Wednesday, July 19, 2006

You'll have to take me just the way that you find me

Today I gave the railgun talk, for reasons that don't bear explanation, to a group of managers from the graphics processor company nVidia.

It was warmly received ("this is the greatest presentation ever") but there was also an embarrassing moment when I showed a curve fit and they asked, "What is R^2 = 0.9581?" I couldn't remember what R^2 was called.

Um, I guess that would be the square of the correlation coefficient.

The nVidia managers were quite interesting people.

3 Comments:

At 11:27 AM, July 19, 2006, Blogger Richard Mason said...

I was sufficiently self-conscious about using the phrase "don't bear explanation" to try googling the phrase.

I was a bit surprised that this phrase (and similar phrases) return comparatively few Google hits.

So, you know... Everyone should start using this expression more often to get the Google hit count up.

Just passing on the word.

 
At 11:59 AM, July 19, 2006, Blogger WestBerkeleyFlats said...

Is this the r-squared that most people call r-squared? I guess you could call it the coefficient of determination, but I've never actually heard anyone call it that.

 
At 2:28 PM, July 19, 2006, Blogger Richard Mason said...

Yes... Saying, "That's r-squared," didn't seem like a good enough answer, but I was blanking on a more precise definition. I may have mumbled something about goodness of fit.

 

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