Degrees of freedom (mechanics) has only one degree of freedom because the positions of the cars behind the engine are constrained by the shape of the track. An automobile with highly stiff suspension can be considered to be a rigid body traveling on a plane (a flat, two-dimensional space). This body has three independent degrees of freedom consisting of two components of translation and one angle of rotation. Skidding or drifting is a good example of an automobile's three independent degrees of freedom. The position and orientation of a rigid body in space is defined by three components of translation and three components of
Degrees of freedom (statistics) vector (made up of "n" − 1 degrees of freedom within each of the populations). In statistical testing problems, one usually isn't interested in the component vectors themselves, but rather in their squared lengths, or Sum of Squares. The degrees of freedom associated with a sum-of-squares is the degrees-of-freedom of the corresponding component vectors. The three-population example above is an example of one-way Analysis of Variance. The model, or treatment, sum-of-squares is the squared length of the second vector, with 2 degrees of freedom. The residual, or error, sum-of-squares is with 3("n"−1) degrees of freedom. Of course, introductory books on