It is possible for the standard deviation to be greater than the mean, even if all data points are positive numbers. However, the only way for this to happen is for most, if not all, data points to be at the extremes (with one extreme much greater in magnitude than the other) and nothing near the average. Generally, in a science experiment, it means the orignal data is garabage.
there are a lot of distributions that have a mean near zero, but a significant standard deviation. The standard deviation can never be negative, but the mean could be negative, depending on the process being modeled.
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