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RECENTLY the statistical section of the Venereal Disease Division, U.S.P.H.S., was confronted with the problem of determining whether persons under 20 were becoming infected with syphilis more frequently during the war period. There was available a large body of data consisting of tabulations for the years 1941-1944 showing the number of patients with early syphilis admitted to public clinics by age, race, and sex. Various methods of analyzing the data were considered. Averages, such as the mean, median, or mode, together with their appropriate standard errors, are the statistics most frequently employed for determining changes in frequency distributions and measuring their extent and significance. All of these measures were discarded as unsuitable for the purpose at hand. The mean was not
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