John W. Colby
jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com
Tue Jan 18 08:43:23 CST 2005
To raise a quantity to an arbitrary power use: X^Y The ^ operator does exactly that. ?2^3 8 ?1.2^2 1.44 ?2^1.2 2.29739670999407 John W. Colby www.ColbyConsulting.com Contribute your unused CPU cycles to a good cause: http://folding.stanford.edu/ -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Steve Erbach Sent: Tuesday, January 18, 2005 9:21 AM To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving Subject: Re: [AccessD] complex query!! Stuart, O!, Ancient One! We are honored and humbled that you have descended from your extended care facility to help us in our dire need! >> I can see a possible use for it, it shows how alike the items are in each pair. << ...and one could graph the "alikeness", too, I suppose. I was going to modify the SQL statement I came up with for Pedro a few messages ago, but I discovered that Access has very poor math function. It has the exp function (e^x) but no function for raising a quantity to an arbitrary power. It has the sqr (square root) function but no function for squaring a number! And the StDev function doesn't seem to allow me to feed it a range of data points. What it wants is a field name and that's that. I could fiddle around with logs and such to get the result that Pedro wants, but sheesh! It's like going back to using a slide rule! I've decided that I've had enough of that kind of pie. I don't feel particularly clever this morning. Steve Erbach Neenah, WI On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 11:44:50 +1000, Stuart McLachlan <stuart at lexacorp.com.pg> wrote: > On 17 Jan 2005 at 19:35, Steve Erbach wrote: > > > Pedro, > > > > Just so I'm clear (I'm 52 years old; have a little pity for the aged), > > You young pups don't know nuttin. When you get to my age you have a better > chance of understanding. :-) > > > do you want what Stuart suggested? That is: > > > > For each pair of values that are used to generate an average, you want > > the standard deviation of that pair of data points? For two points the > > standard deviation is equal to the difference between one of the > > points and the average. So if the points are 8.4 and 9.3, the average > > is 8.85. The "standard deviation" would be 9.3 - 8.85 = 0.45. Is that > > what you want? I mean, it's easy enough to compute, but I'm having a > > hard time seeing how useful it is. > > > > I can see a possible use for it, it shows how alike the items are in each > pair. > > -- > Stuart -- AccessD mailing list AccessD at databaseadvisors.com http://databaseadvisors.com/mailman/listinfo/accessd Website: http://www.databaseadvisors.com