Medians by Zipcode/State Help

• We show median values of emissions. The median is typically used to represent the central tendency of a set of numbers, rather than average (technically known as the "mean"). The median of a list of numbers can be found by simply arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one (or the average of the two middle values if the list contains an even number of entries). The average is the sum of all the values in the list divided by the number of values.
• Thanks to Wikipedia, here is a practical example: Suppose 19 paupers and 1 billionaire are in a room. Everyone removes all money from their pockets and puts it on a table. Each pauper puts $5 on the table; the billionaire puts $1 billion there. The total is then $1,000,000,095. If that money is divided equally among the 20 people, each gets $50,000,004.75. This is the average amount of money that the 20 people brought into the room. But the median amount is $5, since that would be the middle value in a ranked list. In a sense, the median is the amount that the typical person brought in. By contrast, the average is not at all typical, since nobody in the room brought in an amount approximating $50,000,004.75. By using the median, extreme outlying values don't skew the result.