Statistics or Sadistics? Mystery Cache

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Ivory hunters: getting out of the game

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Hidden : 10/31/2007
Difficulty:
2.5 out of 5
Terrain:
1.5 out of 5

Size: Size: micro (micro)

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Geocache Description:


THE CACHE IS NOT LOCATED AT THE COORDINATES LISTED ABOVE!

I teach statistics at the USU Tooele campus one night each week and I often hear things like "When will I ever use this outside the classroom?" Well, here's your chance to learn some simple statistics and apply it in the real world.

Assume you're on a budget and you find yourself spending lots of money geocaching each weekend. You record your total expenses for the last six weekends (food, gas, etc.) as follows:

$47.50
$40.51
$56.50
$9.57
$26.10
$10.84

You want to know what an average weekend costs you, along with an estimate of how much expenses vary each week from this average. Your task is to find the mean and sample standard deviation of the data above. The mean tells you the average expense and the sample standard deviation tells you how much the expenses vary, on average, from the mean each week.

Rounded to three decimal places, the mean will give you the last five digits of the north coordinate and the standard deviation will give you the last five digits of the west coordinate.


THESE ARE VERY SIMPLE TO FIND USING EXCEL!! The Excel functions AVERAGE() and STDEV() can do all the work for you. Simply enter these data into an Excel spreadsheet and then using the help menu search for these functions one at a time for instructions to walk you through it.

If you're more math minded, the formula for the sample standard deviation is



and of course the mean formula is

.

Now who said you'll never use this stuff outside the classroom?!!

You can check your answers for this puzzle on Geochecker.com.

Additional Hints (Decrypt)

OIP

Decryption Key

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
-------------------------
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z

(letter above equals below, and vice versa)


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