Accuracy in Calculation
| Autor: | Karl J. Holzinger |
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| Rok vydání: | 1929 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | The Elementary School Journal. 29:510-517 |
| ISSN: | 1554-8279 0013-5984 |
| DOI: | 10.1086/456281 |
| Popis: | The writer of fiction often uses such expressions as "He was there exactly ten minutes," "It weighed exactly ten pounds," and "He was exactly six feet high." Such statements may be all right for the novelist, but they will not do for the statistician. No measurement is exact. When such things as time, weight, and height-or, in fact, anything else-are measured, the best one can do is to obtain the result to a given degree of accuracy. Thus, when a race is timed, the record might be made to the nearest tenth of a second, while the weight of a person might be determined to the nearest ounce. Finer measurements are, of course, possible, but exactness is impossible. It might seem that such things as size of class could be measured exactly, since there is an exact number of persons in a given class. Such determinations, however, are not exact measurements because the units, which are persons, are not equal in the way in which the inches on a scale are equal. Again, it might appear that, if a pupil gets 79 items in a test correct, this is an exact measurement of the pupil's accomplishment. This is not true because the items in the test are not precisely equal, and, even if they were, a finer unit of measurement is conceivable. The fact that measurements are always made to a certain degree of accuracy-for example, to the nearest ounce-has a very impor |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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