t on doing "is both illegal and illegitimate" (illegitimate = no scientific basis for such a distribution; illegal = this it not even a distribution per se). If Cueball goes on and publishes his results based on such approach, they will not be recognized by the international scientific community (except perhaps by Russia, Syria and North Korea). We, readers, therefore express our deep concern over Cueball's methods. Stpasha (talk) 18:27, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
I believe the joke has to do with "fitting data to a distribution": In the first panel, Cueball is trying to adjust the Student's T distribution on top of the data, which could be a play on "fitting" the data to the distribution. Statistically speaking, fitting data to a distribution is often done to figure out how likely the data were to have occurred, under the assumption that the underlying data generating process follows a particular distribution (like the Student's T). It looks like Cueball first tries to fit his data to a Student's T, and is dissatisfied with the fit. He then tries a much more complicated distribution - which, I think is jokingly called a Teacher's distribution on the premise that something to do with teachers is more complicated than something to do with students. The joke is that data often don't fit a simple distribution like the Student's T... they are nuanced and complex, and their underlying data generating process was far more complex. Amoorthy (talk) 19:50, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
- By the way, this is related to and compatible with the explanation given by Dangerkeith3000 above.Amoorthy (talk) 20:26, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
The title test could be referring to the tests aspiring teachers have to take in the US to get their credentials. It's sort of like a Bar- except you may take it as many times as you wish until you pass. 18.104.22.168 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
- I thought it referred to the practice that some US school systems have of allowing students to take a test (examination) repeatedly until they pass it. 22.214.171.124 06:38, 30 March 2014 (UTC)
I predict that the "Teacher's t-distribution" is the new Cow Tools, and those with actual skill in statistics will drive themselves crazy over it. See  for clarification. 126.96.36.199 21:23, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
Could it be pointed out that the middle of the Teacher's distribution resembles the Tower of Mordor ? Underscoring the role of the Teacher... 188.8.131.52 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
The explain says that the student distribution works when both the sample and the population have the same variance. Isn't that wrong--doesn't the sample tend to have a larger variance than the population under usual/ideal conditions? (I'm assuming the student distribution is meant for usual/ideal conditions.) Sciepsilon (talk) 00:44, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
- I believe the true variance of a sample should be the same as the true variance of the population. Perhaps you are thinking of Bessel's correction - using "n-1" in the denominator of the formula for estimating sample variance, instead of "n". If so: While it's true that Bessel's correction makes our estimate of the sample variance larger than if we'd used "n", the reason is that using "n" would have created an estimate that was too small - or, otherwise put, biased toward zero. (The Wikipedia article on Bessel's correction has the best explanation I've seen for why this is true - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessel's_correction#The_source_of_the_bias.) What's key here is that Bessel's correction is a technique to correct our estimates of variance - the true variance of a sample is really the same as in the population. Amoorthy (talk) 16:20, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
My initial take is that in comic the students' understanding of the correct distribution is being evaluated as a function of the teacher's ability. That a poorly educated student reflects the ability of the teacherExternalMonolog (talk) 12:20, 27 March 2014 (UTC)ExternalMonolog
- This is exactly what I read. I think people are going all sorts of ways with calcula