Summary

If you’re a chemist, you may feel underwhelmed or disappointed by this idea. “Isn’t this just a failed experiment then?”.

If you took some time to explore the controversy online, however, you may discover a treasure trove of interesting theories proposed by science fanatics that tr...

• This is the classic ‘weighted average’ approach and is likely what most people use to calculate averages.
• This kind of average takes into consideration the weight (or quantity) of each item group.

Both averages are perfectly valid and one may be more suitable than the other depending on the context.

Surprised? Well… the learning point here isn’t about math.

It’s about realizing how we could adopt a shift in perspective and still derive the right answer.

• In 1963 when Erasto was a student at Magamba Secondary School, he wanted to sell ice cream to earn some pocket money.
• In the urgency to prepare the ice cream quickly, he skipped the cooling phase of the preparation and placed the hot milk mixture directly into the freezer.
• ...

• Logically speaking, it makes sense that cold water freezes faster than hot water since it can skip the cooling process that the hot water needs to undergo.
• With this logic in mind, the Mpemba effect seems highly unintuitive.
• Indeed, this phenomenon has caus...

Are you more likely to receive help in a room with 3 people, or a room with 30 people? The answer may be surprising to some.

A study showed that the average person has more than 6000 thoughts every day. That is approximately 4 thoughts every minute, or 1 thought every 15 seconds.

Despite having thousands of thoughts every day, we hardly could claim ourselves to be deeply creative and innovative....

• The probability that a person in distress will be helped by a bystander is inversely proportional to the number of bystanders present.
• To put it simply, this means the more bystanders are present, the less likely someone in distress will receive hel...

Diffusion of Responsibility

• “Someone else will do it” (i.e. someone else will help the person in distress)
• In this case, the presence of others makes individuals feel less responsible to take action.
• Here, the responsibility is thought to be shared am...

Both diffusion of responsibility and social influence makes it less likely for a person to receive help in a room with 3 people than in a room with 30 people.

The Bystander Effect, a counter-intuitive theory that the more people are present, the less likely you’ll receive help, is yet anot...

Here are your TWO options:

• Get the average of the averages (i.e. average of the sum of averages in Book A, B, and C). (100 + 200 + 500) / 3 = ~267 words per book
• Get the average by dividing the total number of words by the total number of books.

• The term ‘average of the averages’ is often frowned upon by mathematicians. 
• However, in this case, the term ‘average of the averages’ is merely a disguise. The calculation of the ‘average of the averages’ actually leads to the calculation of Simple Average, a perfec...

• This strange paradox of human behavior was first formulated by psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané.
• This social psychological theory was first prompted by a dark incident where it was wrongly reported that 38 bystanders watched passively durin...

Known as the Mpemba effect, the phenomenon that hot water freezes faster than cold water was named after Erasto Mpemba.

What is the average age of 3 boys aged 10, 15, and 20? Well, you can simply add all their ages up 10 + 15 + 20 = 45 and divide it by 3 — giving you the answer of 15.