can my firm do this?

I get £5K car allowance from my firm, stated in the contract when I started a few years ago. Now there are rumours that they are going to abolish it. Can they? TIA, |F

Reply to
freecycle
Loading thread data ...

Probably - subject to a notice period.

Fixed car allowances are not tax efficient so, if the rumours are true, the coy may have cottoned on at last. (It's amazing how many haven't).

I would assume they are going to replace it with a different scheme (eg a higher rate/mile, mandatory use of pool or hire cars or (least likely) coy cars).

Would be helpful if you can provide more info of your firm's proposals.

Reply to
Martin

Not if it's in his contract and he doesn't agree they can't.

tim

Reply to
tim.....

Obviously, there would be "negotiations" (these are mandatory), but the company could still go ahead and they will doubtless come up with all kinds of mitigation arguments.

If they do go ahead, and you haven't accepted the new terms, you would have to resign and claim constructive dismissal. You may or may not win the case.

So, in my view, yes they probably can.

But clearly this is just a rumour the OP has heard, and I would be surprised if it wasn't either false or else part of a total re-jigging of the firm's car scheme.

Reply to
Martin

I think they should sack you for being below average intelligence.

Reply to
sandy

so we have 49% of the population unemployed - good idea

tim

>
Reply to
tim.....

How bizarre. You appear to believe that 49% of the population are below average, and presumably by the same token 49% are above, and hence exactly 2% of the population are of average intelligence.

Why 2%? Why not 0%, or 20%, or 80%? Enquiring minds want to get themselves around this.

Reply to
Ronald Raygun

He is clearly referring to median - one of several measures of "average".

As for the percentage, it could be right - depending on rounding and to how many sig figs you think intelligence can be reliably measured.

Reply to
Martin

Tim clearly was, yes, but Sandy, the previous poster, might have meant the mean.

No it can't be right. Even if intelligence could be measured so finely that people could be allocated into groups the size of

1% of the population or even less [and indeed measurability need not even come into the picture - it might be possible to conceive of one person being minutely more intelligent than another even though it cannot be reliably measured], I hardly think that a casual reference to someone being "of average intelligence" would intend to refer to such a narrow band as the middle 2%. One is much more likely to mean something like the middle third, or even half, and accordingly a reference to being "below average" would likely mean in the bottom third or quarter.

But really Sandy probably meant to accuse the OP of being *well* below average, so not just in the bottom quarter, but perhaps in the bottom 2%. :-)

Hence anyone in the middle 96% could be deemed "average".

Reply to
Ronald Raygun

Well, actually, neither you nor I know if that's the case. It's a common misunderstanding. A bit like "how many legs does the average person have?" Perhaps I should have put a smiley after my word "clearly".

In which case, it's usually helpful to clarify to whom you are referring.

Yes it can - think about tolerances, population size, the common numeric range and band widths of IQ scores, various interpretations of the "question", etc.

Once your enquiring mind gets around this, you'll find the maths is much simpler than driving a lorry... :-)

What, that rarely?

You may well think that - I couldn't possibly comment.

Who is the "one" you refer to?

Most people, IMHO, who make 'a casual reference to someone being "of average intelligence" ' would mean the middle of the spectrum. Which I imagine is not very different from mode and median in this case.

Quite possibly - though why he suddenly launched into that defeats me (and I have not retained the earlier posts in this thread).

You mean like politicians, bankers, hacks and lawyers?

But only by someone who really meant what you suggest.

Reply to
Martin

Well, it's unlikely to be a misunderstanding in this particular case, because Tim seems to have associated "below average" with (roughly) half the population. This favours the hypothesis that his interpretation of "average" in this case is median, which as we know is defined to be that value (in this case of intelligence) above and below which half the population lie -- but of course if intelligence is measured in discrete bands, then a non-zero fraction of the population will have that actual value, and in consequence either or the both the upper and lower "halves" can have less than 50% of the population in it.

The average (median) person has more than the average (mean) number of legs.

