Add new comment
-
Want facts and want them fast? Our Maths in a minute series explores key mathematical concepts in just a few words.
Generating electricity without the use of fossil fuels is not just an engineering and industrial challenge, it is also a huge mathematical challenge.
In this podcast author Coralie Colmez shares insights into her novel The irrational diary of Clara Valentine.
We talk to early career mathematicians who spent some of their summer holiday solving problems posed by industry — such as how to blend a perfect smoothie!
Don't like plant-based meat alternatives, but want to spare animals and the environment? There's hope on the horizon, aided by a good helping of maths.
Inverse problems are mathematical detective problems. They can help solve crimes, are used in medical imaging, and much more.
An alternative measure of spread is the mean absolute deviation (MAD). It's almost the same as variance, but instead of squaring the differences, you take their absolute value. This has many advantages over variance:
1. You're now actually finding the average distance from the mean.
2. Variance can overweight extreme values due to the squaring.
3. The units of MAD are the same as the original quantity, rather than quantity squared.
4. MAD is more intuitive for non-statisticians. What does it actually mean for a sample to have a variance of 1 024 000 000 pounds squared?
Isn't it time statistics adopted MAD as the default measure of spread, rather than the outdated variance?