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Engineering Statistics Handbook

itl.nist.gov

1–10 of 15 posts

Re: Engineering Statistics Handbook

#3
I have to say, NIST dudes are/were so underappreciated by the likes of me. Is it just me?

I was in a LUG in the DC area and one of the dudes there was a NIST guy. His use of Linux and Unix was not surprising, but when he would tangentially mention what they were doing with their boxes I would always wonder: how the hell do more people not pay attention to NIST? But maybe that is just me. I have done a lot of sysadmin in the education industry, where we are famous for listening to no one and being the butt of security nightmare jokes.

As someone who is weak in all post-high-school maths, and stats in general, I have definitely bookmarked this for later. I did not care for stats until I finally took my first true computation linguistics class, Statistical Methods for NLP, and years of wannabe linguistics without math seemed pretty retarded after that.

Thanks for a cool link.

Re: Engineering Statistics Handbook

#5
post #3

I have to say, NIST dudes are/were so underappreciated by the likes of me. Is it just me? I was in a LUG in the DC area and one of the dudes there was a NIST guy. His use of Linux and Unix was not surprising, but when he would tangentially mention what they were doing with their boxes I would always wonder: how the hell do more people not pay attention to NIST? But maybe that is just me. I have done a lot of sysadmin…

It's not just you.

I don't know how are things in the US, in Europe not many people even know they exist. 10 years ago I was doing some work with biometric identification and it turned out these guys had an open source system for fingerprint recognition (including test data).

Not only they were incredibly helpful, they even sent me a couple of CDs with all the information for free.

Re: Engineering Statistics Handbook

#8
post #4

Okay, I read through the first few pages and it seems to me that this is a difficult presentation, where facts are presented before they are explained.

Handbooks are typically constructed for quick reference by experienced practitioners of the subject. Handbooks favor breadth over depth and this means they tend to be more enumerative than explanatory.

Re: Engineering Statistics Handbook

#9
post #4

Okay, I read through the first few pages and it seems to me that this is a difficult presentation, where facts are presented before they are explained.

This is a common difference between presentation for reference and for pedagogy.

It is extremely difficult to write well for both purposes, so good examples are rare (c.f. Kernigan & Ritchie)

Re: Engineering Statistics Handbook

#10
post #9
post #4

Okay, I read through the first few pages and it seems to me that this is a difficult presentation, where facts are presented before they are explained.

This is a common difference between presentation for reference and for pedagogy. It is extremely difficult to write well for both purposes, so good examples are rare (c.f. Kernigan & Ritchie)

I agree about the difficulty in serving two masters and that The C Programming Language is well written in this regard. Most authors are unfortunately not in position to authoritatively declare portions of a subject undefined and get away with it. K&R is not really so much a handbook as a specification. Its strength is that it often specifies by showing rather than describing.
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