Yesterday, Prof. Amit Bubna was mentioning about the importance of precise usage of terms. I agree with him 100%. Many a times, I have seen people confusing terms and using jargons in a generic fashion. This is more a Indian mindset. They think of a concept but use different terms while explaining that. During my stay in Belgium, I observed that europeans are very precise in using terminologies and phrases. They don’t confuse terms.

I am moulding myself into that mindset for over 1.5 years now. Today, something happened on those lines. The Statistics professor was explaining the concept of hypothesis and confidence intervals. He was using the Y-bar for denoting the sample mean. Normally, we use X-bar. The X-bar chart is an excellent evidence for the significance of the symbol. I was curious as to why he is using Y-bar and not X-bar! I just asked him “What’s the difference between X-bar and Y-bar?”. He began saying with his entertaining american accent, “Well, there is a difference, X-bar is written with X and bar on top of it and Y-bar is written with Y and bar on top of it”…There goes a heavy laughter! …The prof was just making a timely humour..and then he apologised and mentioned that Y-bar is more of his convention and he wants to differentiate the variable at different places. He uses Y-bar as a notation while estimating variations in process and X-bar in regressions to estimate the same variation. This is not a traditional convention though..

So much for sticking to the conventions and trying to be precise…

Another interesting conversation. We were talking about confidence intervals. The population mean was fixed at 5. The standard deviation of the measurement was 0.2. So, normally 95% of the time, the sample mean will be lie between 2 sigma limits(Normal distribution). So, 95% of the time sample mean will lie between 4.6 (5 - 2sigma) and 5.4(5 + 2sigma) in our case. A student posed a question, “Can we say that 95% of the time 7.5 will not lie between 4.6 and 5.4?”. Professor goes “You want to say that 95% of the time 7.5 will not lie between 4.6 and 5.4??”, There goes another heavy laughter!!!! This prof. has real sense of humour…Great pedagogy nevertheless..

Today morning, my ankle was much better..I could walk normally. But still, when bending the ankle in sideways there is a pain, so will wait for 2 days before resuming volleyball..