Most standard statistical methods treat numerical data as if they were real (infinitenumber- of-decimal-places) observations. The issue of quantization or digital resolution is recognized by engineers and metrologists, but is largely ignored by statisticians and can render standard statistical...

There is a little-known but very simple generalization of the standard result that for uncorrelated variables with a common mean and variance, the expected sample variance is the marginal variance. The generalization justifies the use of the usual standard error of the sample mean in possibly...