Can you describe coefficient of variance in 140 characters?

"Can you describe coefficient of variance in 140 characters?", asked a medical librarian on Twitter:

laikas RT @shamsha: need help: can someone plz describe coefficient of variance in English? thnx! 34 minutes ago from TweetDeck

Some people obviously can:

@HCIR_GeneG: It's a measure of variability of a data sample, without paying attention to absolute values. Can be used to compare diff. distributions.

@flutesUD: CV = Std Dev / Mean. Tells u how variable the data are regardless of their units. Lets u compare across different types of studies.

My suggestion:

DrVes@laikas @shamsha Check the Wikipedia definition, click on the links in the description and you'll get there... :) http://bit.ly/18NnEH29 minutes ago from web in reply to laikas

In probability theory and statistics, the coefficient of variation (CV) is a normalized measure of dispersion of a probability distribution. It is defined as the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean .

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