reduced the waiting time, but complaints persisted. The airplane arrival gates were then moved farther away from the baggage claim area, so passengers had to walk farther. Passengers now spend more time walking than waiting in place, and complaints have fallen dramatically. • Many DMV locations now provide visitors with an estimated wait time and queue number. The current status of the queue is displayed on clearly visible screens. Research has shown that providing people with this queue information defuses the stress, anxiety and uncertainty of waiting in line. • The queue for Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts at Universal Orlando Resort features many attractions including the Great Hall of Gringotts bank with animatronic goblins, a pre-ride show featuring the character of Bill Weasley, and an elevator that creates the illusion of descending deep down into underground vaults. All of these attractions keep guests happily distracted (and cool) as they wait in long summer lines. We will proceed to examine the statistics of wait times, but we should always keep in mind that many effective strategies require common sense in addition to a knowledge of statistics. Let’s consider 10 AM wait times at two of the most popular Disney World Rides: “Space Mountain” and “Avatar Flight of Passage.” Examination of the dotplots in Figure 3-1 suggests that “Space Mountain” has a shorter wait time than “Avatar Flight of Passage.” The difference between the minimum and maximum wait time for “Space Mountain” is also less than that for “Avatar Flight of Passage.” Instead of relying solely on subjective interpretations of a graph like Figure 3-1, this chapter introduces measures that are essential to any study of statistics. This chapter introduces the mean, median, standard deviation, and variance, which are among the most important statistics presented in this book, and they are essential to any study of statistics. We will use these statistics for describing, exploring, and comparing the wait times for popular Disney World rides as listed in Data Set 33. Critical Thinking and Interpretation: Going Beyond Formulas and Arithmetic In this modern statistics course, the emphasis is not on memorizing formulas or manually doing messy arithmetic. We can get results with a calculator or software so that we can focus on making practical sense of results through critical thinking. Although this chapter includes detailed steps for important procedures, it isn’t always necessary to master those steps. It is, however, generally helpful to perform a few manual calculations before using technology so that understanding is enhanced. The methods and tools presented in this chapter are often called methods of descriptive statistics, because they summarize or describe relevant characteristics of data. In later chapters we use inferential statistics to make inferences, or generalizations, about populations. Here are the chapter objectives: 3-1 Measures of Center • Develop the ability to measure the center of data by finding the mean, median, mode, and midrange. • Determine whether an outlier has a substantial effect on the mean and median. Chapter Objectives 87 CHAPTER OBJECTIVES >>> FIGURE 3-1 Disney World Wait Times
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