I don't understand the purpose of that remark, since I don't think I was unclear in that respect.

I didn't get the impression that Tim (let alone Sandy) thought about any of those things, so I dismiss them as irrelevant. I suspect 49% was simply the biggest fraction Tim could think of which was less than

50%. I don't think he intended to impute the existence of a middle band exactly 2% wide.

Naughty!

The average person :-) making the casual reference to which I referred earlier.

I agree, but it rather depends on what is meant by "middle".

I would think that the "middle" would in this case be a rather wide band, not a point or the narrowest band which can be discriminated.

Members of an arbitrary jury, for example, will tend on the whole to be of average intelligence, but it is unlikely that they will all belong to the middle 2%.

Taking your spectrum analogy a step further, light of an "average" colour (lying in the middle of the visible spectrum) might mean any light which is vaguely greenish, but not necessarily having a wavelength of exactly 450nm.

I don't think much thought went into his remark. It seems to have been nothing but a gratuitous thinly veiled way of calling the OP stupid.

Reply to
Ronald Raygun
< snip >

But not if you round to 1 sf.

Clearly _you_ don't. But I took it the other way, and don't think I was being stoopid or devious.

But you thought about them, and so have I. So I claim they are relevant to this sub-thread.

Sorry...

I don't know what you arguing here. Do you mean we should define average intelligence as some kind of band containing a large majority of the population? If so, then we're at cross-purposes and/or I disagree with you.

450? That would be blue/violet

And I trust you realise I was merely referring to the full range of intelligence, even though there may well be a correlation between that and seeing the light.

Isn't that what newsgoups are for :-)))

Reply to
Martin

Sorry, you've lost me. The thread went like this:

Sandy: They should sack you [the OP] for being below average intelligence. Tim: So we have 49% of the population unemployed. Ronald: You [*] appear to believe that ... 2% of the pop are of ave int. Martin: He [presumably Tim] is clearly referring to the median. Ronald: Tim clearly was, but Sandy might have meant mean. Martin: In which case, it's usually helpful to clarify to whom you are referring.

So it appears you were accusing me of being unclear to whom I was referring, but the only place I used a pronoun without explicitly making clear to whom I was referring, was at [*] above, but this was implicitly unambiguous, since I was addressing the immediately previous poster, Tim.

If you think I slipped up on clarity somewhere else, I'd like to know where.

They may be relevant to where you want the discussion to lead. I merely dismissed them as irrelevant to what had by then been said. I don't think Tim really intended to imply that the proportion of the population who occupy the narrowest measurable median band of intelligence level happens to be 2% wide. You think it might be, I think you could be right, but do you think Tim meant that?

That is indeed more or less what I am arguing, though not necessarily a large one nor even necessarily a majority, it could simply be a significant minority. And I don't mean "we should define", but that we should recognise that the context in which things are said affects the meaning. Sometimes you want average to mean a specific value, sometimes a narrow band around that value, sometimes a wide band. I'm just saying that in a casual non-technical context, it's more likely than not that a person described as average (be it in terms of intelligence or height or weight or whatever) would be taken to be anyone who is not exceptional.

So it would. I meant 550 (mid way between 400 and 700). Sorry.

Of course.

I like it!

No, I'd say they're more for going off at tangents.

Reply to
Ronald Raygun

Clear? Intelligence (IQ) is standardly modelled as being normally distributed. I'm kind of curious as to what you had in mind that made median and mode different?

Perhaps he was using accountant's rounding where you frig all the figures to make them look pretty.

>
Reply to
Nick

So am I :-)

But I was challenging the implication (as I read it) in RR's post that it was not necessarily the case that as many folk are above "average" as below. With median, however, that is the case.

As for whether differences exist between "m, m and m", the reality (I suggest) is not the same as a modelling assumption. The Flynn effect seems to suggest this, if you accept that increases are not distributed equally across the population. Or maybe IQ distribution wasn't gaussian but has now become so...?

