More Fun with Numbers

In his daily links update this morning, HoCo Rising shared a couple of statistical nuggets from this story by Yeganeh June Torbati in The Sun, particularly the fact that HoCo is the wealthiest county in the wealthiest state in the country "with 57.2 percent of residents having completed a bachelor's degree.”

We also top the charts in the time spent getting to and from work.

“Marylanders continued to have some of the nation's longest driving commutes — about 31 minutes on average, virtually tied with New Yorkers.”

In this story by Carol Morello and Dan Keating in The Washington Post we also learn that in Northern Virginias Loudon County, “more than a third of the households are married couples with children, making it one of the country's bastions of the traditional family.”

On the other hand, the Baltimore area, less than one in ten households are made up of the traditional nuclear family.

In The Daily Record, Michaelle Bond reports that “Howard County schools had the state’s lowest poverty rate at 4.6 percent.”

That still concerns Patti Caplan.

“Just because the Howard County School Public School System has the lowest poverty rate — and is located in the county with the highest median household income — doesn’t mean it doesn’t worry about the relationship between poverty and school achievement, said spokeswoman Patti Caplan.”

“People think, ‘Well, that can’t be a problem in Howard County,’ but it is,” Caplan said. “And we want to raise awareness of the issue.”

Then again perhaps it’s best to consider what Professor Aaron Levenstien said about statistics:

“Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”