While reading about how the
time it takes different programmers to accomplish the same task has a very high standard deviation.
I got curious about the details of standard deviation, having forgotten everything I learned in second year physics.
Talking to a coworker confirmed my intuitive idea of standard deviation: that it's a measure of how closely the individual measurements are grouped around their average.
This
technical definition of standard deviation would have required me to learn several other terms that weren't immediately familiar.
Google let me look at
what a variety of people thought about standard deviation
Wikipedia's entry for
standard deviation started with a good summary continued with the math, and filled in with some applications, including the fact that in many applications standard deviation is a measure of how valuable the average is in making predictions. It also gave examples and related links. Go wikipeida.!!
Dated: 12/09/2005