Slashdot Mirror
'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."
...is TI-84s still cost $100.
First. World. Problems: We no longer waste paper to print archaic Mathematical tables /sarcasm OH NOES!
You know what else is "dead" ?
* Slide rule
* Tables of common Logarithms
* Tables of Trigonometric functions
Guess what, nobody is stopping you from buying those tables from old CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics which have them.
Apparently you didn't get the memo that a cheap calculator is "good enough."
What's next?
Whining that we don't have rotary telephones? Black and White televisions?
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.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch