Sense about science is a very nice website: Lots of good stuff in here about chemical additives, genetically modified foods, homeopathic "medecine", miracle cures for incurable conditions, and other controversies.
that's good, just checked the statistics section (my degree is in math and statistics) and it is quite right, an mean is meaningless without a confidence interval. bookmarked the site.
In my work, I customarily report the mean +/- the standard error. Most others in my field do too. However, I do notice that some will report the confidence interval instead. Is one preferable to the other in certain circumstances?
one is meaningless without the other, the mean is the value in question...basically the values of the random variable multiplied by the probability of that value, the standard deviation is the square root of the variance, or the difference of the values from the mean. the smaller the standard deviation the better the mean is of the value of the random variable you are looking for.
Dude, your cat avatar looks exactly like my older cat. Has my kitty been sneaking out to visit friends? 123