ABSTRACT
A statistician, like Alfred Hitchcock, aims to reveal the shocking in seemingly ordinary data. His or her technology is a large variety of mathematical models, powerful computational devices and a wide selection of data display methods. But in the end, great statistics require great data; meaning information that many people care deeply about, that has a structure that is genuinely informative, and in a quantity that provides answers with useful precision. Data on growth of children works on all three counts; and in this chapter a Canadian statistician and a German pediatrician/auxologist team up to surprise the reader and record our own discoveries along the way.
