hintzman@oregon.uoregon.edu: More on basketball

[Dan Ellis <dpwe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear LIST -

I received this contribution to the debate of the moment from
Doug Hintzman at U. Oregon.

  DAn.

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I don't think anyone should be impressed by the ability of basketball crowds
to always sing "air ball" in the same key.   If you asked the entire
population of basketball fans, individually, to sing "air ball", their
responses would describe some distribution along the pitch dimension.  The
distribution would have a characteristic mean and standard deviation (SD).
If you repeatedly take very large representative samples from that
population, the mean pitch for each sample will be very close to the
population mean. The standard error (SD of the distribution of sample
means) should be SE = (population SD)/sqrt(crowd size).

Undoubtedly, the mean heights for basketball crowds nationwide are very
close to the same value.  That does not imply that everyone is of of the
same height.  Likewise, the abilities of crowds to sing in the same key
does not imply that the members of those crowds have absolute pitch memory.
 Crowd data cannot answer that question.


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