 panel with it.]
- [Cueball comes back onto the panel, now carrying an object shaped like a much more complex curve, with many symmetric spikes and dips, labeled "Teacher's t distribution".]
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22.214.171.124 05:20, 26 March 2014 (UTC)Adam
As a layman, I still have no idea what the comic's about. Is it possible to clear it up a lot more? LogicalOxymoron (talk) 05:37, 28 March 2014 (UTC)
I think this is a comment of the quality of education today - it is difficult to grade students on a distribution curve and even more so when you take into account the distribution curve of the teachers ability. 126.96.36.199 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
- I thought this as well, my interpretation of the comic was Cueball attempting to fit the data with a "Student t-distribution", realizing that the t-distribution poorly fit, and so replaced it with a "Teacher t-distribution" which has a stronger correlation with the data on the piece of paper presumably; the data in question concerning the scholastic success of students. This comic in part seemed to be poking fun at scientists misappropriating the causation of a recognized phenomena. Like the basic statistics example of people finding a correlation in children between tooth decay and vocabulary when, surprise surprise, both tooth decay and vocabulary are strongly correlated with age. 188.8.131.52 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
I noticed the teacher's curve is symmetrical, and after further inspection it could be interpreted as an edge detection: high values show where an edge occurs. The two highest peaks would nicely align with the edges of the paper, the next highest peaks fit the edges of the table, and the rest could be approximation artefacts, as they're equidistant and rather insignificant compared to those four. I'm not statistics pro, but maybe that rings someone's bells? 184.108.40.206 07:56, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
- Interesting observation. It may play into an age-long legend told and re-told among the students that some teachers grade papers by tossing the whole pile in the air; those sheets that land on the teacher's desk get a pass, those falling to the floor get a fail. Sometimes the story gets modified in such a way that papers falling on the teacher's book (or other object) laying on the desk will get a higher marking than those simply hitting the desk. The latter version would explain the higher sheet-size-apart peaks. 220.127.116.11 08:57, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
To be more explicit, I think the sheet of paper represents some data. Cueball is not happy with the results of applying Student's t test, so ze is trying more complex tools in the hope of getting significance. -- TimMc / 18.104.22.168 11:51, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
- I would upvote this comment if allowed. As an aside, there are some teachers who think a class' grades will always fall into a nice t Distribution (thus the expression "grading on a curve") and others who vehemently hate the notion. Source: my 3-year stint as a math teacher in an urban high school. Smperron (talk) 14:06, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
Man, normally these explanations clear the comic right up for me, but I've read this one thrice now and I still can't figure out what a t-distribution is, much less a joke based on one. The only definition being a Wikipedia quote written in legalese doesn't help. So a t-distribution estimates...the probability of a population's average when there's unknown information?22.214.171.124 12:17, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
- The unknown information is the sample size (class size, for example) and standard distribution (by how much, on average, is something going to vary from the mean). The unknown information is not "in the data".Jarod997 (talk) 12:28, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
- Basically, if you have an underlying process that would produce samples with a Gaussian distribution with mean of 0, and stddev of 1, and then you pull a finite number of samples out of it, and do the usual "average" operation on those samples (i.e. sum them and divide by the