John Denker wrote: "Nowadays experts generally avoid using the term
“precision", and concentrate instead on quantifying the uncertainty."
1) I think that the words "uncertainty," like words "errance," or
"estimator", would be good replacements for what is usually called
"standard deviation of mean values."
2) Do you people agree that two similar phrases: (a) "standard
deviation" (referring to a set of data in a sample) and (b) "standard
derivation of mean values" (referring to data on <x> from many sample)
often confuse students?
3) John suspects that many people use the word sample as a reference to
one number. Statisticians, however, decided to define samples as sets
of n numbers. That is why John suggested to replace the word "sample"
with the word "cluster." Will this suggestion be implemented? I do not
think so.
4) I suggest that, at least on this list, we start using the word
"errance" instead of "standard deviation of the mean". By errance, E,
we mean s/sqr(n), where s is a standard deviation from a representative
sample of size n.
4) What should one do to make this happen? I do not know. In fact, I do
not believe that this will happen. The proposition would have a much
higher chance of being implemented if it came from a famous scientist,
for example, from a winner of Nobel Prize in pedagogy, or from an
author of a widely used laboratory manual for students.
Ludwik