

The OED in turn defines “squeezed middle” as “the section of society regarded as particularly affected by inflation, wage freezes, and cuts in public spending during a time of economic difficulty, consisting principally of those people on low or middle incomes.” ( MORE: Merriam-Webster Adds ‘Tweet’ and ‘Bromance’ to Latest Edition) Miliband discussed the word on BBC’s Radio 4 earlier this year, where he failed to clearly define who the “squeezed middle” exactly included, saying it referred to people “around the average income, but below and above the average income.” This obviously includes just about everyone, and after being called out by host John Humphrys, Miliband clarified: “I’m not talking about people on benefits, I’m not talking about people on six-figure salaries either I’m talking about the broad middle class in this county who find themselves financially hard-pressed.” Sign up to get unlimited songs and podcasts with occasional ads. came together to review the buzzwords that “ captured the flavor of the year”-including occupy, podcasting, hacktivisim, Arab Spring, and an OED judge’s favorite, “ bunga bunga”-used in reference to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s scandalous parties. Best wishes.Follow that time of year again: lexicographers from the Oxford English Dictionary have come together to pick the one word or phrase that defines the past 12 months.Ģ011 is the year of the “squeezed middle,” as suggested by British Labour Party politician Ed Miliband. I hope this assists and wish you a great Sunday.

SQUEED TOWARDS THE AVERAGE HOW TO
Please let me know if you need to know how to calculate the kurtosis of the curve. Finally, you have your normal distribution and bell curve. Leptokurtic refers to a distribution that is relatively peaked compared to a normal distribution. Platykurtic refers to a distribution that is relatively flat compare to the normal bell curve. This is another descriptor we use to describe a distribution or curve. One last point that as a tutor I would not be doing my job if I did not briefly discuss: the kurtosis of the curve representing your distribution. Asymptotic simply means that as the tails of the curve approach the x-axis they still will never touch the axis.įinally, you know - I am sure - what the mean, median and mode are.

Unimodal simply means you do not have a Bi-modal distribution. The mean, median and mode are all the same. Think of a statistics test administered where there were a great many easy scores and very few lower scores from your class.Ĭharacteristics of a normal distribution or normal bell curve are as follows: If your tail on the left is longer, we refer to that distribution as "negatively skewed," and in practical terms this means a higher level of occurrences took place at the high end of the distribution. No, your distribution cannot possibly be considered normal.
