Encyclopedia > Bias

  Article Content

Bias

A bias is a prejudice. One is said to be biased if one is influenced by one's biases. A bias could for example lead one to accept or non-accept the truth of a claim, not because of the strength of the claim itself, but because it does or does not correspond to one's own preconceived ideas.

An example of bias is having an Americo-centric point of view (the point of view of an American, in particular one from the US), or similar for another country.

A systematic bias is a bias resulting from some system. For example, a committee on evolution that meets in a Christian church and is primarilly advertised through fliers in Bibles may have a bias towards Christian views of evolution.

See: Bias (book by Bernard Goldberg)


In statistics, the word bias has at least two different senses, one referring to something considered very bad, the other referring to something that is occasionally desirable. See bias (statistics).


In philosophy of science and experiment design[?], bias refers to psychological factors which affect scientific hypothesis testing. The variants culture bias, cognitive bias, confirmation bias, infrastructure bias, and notation bias are widely recognized.


In telecommunication, the term bias has the following meanings:

1. A systematic deviation of a value from a reference value.

2. The amount by which the average of a set of values departs from a reference value.

3. Electrical, mechanical, magnetic, or other force (field) applied to a device to establish a reference level to operate the device.

4. In telegraph signaling systems, the development of a positive or negative dc voltage at a point on a line that should remain at a specified reference level, such as zero.

Note: A bias may be applied or produced by (i) the electrical characteristics of the line, (ii) the terminal equipment, and (iii) the signaling scheme.

Source: from Federal Standard 1037C and from MIL-STD-188

This should also mention bias as the term defined here: http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=bias, def 2.


Bias[?] is a commune in the Landes département, in France.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Fibre optic gyroscope

... optic gyroscope wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 41 ms