Re: PHYS-L Nov99 Technical posting

[brian whatcott <inet@INTELLISYS.NET>]

At 13:59 11/4/99 -0500, David Bowman wrote:
> Time span                Avg. per diem number of posts
> 03/21/95 - 08/27/96           14.9
> 09/05/96 - 12/31/97           15.2
> 01/01/98 - 12/31/98           14.1
> 01/01/99 - 11/04/99           18.5

> I suspect it may still be too soon to tell if the recent upswing in
> volume represents a new long term average baseline level.  However the
> 1999 volume so far does seem to be over 6 standard deviations above the
> mean of previous years.
>
> David Bowman

This looks like a staggering jump.   6 S.Ds.
  I wonder how the data would look if we took
(as a null-hypothesis) that these are samples from a single
population: specifically, how many S.Ds is this year's daily number
distant from the average daily number for all years?

 Could it possibly be a rather small distance
 - perhaps even insignificant?   :-)
(I haven't worked the numbers...)

Brian W.
brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>
Altus OK