Listening Tests & The Bell Curve

[Marco]

I think that I might make that into my avatar.....

Marco.

[Alex_UK]

Ended up there purely by accident with a car club in the summer... we did laugh!

[The Grand Wazoo]

Just to clarify for those who still don't know what a bell curve is
Take a look at this:



This is a timber yield curve - we use them in forestry a lot & this one shows a way to determine the most economically advantageous time to harvest a crop of timber.

The 'bell' is the green line (it looks like half a cross section of a bell). You get this in a statistically normal population when measuring all sorts of parameters. A simple example would be where you're recording ages - in any given population you'll have a wide range of ages & the bulk of the community will be in the middle of the curve, while it'll tail off to the lower end of the scale and also to the higher end of the scale.

To relate that to the curve above, the optimum economic advantage can be gained where you cut down trees at the tipping point before the annual growth begins to slow (the point of maximum mean annual increment). If the trees had been growing quicker the centre area of the curve would be steeper & vice versa.

There you go my friends, today you've learnt something about:

• hi-fi,
• statistics,
• the yield function of crops and
• how to cut down your very own rain forest!!