Measures of Central Tendency: Range, Mean, Median, and Mode. Halloween Edition!

You and your friends go Trick or Treating, and decide to pool all of the candy and divvy it up evenly when you get back home. You get 23, 27, 18, and 26 pieces of candy.
- How many pieces of candy will each person get?
- What MoCT is this?
- What are the other measures?

Right before you leave the house, your Mom tells you to bring your little sister along with you. Ugh! But, all of the neighbors thought she was so cute that she was raking in the candy. She got 45 pieces of candy!
- What will happen to each of the MoCT? Will they stay the same, increase, or decrease? By a lot or just a little?
- Will each person, including your little sister, end up with more or less candy?

After the first house you visit, you run into a classmate of yours, who tags along for the rest of the night, but doesn't get any candy himself. (All of the pillowcases at his house were in the laundry.) At the end of the night, he asks to get half as much candy as everyone else.
- How do you distribute the candy between all of the people?
- What expression can you write to show this?

Welcome to MathEd Out!

“For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics”  (NYT 8/6/09)

“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And I’m not kidding.” -Hal Varian, chief economist at Google

Math stole the front page of the New York Times today. In short, it claimed that a good number of the careers that will pop up in the next decade are going to be based on a math-heavy education, namely the field of statistics. With the growing number of technologies born to process huge quantities of information, we need more human intelligence to do something with all of it, and to make those technologies more efficient.

One example:

A while back, MIT experimented by giving 100 students Blackberries that tracked their movements and actions on campus. One small step for Big Brother, one large step for statisticians. It’s one thing to have a massive amount of data on record about your student body; the hard part is focusing on a specific trend, and extrapolating from it. Humans come into play by deciding how to organize the information into something useful, or at least interesting. 

The headline for the general public, or least for school-age students, should be shouted loud and clear: Math is everywhere, not just in your textbooks. You don’t have to be a typical “nerd” to find something that catches your attention in the field of mathematical applications. Most people take advantage of forms of advanced mathematics every day, and anyone with the right kind of analytical mind could contribute to the field in ways yet unimagined. 

For once, math education is being glorified based on something other than only salary! (Though, going by the jobs mentioned in the article, that part doesn’t sound too shabby either.) Soon, the secret will be revealed that math can, in fact, be cool to study. And that it involves far more than learning techniques and regurgitating them on worksheets. You could land a gig delving into technologies we take for granted, and making them even better and more user-friendly. Who wouldn’t want to take part in that? I don’t know how many pre-college students are going to read this article, but I would encourage them to do so, before they make up their minds to dismiss math completely.

“You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?”  (NYT 11/30/08)