#bell-curve — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #bell-curve, aggregated by home.social.
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Alright, future engineers!
A **Normal Distribution** (Bell Curve) describes data symmetrical around its mean. Ex: About 68% of data falls within +/- 1 Std Dev. Pro-Tip: It's vital for quality control & predicting outcomes in many systems!
#StatsForEngineers #BellCurve #STEM #StudyNotes -
“It’s the bell curve again”*…
Joseph Howlett on how the central limit theorem, which started as a bar trick for 18th-century gamblers, became something on which scientists rely every day…
No matter where you look, a bell curve is close by.
Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will conform to a bell curve. Record 100 people’s guesses at the number of jelly beans in a jar, and they’ll follow a bell curve. Measure enough women’s heights, men’s weights, SAT scores, marathon times — you’ll always get the same smooth, rounded hump that tapers at the edges.
Why does the bell curve pop up in so many datasets?
The answer boils down to the central limit theorem, a mathematical truth so powerful that it often strikes newcomers as impossible, like a magic trick of nature. “The central limit theorem is pretty amazing because it is so unintuitive and surprising,” said Daniela Witten, a biostatistician at the University of Washington. Through it, the most random, unimaginable chaos can lead to striking predictability.
It’s now a pillar on which much of modern empirical science rests. Almost every time a scientist uses measurements to infer something about the world, the central limit theorem is buried somewhere in the methods. Without it, it would be hard for science to say anything, with any confidence, about anything.
“I don’t think the field of statistics would exist without the central limit theorem,” said Larry Wasserman, a statistician at Carnegie Mellon University. “It’s everything.”
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the push to find regularity in randomness came from the study of gambling…
Read on for the fascinating story of: “The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere,” from @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
Howlett concludes by observing that “The central limit theorem is a pillar of modern science, ultimately, because it’s a pillar of the world around us. When we combine lots of independent measurements, we get clusters. And if we’re clever enough, we can use those clusters to find out something interesting about the processes that made them”– which follows from the story he shares.
Still, we’d do well to remember that there are limits to its applicability, both descriptively (as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out, “because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty”) and prescriptively (as Benjamim Bloom argues, “The bell-shaped curve is not sacred. It describes the outcome of a random process. Since education is a purposeful activity….the achievement distribution should be very different from the normal curve if our instruction is effective).
For (much) more, see Peter Bernstein‘s wonderful Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
* Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
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As we noodle on the normal distribution, we might send curve-shattering birthday greetings to Norman Borlaug; he was born on ths date in 1914. An agronomist, he developed and led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the voluminous increases in agricultural production we call “the Green Revolution.” Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal; he’s one of only seven people to have received all three of those awards.
#agriculture #BellCurve #centralLimitTheorem #culture #GreenRevolution #history #Mathematics #normalDistribution #NormanBorlaug #Science #statistics -
The math that explains why bell curves are everywhere
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-math-that-explains-why-bell-curves-are-everywhere-20260316/
#HackerNews #bellcurve #math #statistics #probability #dataanalysis
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The last 30 years went from being unable to explain to my parents what I actually did in my "IT" job, to listening to two old ladies at a bus station discussing the relative pros and cons of windows av software, to being surrounded by kids who don't know what a filesystem is.
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Daily Dose of Anti-Corona Humor
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🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #TheRaversHour
Bell Curve:
🎵 Heart Alarm (feat. They Hate Change)https://bellcurve.bandcamp.com/track/heart-alarm-featuring-they-hate-change
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🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #TheRaversHour
Bell Curve:
🎵 Just A Lil Bit of Sweat#BellCurve
#newRelease 🆕 singlehttps://bellcurve.bandcamp.com/track/just-a-lil-bit-of-sweat
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#LetterOfTheWeek
🇸🇬Forum: Re-examine #nationalpolicies to broaden definitions of #success
"students sitting national #exams at Pri, Sec, & JC levels, r graded on a #zerosum #bellcurve sys.. Even #carownership involves competition thru #COE #bidding.. These policies foster an #individualistic #culture where people r reluctant to help one another.. For decades, #materialism has been ingrained in #Singaporeans.. We need to re-examine our policies to enable tis #paradigmshift"
https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/forum/forum-re-examine-national-policies-to-broaden-definitions-of-success -
Why does #Nature always follow a #BellCurve? : Medium
Good #Leadership Is About Asking Good #Questions : HBR
Listen to three #Breathtaking #NASA #Images : Pop Sci
Check our latest #KnowledgeLinks
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Also from 10:45-12 on Thursday @ieeevis, in ‘Evaluation’ in Room 109, a double-feature of @KhouryVis members:
“Fitting Bell Curves to Data Distributions using Visualization” (ft. @Birdbassador - https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.04717)
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CW: draft email to a conservatist relative; seeking comments
[...] but you never answered my question: when and how do we decide that a theory is without substantial merit?
This is very much a key question when it comes to politicized science.
For instance, we can dismiss anyone trying to introduce "flat earth theory" or "intelligent design" as justification for a political position, let alone for scientific discussion. It's not that we can't ever question our beliefs about those things; it's just that the evidence is in, the "debate" has already happened, and scientific orthodoxy came down on the other side (the earth is round; present life evolved from simpler forms via natural selection) -- so if someone wants to reintroduce them as legitimate issues worthy of debate, they have some heavy lifting to do.
I would characterize this heavy lifting as requiring the following:
- State the orthodox conclusion, and note that you are suggesting an alternative.
- Clarify whether you agree that the orthodox conclusion was reasonable, given what was known previously.
- Propose your new conclusion, and suggest how the evidence (old and/or new) supports it better.
That's the simplest case for challenging orthodoxy; the situation is a bit more nuanced with an item like The Bell Curve (TBC).
While the scientific debate has been had and many of the book's conclusions have been rejected as bad science, it's also true that it may include some perfectly valid statements which have simply been taken out of context and used in misleadingly political ways.
If you're arguing, for example, that TBC has been unfairly written off for political reasons, then, you need to be clear about which specific parts of it (conclusions or statements) you're referring to and whether you're challenging the orthodoxy on those items or merely pointing out that they've been unreasonably politicized despite being valid.
Note that you can't just go saying "this book is unfairly maligned" -- because as a whole, it was maligned for very good reasons. If there are particular parts of it which you believe to be salvageable, you need to make it clear that you're not trying to defend the book as a whole.
If (on the other hand) you believe that it's valid as a whole, then you're asking for settled orthodoxy to be re-examined on numerous points -- which requires the rather heavier lifting above for each of those points.
W.
(This discussion started with the item I linked and responded to here on CWRE.)
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The secret of content marketing: Avoid high bounce rates - Julian Shapiro
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Julian... more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/wCpaoZNMNT0/ #customeracquisition #contentmarketing #digitalmarketing #contentcreation #growthmarketing #growthtactics #userretention #digitalmedia #conversions #ecommerce #bellcurve #marketing #startups #column #google #media #tc