Penelope

NPR was bringing it this morning with some fun stories disguised as learning!

Meet Penelope the cow.

NPR posted her pic on the internet, and asked people to guess how much she weighs to see how close the collective group could get to the actual number.  Over 17,000 people responded.  The average guess was 1,287 pounds...only 68 pounds (5%) off from her actual weight of 1,355.

The point of this experiment was the show how the stock market (of all things) works: people in the market are fairly good at arriving at the "correct" price because they average one another out.  One explanation is that each person brings their unique perspective/experiences to the crowd--so Cherie Olsen would probably provide a better guess having grown up on a farm in Wisconsin that I would.  To prove this point, please refer to this photo and fact that when we toured a dairy farm last time I was in Denmark with the Olsen family, I was most interested in playing with the baby kitties and congratulating my wry wit of taking a "cowfie".  I still think that is genius, by the way.

Kids hogging the kitten.  

One man of the whole bench guessed the exact correct weight.  They called him to ask how he did it. Answer: he googled average weight of a cow (1,500 lbs), looked at Penelope's pic and thought she looked a bit smaller than the average bovine and randomly guessed 1,355.  NPR says this goes to show that successfully timing the stock market is more luck than skill.  This man was also given a trophy with a cow on it for his luck.  

Last fun fact about this story.  The first 5 guesses were all from children who guessed: 6 lbs, "60 hundred" (6000), 200, 300 and 300....for an average of 1,361(even closer than the 17,000 group average at only 6 lbs off...less than one percent error of margin)!  Thank goodness for the 60 hundred kid.

Show Miss Penelope to your kids and see what weight they guess!