“Mean”all rights reserved lyric © 2011 Lawrence Mark Lesser

may be sung to the tune of (the first verse and final choruses of)

Taylor Swift’s 2011 top-10 country hit and 2012 Grammy-winning country song of the year of the same title

You.......with your words like mean & mode & symbols that you use against me.

Mu........stands for a population mean and x bar for the sample.

Who…..knows what symbol to use for other measures of data location.

You…...pickin' each time the mean.

But it can get pulled off by just one single point,

And you don't know what you don't know....

CHORUS: Sometimes data have a real asymmetry

Or values that are really quite extreme.

In those cases, better use the median

If the middle is what you need— that’s not gonna be the mean!

That won’t be the mean with outliers, just forget it,

Do you see just what I mean & mean & mean & mean? (repeat chorus)

return to Larry's www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/lesser/Mathemusician.html  page