The CAUSE Cartoon Caption Contest for October is now taking entries
The Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education is happy to
announce our fifth Cartoon Caption Contest. Each month a cartoon, drawn by British
cartoonist John Landers, will be posted for you and your students to suggest statistical
captions.
The next cartoon and the entry rules for the contest ending October 1 are at
https://www.causeweb.org/cause/caption-contest/october/2016/submissions
The best captions will be posted on CAUSEweb and the winner(s) will receive their choice
of a coffee mug or t-shirt imprinted with the cartoon or free registration to eCOTS 2018.
Enjoy.
September Results: We had 56 submissions for the September caption contest that featured a
cartoon showing a crash scene on a rural road with an upcoming curve that looked
bell-shaped. The September caption contest had two co-winners. Eugenie Jackson, a student
at University of Wyoming, won with his entry “Even a crash course in model-fitting will
need to consider distributions other than normal.” Eugenie’s caption was selected for its
clever play on words and being well suited for starting a conversation about the normality
assumption in statistical models. Our second winner was Amy Nowacki from Cleveland
Clinic/Case Western Reserve University whose entry “The dangers of driving more than 3
standard deviations below the speed limit,” would be useful in a classroom discussion of
z-scores. Other honorable mentions that rose to the top of the judging included “Big
pile-up at percentile marker -1.96 on the bell-curve. You might want to take the
chi-square curve to avoid these negative values,” written by Mickey Dunlap from University
of Tennessee at Martin; “Call the nonparametric team! This is not normal!” written by
Semra Kilic-Bahi of Colby-Sawyer College; “I assumed the driving conditions today would be
normal!” written by John Vogt of Newman University; and “CAUTION: Z- values seem smaller
than they appear. Slow down & watch for stopped traffic reading these values,” written
by Kevin Schirra, a student at University of Akron.
Thanks to everyone who submitted a caption and congratulations to all of our Winners!