In the article titled The Metric Mania, professor John Allen Paulos explains the difficulty and complexity of measuring the effectiveness of human actions and related public policies either in health care, higher education (students' learning) or economics. The linguistic ambiguity of terms used in measuring the quality or outcomes may lead to meaningless results. For example, he cites the statistical data of homeless people or battered women. How we define those categories will lead to different numbers. Then, how we measure these things will also affect the data.
The short piece introduces the concepts of mathematical statistics, aggregation, median, mean, Arrow's Theorem.
Assignment: Discuss this article providing other examples. Related fields: Actuarian statistics.
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Recommended book by John Allen Paulos, Once Upon a Number: The Hidden Mathematical Logic of Stories.
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