Re: NY Times on breast cancer rates

[maury <maury@WEBTEXAS.COM>]

A personal pet peeve that will never come to pass: I wish that all media,

congressional hearings, and so on would routinely publish an SD or other

appropriate measure of variability whenever they talk about average this or

the mean of that, etc., etc. ....     <grrrrrrr>

Cheers anyway for a good holiday

Maury Siskel       maury@webtexas.com



William Prestwich wrote:



> The article on breast cancer rates got me curious about something. The

> numbers were quoted to 4 figure accuracy, and no standard deviations or

> whatever were given. What got me curious was how you would ever assign

> one given the uncertainty associated with the variability in diagnostic

> success. Up to now I had simply not thought things through because in

> so many nuclear studies, when categorized the numbers involved are

> so small that I assumed Poisson statistics was dominant. This is surely

> important. Many radsafers have correctly commented that in any collection

> of values there will be many above the mean so that a higher value doesn't

> ------  snipped  -------------



___________________

And remember, he who hesitates is lost and is miles from the next

exit.           <grin>



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