User talk:Tombadog
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[edit] Welcome!
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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Oh yeah, I almost forgot, when you post on talk pages you should sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); that should automatically produce your username and the date after your post. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Again, welcome!
FisherQueen (talk ยท contribs) 16:14, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Thanks for your hard work so far!
I wanted to thank you for your recent contributions. One pertinent comment would be that titles and subheadings should adhere to the following guideline: only the first letter of the first word, letters in acronyms, and the first letter of proper nouns are capitalized; all other letters are in lower case (Funding of UNESCO projects, not Funding of UNESCO Projects) (see: Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Article_titles.2C_headings_and_sections for more info.). Thanks again. --Seans Potato Business 17:10, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Welcome to MCB
Hi there, welcome to the project! If you have any ideas, requests or questions the talk pages are usually great places to get feedback. Please feel free to drop me a note on my talk page if you need help with anything. All the best Tim Vickers (talk) 19:05, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Central limit theorem
I've reverted your edit to central limit theorem, which seemed quite confused. A random variable can have a variance, and a sum of random variables is itself a random variable, so it can have a variance. It's not just one number; it's just one random variable. And what "sums" would you be referring to, if not the one sum that the article referred to earlier? Moreover, you seem to suggest that it is the things being summed that are approximated normally distributed, and that is certainly very very far from correct. Michael Hardy (talk) 17:51, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
I suppose the meaning of "random variables" follows a different convention from what makes intuitive sense to me. "Intuitive" and "correct" are not always the same thing and I'm pretty sure Michael Hardy knows how people use this phrase better than I. The genesis of this conflict, in case anybody cares, has to do with the current formal statement of the central limit theorem on wikipedia, namely "the sum of a large number of independent and identically-distributed random variables will be approximately normally distributed (i.e., following a Gaussian distribution, or bell-shaped curve) if the random variables have a finite variance". This way of expressing it strikes me as weird because of the plural in "variables". I think of the process as taking many measurements of the same thing, so I envision rolling a single die many times, adding up the results, then doing it again. To me that feels like many sums of one variable. Even if you use multiple dice to speed things up, this still feels like one variable to me -- there is, after all, ONE distribution, so why describe the system as involving many variables? There may be a good reason, or not, and I agree that conventions are not something to fight...
