Our tale begins innocently enough as a homework assignment for Statistics 1 12-a second course in statistics for undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. Students were asked to find a publicly available data display that could be modified to serve its purpose better. One student found a table on the United Nations web site {http:iliinsiats.un.org/unsdi'demographic roducts/socindlhousing.htm) describing an aspect of the crowdedness of housing in 63 countries (Table 1). The table is arranged alphabetically and contains the year that the data were gathered and the average number of persons per room in that country'. This latter figure was also broken down into its rural and urban components. Although the table adequately archived the information, it was not an evocative display that illuminated the character of housing crowded-ness. The path toward that goal is the subject of this essay.
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