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Thread ID: 85378	2007-12-08 07:34:00	What does Average mean?	martynz (5445)	PC World Chat

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
619190	2007-12-09 10:21:00	I'm wrong? What did I say? I was quoting from a report in the DomPost. I have a gut feeling that the author/s would like everybody to do better than average. Martynz what we mean is that there will be some people who cannot read at all, bringing the average down very low, leaving 57% of people sitting not too far above average literacy ie, 50% of people are always above or below the median but of the ten scores 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and 1000000, 90% or those scores are below average (also called the mean)	motorbyclist (188)
619191	2007-12-09 10:50:00	what we mean is that there will be some people who cannot read at all, bringing the average down very low, leaving 57% of people sitting not too far above average literacy ie, 50% of people are always above or below the median but of the ten scores 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and 1000000, 90% or those scores are below average (also called the mean) I recommend your post. At least you can read and comprehend. This MEANS you are above AVERAGE in my humble opinion. And the post is not written in TXT speak either, for which I thank you. If I say, "It will be wet or dry tomorrow." I will be 100% correct. It has to be one or another I think.	Sweep (90)
619192	2007-12-09 11:05:00	And the post is not written in TXT speak either, for which I thank you. heheh, yeah i pride myself on being in that 57% percent above average.... even txting on my cellphone i'll use predictive and get everything clear with punctuation. i don't see the point in writing in such a way others have to decode your message and risk miscommunicating simply to save a few seconds or to fit everything into one txt though i do tend to not bother with capitalisation.... but if it needs a capital to make it clear i'll put it in. little thing called "practicality"	motorbyclist (188)
619193	2007-12-09 11:25:00	heheh, yeah i pride myself on being in that 57% percent above average.... even txting on my cellphone i'll use predictive and get everything clear with punctuation. i don't see the point in writing in such a way others have to decode your message and risk miscommunicating simply to save a few seconds or to fit everything into one txt though i do tend to not bother with capitalisation.... but if it needs a capital to make it clear i'll put it in. little thing called "practicality" Another thing called "communication" as well. In my view, the language any person uses is immaterial. So long as the message gets through to the intended recipient(s). You have to say what you mean and also mean what you say.	Sweep (90)
619194	2007-12-09 11:33:00	Another thing called "communication" as well. In my view, the language any person uses is immaterial. So long as the message gets through to the intended recipient(s). You have to say what you mean and also mean what you say. yeah, that's what i meant to say:thumbs:	motorbyclist (188)
619195	2007-12-09 11:52:00	I'm wrong? What did I say? I was quoting from a report in the DomPost. I have a gut feeling that the author/s would like everybody to do better than average. Martynz You posted a quote from a newspaper. I talked to another person in real life just a few days ago about similar matters. Would you like every person to be 100% correct about everything? If so then we would all have AMD processors or Intel as the case may be. We would all have to favour the right hand as opposed to the left hand or vice versa. Just because I run Windows on my PC as a large number of people do, this does NOT make me 100% correct. The Earth is still flat. (I think)	Sweep (90)
619196	2007-12-09 18:11:00	"Perfection is the enemy of good"	zqwerty (97)
619197	2007-12-09 22:19:00	Almost 50% of the people I know are above average, but hardly any of them are mean. And in South-Westland at least, there are very few believers in the flat earth theory. They do not consider themselves below average. For rainfall, it is impossible for them to ever have an average. (For SurferJoe46, most of S-W land is steep to overhanging. The rest is pretty irregular. They farm both sides of their dirt. The elevation is a lot larger than the plan. The rainfall is in Fathoms.)	R2x1 (4628)
619198	2007-12-10 03:01:00	The median as seen in a example in a earlier post, is sometimes a better representation as it is less sensitive to individual scores. Then there is the sampling techniques, type of population distribution, and the type of average (e.g. normal, weighted, and moving average's) and any margin of errors or upper and lower limits. Sometimes surveys are just a snapshot in time, location, and perhaps other factors, and may not be truly representative to apply on a larger scale...	kahawai chaser (3545)
619199	2007-12-10 10:01:00	In the good old days when School Certificate results were scaled, the practice was to scale the median mark to 50%, this equalised the comparison between subjects, and theoretically took into account the varying degree of difficulty between subjects - Hard paper all candidates scores were scaled up, easy paper the reverse - problem was 50% always failed to pass a paper. Obviously one had to aim to be in the upper quartile. In the handful of examples given by posts in this thread, the results are skewed, mainly due to the small number of figures in the samples. In the Literacy survey, with a sample size of 7000, the results should be fairly accurate, certainly a lot better than the political polling that usually has sample sizes between 1000- 1200, and claims an accuracy of + or - 3 %. Literacy in NZ is not as good as it should be, too few people read books of any literary standing, and when one takes NZ Newspapers, many have been dumbed down to fairly low levels. The NZ Herald, which is higher than many has a reading age of round 14 - hardly likely to contribute to improving literacy. Still a lot better than some of the English tabloids that have a reading age of 10 - 11.	KenESmith (6287)
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