I heard an interesting talk a few weeks ago about “age-heaping” in survey responses, the phenomenon where people remember ages imprecisely and say that their siblings are ages that are divisible by 5 much more often than expected. There are some nice theory challenges here, with a big dose of stats modeling, but I’ll have to share some more thoughts on that later.
In the talk, the age-heaping was also referred to a a hedgehog or porcupine plot, because of the spikey histogram that the data produces. I was looking for a nice picture of one, or some additional background reading, and when I searched for “hedgehog statistical plots”, all google would give me was a bunch of pages about stats on actual hedgehogs. Cute!
Healthy Algorithms 