Saturday, May 31, 2014

Baby Name Distributions

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-tell-someones-age-when-all-you-know-is-her-name/

I am fascinated by baby name trends, but I don't know if students are. What I am most interested in with this is the intuition students will have about names, and how that helps set them up to understand distributions, especially bimodal distributions. I know that I have fairly set ideas about what names come from what eras (I hear "Agnes" and I picture an elderly woman; I hear "Kaylee" and I picture a young girl), so it helps with thinking about when median may or may not be the best measure of center. Also, there's a nice graph with interquartile ranges, which demonstrates why we care about the interquartile range. Finally, there's so much baby name data out there that kids could definitely research and construct their own graphs based on the questions that (I expect) will come up from looking at all this.

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