These two abbreviations are often used but easily confused:
e.g. means “for example” (Latin exempli gratia).
i.e. means “in other words” or “that is” (Latin id est).
Grammar Monster, Grammar Girl and Dr. Grammar have great examples of using the two correctly.
Given that median is such a valuable statistical measure, it’s baffling that Microsoft’s SQL Server and other relational databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL) don’t have a built-in MEDIAN function. Well, this week, after working through a data set in SQL Server — and deciding I didn’t want to push the data into SPSS to find medians — I hit the web to find a T-SQL workaround.
I found a ton of solutions (some from people with no clue about the difference between median and average), but the one below — adapted from a post by Adam Machanic at sqlblog.com — was the best. It produces accurate results and is fairly speedy to boot.
Here’s an example. Consider this table with student grades from two courses:
.
| ID | Class | FirstName | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Math | Bob | 65 |
| 2 | Math | Joe | 72 |
| 3 | Math | Sally | 95 |
| 4 | Science | Bob | 65 |
| 5 | Science | Joe | 81 |
| 6 | Science | Sally | 81 |
| 7 | Science | Mike | 72 |
We’d like to find the median grade in each class. Here’s the script:
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With journalism in the midst of a reinvention, there’s no shortage of opinions as to which content or practitioners will carry the flag forward. We’ve read enough about whether data is journalism, and we can fill a book with opinions on bloggers and whether what they do is journalism or not.
But here’s another question: Regardless of what you’re doing — writing, coding, designing — is it worthy of being called art?
On a recent trip to New York, we stopped in Mountainville to tour the Storm King Art Center. It’s a 500-acre sculpture museum with works by Maya Lin, Andy Goldsworthy and others who take simple elements and arrange them in fresh, surprising ways. We toured the fields, and we saw stone, glass, metal and earth all crafted into surprising shapes. The place is massive and so are the works. For example (click for full size):
Beethoven’s Quartet (front) and Pyramidian by Mark di Suvero:
Frogs Legs, also by di Suvero:
Storm King Wall by Andy Goldsworthy, snaking through a stand of trees:
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