A fork of Rural Dictionary
A quick way to see how much a set of datapoints deviates from their own average, where the points that lie farthest away, have the most weight, because the differences are squared.
Standard Deviation: "The sum of the differences from the average squared"
a sexual fetish that was previously considered perverse but is now commonplace
Bondage and foot fetishes are standard deviations
The point in time when although things are working fine a complete system restart has occured
Them: How'd things go last night during registration? Me: Well as you can see by this graph, thigs were working but here you see the standard gossard deviation, then it was busy again. Them: What an idiot!
In Finance, a higher standard deviation means the returns are more spread out, but a lower standard deviation means the returns are more consistent or stable.
"Last year, Stock A had a standard deviation of 10%, which means its price fluctuated by about 10% from the average return"