How to generate fake population (ie. not sample) data?

-----Original Message-----
From: Gabor Grothendieck [mailto:ggrothendieck at gmail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2009 3:17 AM
To: Daniel Nordlund
Cc: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] How to generate fake population (ie. not 
sample) data?

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 2:48 AM, Daniel Nordlund 
<djnordlund at verizon.net> wrote:

-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org
[mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of CB
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 10:05 PM
To: David Winsemius
Cc: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] How to generate fake population (ie. not
sample) data?

My understanding is that rnorm(n, x, s) will give me an 

n-sized sample

from an (x, s) normal distribution. So the vector returned 

will have a

mean from the sampling distribution of the mean. But what 

I want is a

set of n numbers literally with a mean of x and sd of s.

I am at the very beginning of my R journey, so my 

apologies if this is

a particularly naive enquiry.

2009/3/4 David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net>:

In what ways is rnorm not a satisfactory answer?

--
David Winsemius

On Mar 3, 2009, at 9:33 PM, CB wrote:

This seems like it should be obvious, but searches I've

tried all come

up with rnorm etc.

Is there a way of generating normally-distributed 

'population' data

with known parameters?

Cheers, CB.

Something like this may help get you started.

std.pop <- function(x,mu,stdev){
?((x-mean(x))/sd(x)*stdev)+mu
?}

Note the scale function, i.e. the above can also be written:

stdev * scale(x) + mu