Here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oah03QcRxGY
and
Here: http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_13318018
An interesting excerpt:
When you plug the average of some uncertainty (future sales, prices, interest rates, etc.) into a spreadsheet you will generally NOT get the average value of the output (profit, cost, return on investment etc.). This has been known by mathematicians for a century as Jensen’s Inequality.
yep. Which is why you observe what is happening and act instead of gather statistics and react. Stats lie. Makes sense, the root word for statistic is state after all. I suppose an individual could subjectively value his gathered stats and go from there. That would be action though, not reaction.
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Sorry I should qualify that. Stats lie in the sense that once gathered the dynamic forces that made their gathering possible have changed. For example. I observe that x amount of people bought bread. I conclude that I should produce more bread. Problem is these people are no longer hungry, they want water now.
That is simplified, but it starts there.
Statistics are the information gathered by agents of the state originally. I believe the Chinese (Ming dynasty maybe) first coined the term. I don’t know how it was brought to Europe, there is an article with the specific references about this from one of LRC’s contributors. I honestly can’t remember it. I apologize for that.
Statistics come from the word state. In ancient greek I think.
I should have said developed in Europe. I’ve used the edit feature before, I lost the knowledge. Help
This appears to be the derivation:
“status” (root) + “-tic” (adjective marker) = statustic → statistic (and one can also use it as a noun as one can use “neurotic” as a noun but its usage seems to have evolved into only nounal because one can add the adjective marker “-al” in order to form “statistical” and two forms corresponding to two functions is always preferred to one form corresponding to two functions)
I may be incorrect, though.
This is right. Status is correct. Going back further we arrive at state. I’m researching the Indo-European origin, but no luck so far.
there you go.