A song to help students confront the "equiprobability bias". Lyrics and music were written by Lawrence Mark Lesser of University of Texas at El Paso. The song won an honorable mention in the 2013 CAUSE A-Mu-sing competition. Free for use in non-profit education settings.
A song to teach about Benford's Law for the probability distribution of first digits in real data. The lyrics are copyright by Lawrence Mark Lesser as a parody of Harry Nilsson's "One" made popular in 1969 by "Three Dog Night". "One is the Likeliest Number" was first published in the Spring 2011 issue of "Teaching Statistics". Free for use in non-profit education settings. Musical accompaniment realization and vocals are by Joshua Lintz from University of Texas at El Paso.
A cartoon for use in celebrations of Random Acts of Kindness Day which is an unofficial holiday in many countries typically celebrated in February. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on the suggested illustrating text and concept from Larry Lesser (The University of Texas at El Paso). The cartoon was first displayed on the website http://www.worldofstatistics.org on Random Acts of Kindness day in February 2014. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites or other non-profit teaching uses.
There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe. is a quote by American Science fiction writer Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988). The quote appears at the begiining of section 2 of his 1958 serialized novel "Have Space Suit - Will Travel".
This is a lesson plan for 16 to 17 year old students that focuses on developing students' understanding of the relative strengths and weaknesses of various representations of real world univariate statistics. Students work in groups to research different visual representations and create a wiki page of their findings.
This simulation illustrates least squares regression and how the least squares solution minimizes the sum of the squared residuals. The applet demonstrates, in a visual manner, various concepts related to least squares regression. These include residuals, sum of squares, the mean line, how the line of best fit is determined, and how the line of least squares solution minimizes the sum of the squared residuals.
A collection of Statistics related Haikus collected by Nicholas Horton from his Math 190 (statistical Methods for Undergraduate Research) course at Smith College in Spring, 2010. These are included in the Statistics Haiku Project at http://www.math.smith.edu/~nhorton/haikustat.html
A cartoon suitable for use in teaching the difference between how the word random is used in probability compared to some uses in everyday parlance. The cartoon is number 1210 (May, 2013) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license
A joke to use when teaching about choices of binary response data models like the Logistic or Probit models by University of Texas at El Paso professor of Mathematical Sciences, Lawrence Mark Lesser (1964-).