Introduction
x-bar-s teaches in an economics department at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, USA. He is also active in several community groups (historical, youth service), enjoys the arts, and likes woodworking and the outdoors.
Many of the courses he teaches are empirically technical, hence x-bar-s. By convention, the name of a sample variable is a lower case letter, usually x. X-bar (lower case x with a bar over it) is the arithmetic average [mean] of a sample variable - its center or most likely value. The s is also lower case by convention; s is the sample's variation [standard deviation] around its mean.
The techie perspective is never far from my consciousness, and I know it influences my reading (Asimov, Clark, Heinlein...; computer manuals...), fussy woodworking precision, enjoying Bach and the piano, ....
x-bar-s also suggests scepticism. A sample's mean and standard deviation are all the information needed to specify a commonly observed distribution of values. That distribution was developed by several people, one of whose names (K.F. Gauss) is sometimes given to it. The Gaussian distribution is more often called "normal" because it is so common. I avoid that name because it's so easy to associate average with "normal" and distance from average with some ethereal rank.
That leads to my non-techie side, which includes volunteer youth service, reading (C.S. Forster, A.B. Guthrie, Patrick O'Brian [his biography of Picasso is near the top of my reading list], ...), trying to get students to write coherently, hiking and camping, thinking about things, and....
I just found h2g2 online, so I'm not sure where I'm going or what I'm doing here. I've enjoyed what I've seen so far, though.
Latest Messages
| Messages left for this Researcher | Posted |
|---|---|
| welcome x bars you have been ACEd | Jun 7, 2003 |
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| Conversation Title | Latest Post | Latest Reply |
|---|---|---|
| Nice article | Jun 7, 2003 | Nov 30, 2005 |
| Backstory of O? | Jun 27, 2003 | No Replies |
x-bar-s
Researcher U230240
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