opinion help

kenny_kendall · Post by **kenny_kendall** » Wed Apr 14, 2004 9:09 pm

hey pplz i dont know exactly what this means its in my profile and has to do with my opinions. i've given 51 opinions and it says this
average 158.2 of 56343 opinions; standard deviation 687.4

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Thu Apr 15, 2004 1:10 am

The average is the arithmetic mean (in this case, the population mean) of a set of values.

The standard deviation (in this case, it is the population standard deviation) is a measure of how spread-out a given population is.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/StandardDeviation.html
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Mean.html

The arithmetic mean is a fairly useful measure of "the middle" when the data set has a reasonable spread (which is somewhat true among .org opinionators -- there are outliers on both sides, but I think the values being biased towards the low end of word count. Not sure about that one; I'd need access to the .org's database to check that.)

The standard deviation in this case tells us to what degree the word-count of a typical opinion is clustered around the mean.

godix · Post by **godix** » Thu Apr 15, 2004 1:36 am

To put what trythil said in english, the typical opinion is about 158 words long. The 687.4 deviation lets you know that some people go way WAY over that.

downwithpants · Post by **downwithpants** » Thu Apr 15, 2004 2:09 am

trythil wrote:there are outliers on both sides, but I think the values being biased towards the low end of word count. Not sure about that one; I'd need access to the .org's database to check that.

if you look at the most useful and most useless lists, it appears that there are more outliers on the high end. i had suggested using the median + interquartile/decile ranges, but i guess that might be harder to track.

kenny_kendall · Post by **kenny_kendall** » Sat Apr 17, 2004 7:47 am

ok thx for the tips :o