There were 26 entries in the September caption contest that featured a cartoon showing two people washing dishes together. The dishes have numbers on them and as they are dried and put away, they form a normal curve on the shelves.
The winning caption for the September contest was "Data cleaning may involve normalization," written by Larry Lesser from University of Texas at El Paso. The caption can be used for discussing data wrangling issues involved with bringing together data of varying file formats, naming conventions, and columns and transforming it into one cohesive data set.
An honorable mention this month goes to Douglas VanDerwerken from the United States Naval Academy for his simple caption "The Normal Dishtribution," that might be used in discussing the value of the normal curve. A second honorable mention goes to an anonymous contributor for their caption "It is not appropriate to clean the data just to make them look more normal." That caption might help focus a classroom conversation on the idea that unbiased procedures for cleaning data should be laid out independently of issues like the convenience of using the normal distribution in their analysis.