Slashdot Mirror
Domain: radford.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to radford.edu.
Stories · 1
-
'Calculators Killed the Standard Statistical Table' (sas.com)
theodp writes: In an obituary of sorts for the standard probability tables that were once ubiquitous in introductory statistics textbooks, Rick Wicklin writes: "In my first probability and statistics course, I constantly referenced the 23 statistical tables (which occupied 44 pages!) in the appendix of my undergraduate textbook. Any time I needed to compute a probability or test a hypothesis, I would flip to a table of probabilities for the normal, t, chi-square, or F distribution and use it to compute a probability (area) or quantile (critical value). If the value I needed wasn't tabulated, I had to manually perform linear interpolation from two tabulated values. I had no choice: my calculator did not have support for these advanced functions. In contrast, kids today have it easy! When my son took AP statistics in high school, his handheld calculator (a TI-84, which costs about $100) could compute the PDF, CDF, and quantiles of all the important probability distributions. Consequently, his textbook did not include an appendix of statistical tables."