Correction: "Significant Figures," "Precise and "Imprecise" Information
12 Apr 2006 in Regulatory Science, Corrections
We erred in our description (since corrected) of the
difference between accuracy
and precision
in our blog entry on Klamath
River Chinook salmon
Recently Neutral Source posted a discussion of the reported numbers of
Chinook salmon likely to return to the Klamath River to spawn, and the
number needed to maintain Klamath River stocks. Because of sloppy HTML
coding, we erred in our description of the difference between accuracy and precision.
Significant digits
are a means of describing the precision of a measured or
estimated quantity, not accuracy. We have corrected the error in our
original post, and added additional text to make these concepts
clearer (we hope).
A non-neutral hat tip to source Scott Ferson of Applied Biomathematics
for catching the error.
