The January caption contest featured children playing on a jungle-gym with a flagpole and some birds in a tree in the background. The flagpole and the top of the jungle gym appear to form the axes of a scatterplot where the birds are the points with male (red) cardinals in a downward pattern and female (brown) cardinals in an upward pattern.
The winning caption for the January contest was “Data analysis and presentation in our country should not be ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’," written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. Larry’s caption invites conversation about the timely topic of conviction bias and the challenges that result when findings about controversial topics are presented and interpreted based on partisan beliefs.
Honorable mentions this month go to V.N. Vimal Rao, a student at University of Minnesota, for the caption “Regression trees aren't just for the birds” to discuss how relationships between variables might be expressed and communicated by classification and regression tree models. A second honorable mention goes to Kelly Spoon from San Diego Mesa College for her caption “Combining groups in simple linear regression is for the birds!” for use in discussing how interactions are seen in a scatterplot and the problems with not incorporating that in the model.