Re: [math-fun] Sex, Lies and Government Conducted Surveys

Here's another kind of median I could imagine statisticians using: Suppose our data are the numbers 1, 1, and 2. The bar graph is ___ | | | |___ | | | |___|___| 1 2 We could then choose the median to be the value m such that the line x=m bisects the area inside the histogram, which (if I'm not mistaken) is m=1.25. This is not such a bad thing to do when the original (possibly lost) data were real numbers that got rounded; ergo, statistics packages will enable users to compute medians this way; ergo, some users will compute medians this way even when it's not appropriate. Jim Propp