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On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 01:02:36PM -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote: > On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 06:06:04PM +0200, andrea@cpushare.com wrote: > > JFYI: all statistics only take a sample of the larger space, the whole > > point of having a statistic is because you can't measure the total. > > The smaller the sample compared to the total, the less the stats are > > accurate > > Definitely not true in general. If I wanted to know the gender ratio at > the latest OLS I'd take the results from a sample of a dozen chosen > randomly over the results from a sample of hundreds all taken from the > men's room. Well, your example is perhaps the worst one since you wouldn't be decreasing the quality of your stats very much by only doing the sample in the men's room ;). I guess you meant the woman's room. > For exactly the same quality of sampling, yes, the larger the better, > but the point of diminishing returns comes pretty quickly. So given > limited resources it's probably more important to work on the quality of > the sample rather than on its size.... No matter how you see it, the larger the better (in the worst case it won't make a difference). Certainly if I could work on the quality, that would be more important than adding 1 more user. But I can't work on the quality. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/ | ||||||||||||
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