'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."

Comments

So what?

[mschaffer]

I was in one of the last years my high school taught to use sliderules. Fancy ones already had trig scales. Didn't need the trig tables anymore.

Re:So what?

[Oswald McWeany]

That's a LOT better than the knots-on-strings I learned with.

I remember when string was invented. It saved time on having to make arrays of chars.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Knots-on-strings? I WISH were so lucky! We had to use chalk on the sides of buffalo. And they were always moving around and rolling answers off in the dust. I had to repeat grade 5 because a spit ball spooked my exam results.

Re:So what?

[ClickOnThis]

Ah yes, chalk on moving buffalo.

'Course, there's an emacs command for that.