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Both arithmetic mean and median are averages, so unless they specify what average they used for the annual income, you may only assume what the author meant.

EDIT: Never mind, the author also says:

>Moreover, we compare median annual values for software engineers with mean annual values for the general population

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I'd appreciate a link to anyone, anywhere, at any time, using the word average to refer to the median. The median is the middle, not the average, and often nowhere near the average.

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/25/uk-incomes-how-...

This is standard statistical terminology, where "average" is a general term used to describe a central tendency of data. Canonical example averages are arithmetic mean, median, mode.

In popular usage, this has become muddled because the arithmetic mean is also an estimate of the peak/center of a Gaussian distribution from a sample distribution.

Note that "arithmetic mean" is what you colloquially call "average" and think of as "the mean" but it is not in any way the only "mean", either.

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average

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