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 her 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!