Newcomb's Measurements of the Passage Time of Light

Description

A numeric vector giving the ‘Third Series’ of measurements of the passage time of light recorded by Newcomb in 1882. The given values divided by 1000 plus 24.8 give the time in millionths of a second for light to traverse a known distance. The ‘true’ value is now considered to be 33.02.

The dataset is given in the order in Staudte and Sheather. Stigler (1977, Table 5) gives the dataset as

    28 26 33 24 34 -44 27 16 40 -2 29 22 24 21 25 30 23 29 31 19
    24 20 36 32 36 28 25 21 28 29 37 25 28 26 30 32 36 26 30 22
    36 23 27 27 28 27 31 27 26 33 26 32 32 24 39 28 24 25 32 25
    29 27 28 29 16 23

However, order is not relevant to its use as an example of robust estimation. (Thanks to Anthony Unwin for bringing this difference to our attention.)

Usage

newcomb

Source

S. M. Stigler (1973) Simon Newcomb, Percy Daniell, and the history of robust estimation 1885–1920. Journal of the American Statistical Association 68, 872–879.

S. M. Stigler (1977) Do robust estimators work with real data? Annals of Statistics, 5, 1055–1098.

R. G. Staudte and S. J. Sheather (1990) Robust Estimation and Testing. Wiley.