Abstract
Look out a window close to where you are right now. Wouldn’t it be dull if all the people you see were the same size, or if all the cars were the same size, or if all the trees were the same size? Virtually everything around us is subject to variability. Sometimes variability is good, as in sizes of people, and sometimes it is not so good, as in the diameter of the cylinders in the engine of your car. Since variability is always with us, we must learn to describe it and work with it, rather than ignore it. How can we adequately describe the important features of variable measurements? That is a key question in statistics and the focus of this activity.
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© 1996 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Scheaffer, R.L., Watkins, A., Gnanadesikan, M., Witmer, J.A. (1996). The Shape of the Data. In: Activity-Based Statistics. Textbooks in mathematical sciences. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3843-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3843-8_3
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
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