[ILUG] Advertising in GMail

[Colm MacCarthaigh]

On Tue, Nov 21, 2006 at 11:05:02AM +0000, Dave O'Connor wrote:
> > Make up your mind.
> >
> >It was "pretty accurate" and now it's become a "good guess"
> >
> >Either it's accurate or it's not and we can see that it's not
> 
> Gawd. Now I remember why I unsubscribed.
> 
> Read what I said, numbnuts.

The problem is that you are abusing statistics. Although it's possible
to make general statements about the level of accuracy of statistically
aggregated data it is *never* appropriate to make inferences from that
to any one particular datapoint.

So, although I can say that 95% of ILUG subscribers are male, that
doesn't mean "particular ILUG subscriber is male" is a "good guess",
hell it's not even appropriate to say that "there's a 95% probability
that this particular ILUG subscriber is male". Those statements are
meaningless. The person either is or isn't male, there's no intermediate
state.

So, you either are in or around Nass or you're not, and although you can
say that a GeoLocation service gets it right - in the aggregate - NN% of
the time, that still says precicely nothing about the "quality" of any
particular guess.

-- 
Colm MacCárthaigh                        Public Key: colm+pgp at stdlib.net