Agreed, but I've got to say from experience that quantile statistics like the author proposes are often way more informative. The only downside is that they ca

Agreed, but I've got to say from experience that quantile statistics like the author proposes are often way more informative. The only downside is that they can be considerably more expensive to compute for bigger data sets, whereas mean and standard deviation are cheap and can be updated without taking another pass over the data.