I am and I do - but to make them digestible rather than merely pretty :-))

Reply to
Martin

Though I did not mean to imply that earlier, it is nevertheless true:

It is indeed not necessarily the case that equally many of a population are above median as below median. In particular it may not be the case when the attribute being measured is such that several members of the population may share the same value of the attribute in question, so that the median is not unique.

Take a population of five boys and let the attribute being measured be the number of marbles (excuse the pun on intelligence) each has in his pocket. The numbers might be 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, and so the median is 4, but there is more than one occurrence of 4. So one boy's marble count is below 4, and two boys' counts are above 4. One and two are not the same.

Or to return to your example of legs. The mean number of legs per person in the general population of people is slightly less than two, but the median is exactly two, because in fact more than half the population have two legs. I think it's safe to say that nobody will have more than two legs (statistically insignificant freaks of nature exdcepted), but some folk will have fewer (or less, since some might have only part of a leg missing). Some is not the same as none.

Reply to
Ronald Raygun

Yes we understand the difference between mode, mean and median. However where the quantity being measured is Normally distributed the three will be the same. The central limit theorem shows that a random variable, such as intelligence (take this argument with a pinch of salt), which is based on the sum of many component varaibles will tend to be Normally distributed. Hence Intelligence is standardly measured via tests with the test results being massaged to fit a Normal distribution.

There are some reasons (and lots of empirical evidence) to believe that intelligence in some populations is not normally distributed, one typical suggestion being the assertion that IQ is ethnically correlated. The Flynn effect Martin mentions is a counter argument that the IQ test results of a single ethnic group have improved markedly over the last

100 years and hence IQ tests are not a reliable indicator of innate intelligence.

I was curious as to why you thought intelligence was not Normally distributed and how you felt mean and median differed.

Obviously if you make the wrong here move you will be blackballed and have to spend the rest of you usenet life shunned and isolated, like Watson of DNA fame ;o)

Reply to
Nick

I may have been misinformed in my youth, but had been given to understand that the Q in IQ stood for quotient, and that IQ was basically the ratio (expressed as a percentage, i.e. multiplied by 100) between two quantities, namely the subject's mental age (a bit of a woolly concept, but this "age" is what the intelligence test was meant somehow to determine), and the subject's actual age.

Hence a subject of "normal" intelligence would have a mental age equal to their actual age and therefore an IQ of 100.

If this is what IQ actually is, then it *cannot* be normally distributed, since if it is even remotely possible for some subjects to have a mental age in excess of twice their actual age (i.e. to have an IQ over 200), then it would be necessary for the population also to include people with an IQ less than 0, and thus of a negative mental age, which is absurd.

But to be honest, none of this went through my mind at the time. I didn't think IQ wasn't normally distributed nor did I think it was. I just went with the default general assumption that since nothing was really known about the distribution (at least to me), mean and median would not necessarily be equal.

Reply to
Ronald Raygun

"in particular" implies there are other exceptions. What might they be...?

But only half the time - when an odd number of "medians" occurs in an "even" population, and vice versa.

Yes, yes, yes - I do "get it"... And if it's 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 6 then the median is 4.5. Proving what? That 50% could be above and the other 50% below? That would require that the middle 2 people have different IQs. Unlikley, I would have thought, unless you can take on board my earlier points about rounding, precision of measure etc.

Yes - I "get" that too. After all, I fed you that example.

"less" ?? - you sound like the fast checkout at the supermarket...

The top part perhaps...?

Anyway, does this mean you're no longer rounding to integers?

Well said. Lucky no-one suggested otherwise :-)

Reply to
Martin

I had hoped we would avoid the issue of how / if intelligence is measured/able.

Like many (most?) I reckon IQ is simply a measure of the ability to do IQ tests.

Perhaps the ability not to make a bank go bust is more valid. So, on that basis, I'm with the poster who suggested (IIRC) sacking folk with less than average intelligence.

Which is kinda where we came in.... :-(

Reply to
Martin

BeanSmart website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.