Measures of Location

A fun song about the average by American humorist and singer-songwriter Carla Ulbrich. The song was a finalist in the novelty category of the 2018 USA Songwriting Competition.  The song is also available at www.theacousticguitarproject.com/artist/carla-ulbrich/ and more about the singer can be found at her website at www.carlau.com. For classroom use, you might ask which lines in "Totally Average Woman" refer to ways in which the woman in the song is at the mean, and which refer to ways in which she is at the median. Permission from singer is for free use for teaching in classroom and course websites with attribution. Commercial users must contact the copyright holder.

A song lyric by Dennis Pearl of The Ohio State University written as a parody of the 1960 tune "Hit the Road Jack" by Percy Mayfield; made popular by Ray Charles in his 1961 recording. What to say in class before song: There are times when the mode may be preferred to the mean - especially if the concept of interest is tied to understanding the most likely situation. You might remember that Ray Charles used to sing a song about this... In a class where Bayesian and Maximum Likelihood methodology has been introduced you might add the following after the first sentence "For example when you assume a uniform non-informative prior for a parameter, then the m.l.e. coincides with the mode of the posterior distribution - and the mean of the posterior distribution may not be a good estimate." Tip for Teaching: The song takes up a bit too much class time for delivering its message. Thus, for in-class use, it is recommended to play only the first verse or three. Musical accompaniment realization and male vocals are by Joshua Lintz, female vocals are by Mariana Sandoval from University of Texas at El Paso.