Age of the Oldest Person You Know

From a Prudential TV commercial that has people place large, round stickers on a number line to represent the age of the oldest person they know. This forms a histogram or dotplot. The message is to have Prudential prepare you to have adequate money for all these years. You can add your own sticker at the Prudential website. Here is a video behind the scenes.

Top of the Curve = Middle of the Pack

Here's a normal distribution design from a t-shirt (thanks Jun). Unlike the possible confusion we have seen from bell-curve t-shirts, this one, from shirtwoot! shows that the designer got the bell-curve's relation to the normal distribution correct. The bell-curve is not the normal distribution. The bell-curve only describes the normal distribution. The normal distribution is a specific random arrangement of measurements on a number line. This arrangement ranges from small measurements on the left of the number line, up to large measurements on the right. The curve represents the frequency or density of observations along the line. Where the curve is low, the observations have a very low density. We would expect few measurements there, occurring sparsely in those regions. Where the bell-curve is higher, we expect a dense arrangement, with observations piling up to a peak in the middle. But the location of this peak on the bell-curve lies in the middle of our number line range. The peak corresponds to the measurement that occurs most often, where its measurement is most common. It is literally the peak of mediocrity.

This shirt design gets it right. At this peak, you have not surmounted all around you to become the best. On the contrary, you've truly "reached mediocrity".

More Cumulative Distribution Tabs

This is a recent post from Shorpy.com, a blog of vintage photographs. This image from 1933 shows a woman deftly gluing alphabet tabs on, what appears to be, a dictionary. We've seen earlier how such tabs represent the cumulative distribution function of the first letter of the words in English. The close-up below show the dictionary to the woman's left. The tabs for letter groups run from Z to A from left to right. For our use, we flip it over allowing the alphabet to run properly from A to Z.
The tabs then show relatively few English words beginning with the last letters of the alphabet.

When flipped over, we can see the tabs form cumulative distribution function just as the printed pages showed in our earlier post. More details on these cumulative distribution images can be found in my paper available here.

Market Price

Market Price (getmarketprice.com) collects the current prices of items (over $100) selling on e-bay. It provides summary statistics (min, max, median, mean, and standard deviation) along with a histogram of prices and a scatterplot of  time left to bid against price. They also include a list of the raw data with links.

Pitch-and-Toss

Look close. Coins have done their worst. Scores of drivers, admonished to "Stay in Vehicle", have tossed their coins into this Florida Greenway tollbooth. They have aimed for the bin and hit the backstop: the sign. Examine the coins' dings and marks near the bottom of the "Vehicle" sign. If the sign extended lower we would probably see a near circular scatterplot pattern of marks, the results of targeted tosses that have missed in various ways: off target left or right or up or down. As it is, the close-up below shows that the sign retains the marks of the top half of the scatterplot target. The drivers' coins seem aimed just below the "C", not full center. Perhaps slight bias is aided by the forward motion of cars, not fully stopped, to pay the toll.

Wear Fountain

 

A water fountain at the Smithsonian American Art museum, submitted by Eric Lawrence of George Washington University. The many hands of museum visitors have pressed on the lever for a drink and worn away the metal luster to produce the dark pattern of a histogram revealing a bell-shaped distribution of wear and use. Good eye, thanks Eric.

Another Sherlock Clue

Here's another Sherlock Holmes statistical connection (thanks Laura). This image is from another modern update to Sherlock Holmes. This is from the BBC TV series Sherlock that appears on PBS Masterpiece Mystery. This episode is A Study in Pink a modern version of the Arthur Conan Doyle story A Study in Scarlet. Notice the pattern of footfall placement on the steps. Each step shows a bell-shaped  distribution of wear. You can trace the mode of each step's distribution and see a regression curve of the modal path up the steps.

Arthur Conan Doyle described such a wear pattern in his story The Man with the Twisted Lip where Watson describes his investigation of an opium den:

I passed down the steps, worn hollow in the centre by the ceaseless tread of drunken feet.