statistics rant + i miss my boyfriend.

[amerrywanderer]

what. the fuck. i just spent an hour reading these damn statistics chapters for the class that i'm taking IN ADDITION TO MY 40 HOUR WORKWEEK and i haven't retained a goddamned thing...i have NO idea how to do these problems. statistics and i are breaking up, right now. i hate hate hate statistics. it doesn't stick in my head the way calc did,

Comments

[oblvndrgn]

I was kind of an engineering stats major. I haven't touched the majority of it in years so I might be just as clueless but if you want someone to bounce things off of look me up, I might be able to help.

[amerrywanderer]

well maybe you can answer this for me (and thx, btw):

why do we have to look up z scores in a chart when the answer is obviously an integral?

[oblvndrgn]

Z-score? That's the number of standard deviations your observation is above/below the mean in a normal distribution.

[amerrywanderer]

yes but when you're finding the area under the normal curve, you're finding a probability. which corresponds somehow to the z score. and i just want to know why you can't integrate.

[oblvndrgn]

Oh, yes. You can. Very rarely you need to. But the regular formula is this thing - that thing over this other thing, which is much easier.