What Is An Outlier, Anyway?

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Whenever someone approaches us at a gig, the following conversation usually ensues:
 
Person: Hey, you guys are really great. Blah blah, blah blah diddy blah...
 
Outlier: Thank you.
 
Person: What's the name of your band?
 
Outlier: The Outliers.
 
Person: The what?
 
Outlier: The Outliers
 
Person: The Outliners?
 
Outlier: No, The Outliers.
 
Person: What's an Outlier?
 
Outlier: Well...
 
So, here's what an Outlier is (not that we want to appear too geeky, but):
 
An Outlier is a statistical term. It refers to observations in a distribution of data that deviates so much from the other observations as to arouse suspicions that it was generated by a different mechanism, and therefore discarding of the observations might be considered. (Here's a graphical representation of what this means.)
 
Graphical 
Representation of Outliers
 
So, how did we come to call ourselves The Outliers?
 
Well, we were sitting around after rehearsing one night trying to come up with a name for the band. We came up with all sorts of crazy things - The Logarythms 2, The Log Jam (which we actually used for a year or two), The Mississippi Log Jam, The Frogs (Four Rockin' Old Guys), Rubber Band. We just kept throwing names around, and having a miserable time doing it. As David once said, "You know, one of my least favorite pastimes is sitting around trying to name a band."
 
Well, while all this was going on, Joel and Mark were working on a particularly tricky assignment for one of our financial services clients. We were working with Dr. Richard Columbo from Fordham University on, what else, developing a system to detect outliers in financial data. Mark was spending the better part of his days on this project, living, thinking and breathing - OUTLIERS! Finally, it hit them, why not just call ourselves The Outliers? It kind of fits (we thought in self-deprecating fashion) - none of us fit into what anyone normal would describe as a "normal" distribution, so why not?
 
Of course, we never realized that everyone else (those people in the "normal" distribution) would have such a tough time understanding the name.
 
Oh well, and so it goes...
 

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