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[prof_mom]

2) No sh*t, sherlock.  But the (square) root of the square of a number IS the absolute value... unless, as I said, I'm somehow wrong about that.
Thanks for the constructive input.

The square root of the square...square 2, get 4. take square root and get 2. square -2, get 4, root = 2. You might be right about that one.

ASCII is the language of computers with a possible 256 values because that is all they could initially figure out how to represent in a computer based on 8 bit bytes using a binary system (figure powers of 8, and 2 to the power of 8 is 256). Only 10 of these represent numbers (values 48-57 represent 0-9). The rest of them are for letters and characters.

It does include some math symbols (+, -, =, *, etc), but I have no idea why you would want to convert numbers to ASCII to compute mathematical problems.

Standard deviation is important to consider because the outliers tell you how to interpret the variance. Remember that most analyses analyze the variance between and within groups of participants. if one group has too many extreme outliers, there may be something else going on in that condition. Thus, SD provides you with useful information when considering variance. AAD has its value as well, but it provides different information.

This is fun!

[acrimone]

Ah, profmom... you wouldn't want to use ASCII to represent math.

But people have to do it if they are going to communicate by email/forum, so mathematicians have developed a set of standard terminologies for that.

Things like:

4^3 = Four to the third

I don't know these conventions very well (although I know they exist) so I made up some for my post above.

rad(x) means "radical x"

Vn^2 means "V sub n, squared"

((sum n=1-->x) Vn^2) means "sigma Vn^2, as n goes from 1 to x"

I know the "sum" one is at least close to standard usage, not so sure about the others.

My point is that by taking the root of the square of a portion of the AAD equation, you can get them to be arranged in almost the exact same fashion, and that lets you see, visually, how different changes in variables affect the two equations differently.

[adhoc]

Ah, profmom... you wouldn't want to use ASCII to represent math.

But people have to do it if they are going to communicate by email/forum, so mathematicians have developed a set of standard terminologies for that.

Things like:

4^3 = Four to the third

OK, perhaps I gave you too much credit when I guessed that you were trying to embed ASCII codes in a posting in order to get graphics. What you seem to be calling ASCII, that is, notation such as 4^3 is not ASCII.  Further, I'm not sure that Vn^2 would be interpreted as "V sub n, squared;" I, at least, would read that as "V times n squared."  I would also suggest "sqrt(x)" for the square root, not the ambiguous rad(x).  ("Radical" is ambiguous, not "rad.")  Alternatively, you could use "pow(x, 0.5)" for "x to the one half power."

As for why you feel like Sigourney Weaver, I have no idea.  I do see that I initially misread your claim that "taking the absolute value of something is the same as taking the root of its square;" however it is still not a correct statement.  For one thing, you don't specify which root is to be taken.  Assuming that you mean the square root, you don't specify which square root. 

My earlier simplified explanation notwithstanding, there are two square roots for each number.  The square roots of 4, for example, are 2 and -2.  So, if what you really mean is "the positive square root," then you should say that.

[prof_mom]

4^3 = Four to the third

Nope. That isn't ASCII. It may be mathematical notation, but it isn't ASCII.

In ASCII, the number 4 is actually 52. You could convert that to binary and then send it on a computer, but I don't think that's the goal of that notation.

[adhoc]

4^3 is 001101000101111000110011 in ASCII, which as pointed out, does not make it easier to read.

I realize this was not what acrimone was trying to do, but since I brought it up, ASCII codes can be embedded in a posting by placing "&#A;" in your post, and substituting the desired code, in decimal, for the A.  (Include the semicolon, but not the quotation marks.) The extended code values (those above 127) are interpreted as they are defined in HTML and do not include graphic symbols such as the radical sign.  They do, however, include things such as ± and ³.

So, if one means "four cubed," one can simply say 4³.

A table of HTML ASCII code values can be found at http://ascii.cl/htmlcodes.htm.

[prof_mom]

4^3 is 001101000101111000110011 in ASCII, which as pointed out, does not make it easier to read.

Isn't that technically ASCII converted to binary?

Yes, this is how computers "see" it, but I was taught to carefully distinguish between ASCII and binary. ASCII was set up to allow numbers and letters to be transmitted in binary format, but ASCII is not always in binary.


I have to log off now and get some work done!

[adhoc]

prof_mom, you are right; and you make a good point about distinguishing between ASCII and binary.  And, anyway, what I wrote is actually the numerals represented by the ASCII codes for 1s and 0s which in turn are used to represent the binary representation of the ASCII codes...

As you suggest, getting back to work is probably a good idea.

[acrimone]

Nor am I a computer scientist... I was under the impression that the standard character set used in programming (letters, numbers, certain symbols, and those positive and negative smiley faces) were called the "ASCII set of characters" so that when you wrote something like this:

//_______\\

    0    0
      ||
(            )
 \______/
       -


You're said to be drawing a face in ASCII.

My apologies for the confusion.

And yes, Vn would normally be read "V times n" which is why I specifically, explicitly stated what I was using it for in my original post.

[prof_mom]

I guess I'm waving my geek flag high today, but it's fun. I'm not a computer scientist, but I play one on the Internet. ;)

You are correct that such drawings might be termed ASCII art, but only because you would limit your rendering to include characters included in the ASCII code. You could not use smiley faces, colors, or certain characters because they did not exist in the ASCII code. So, you type a space and the computer sees that as 36 and converts it to binary for transmission. If you used a character that was not included in ASCII, you couldn't transmit it. This also gave rise to emoticons.

This dates back to before JPG files and MP3 compression techniques (actually before any compression techniques and even WAV compression didn't exist yet). Therefore, sending images took a very long time.

Fun stuff!

I just submitted my paper, rewarded myself with another visit here and now I'm going to work out.

Happy Friday to everyone reading this topic, which I think is among the best topics today.

[adhoc]

Acrimone, thanks for the explanation.  The reason for the confusion is now clearer.

You are right when you say that the characters you mention are called the "ASCII character set" and that pictures formed with them are referred to as "ASCII graphics."  The reason for this, though, is that those are the characters for which ASCII codes are defined.  Computers can only store and manipulate numbers and the ASCII codes provide a standardized means of representing other characters.  The acronym "ASCII" (for American Standard Code for Information Interchange) refers to the codes themselves.