A letter to high-school students

Imagine Magazine, a youth-focused journal by Johns Hopkins's Center of Talented Youth, invited me to contribute an article in celebration of statistics. I try to convey the fun and joy of working with numbers and charts.

You can read it here, starting on p. 22. While you're at it, the rest of the magazine is really great too, and I hope we're able to influence at least a few youngsters to take up math-stats as a career.

Please forward to kids and teachers!

Comments

[Alan]

Maybe this is a side effect of living in Wisconsin, but I'm surprised that people wouldn't know that whole milk doesn't mean 100% fat.

Logically it means "has all of the fat, as it came out of the cow." Except it turns out that cows aren't as consistent as our modern world demands, so whole milk is mixed to achieve a consistent fat level.

[Ken]

The Frappe will get most of its energy from the sugar in the syrup that they use as flavouring. Probably corn based as it has high subsidies.

[Kaiser]

That example has a number of teaching points. One which I decided not to include in the short article is the choice of metric. Is percent fat a good metric? Or should it be the calorie count? Or something else?

[Yawar]

Seems to be behind a paywall now.