Fun

  • "WON OVeR" is a poem by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. The poem was written in 2022 and originally published in the January 2023 Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.  The poem highlights the unexpected occurrence of the constant 1/e in two classic probability problems:  “secretary problem”/”marriage problem” and “hats derangement problem”.  The poem could be used either to motivate students to learn about those particular problems or to cap things off after working through them.  

     

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  • A joke to teach the idea that the average of independent measurements are more reliable than individual measurements from the same process.  The joke should help start a discussion of the importance of the independence assumption in this idea.  The joke was written by Dennis Pearl, Penn State University and Larry Lesser, The University of Texas at El Paso in September, 2022.

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  • An interesting sestina poem to discuss measurement scales and can also be used while discussing spurious correlations if the teacher provides a guiding question such as “What part of the poem describes the relationship between quantitative variables, rather than just descriptions of quantitative variables? Are those relationships examples of 'Spurious Correlations' (per the title of the poem)? Explain briefly."   If the students need further help, the instructor might suggest that they focus on the second to last stanza.  The was written by Jules Nyquist, the founder of Jules' Poetry Playhouse, a place for poetry and play and published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (2022) v. 12 #2 p.554.

     

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  • A climate change related poem describing the numerous record temperature values being set (expressing that as unusual under a model of no overall warming but the norm in reality).  The poem was written by author with pen name Anubis the Philosomancer in July 2013 and posted on the poetry website hello poetry.com

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  • A joke relating the voting preferences of certain states with the shape of a map of the states (i.e. the shape they take if viewed as a histogram).  The joke was written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso.

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  • A song to discuss how a confidence interval made for a population parameter will be biased if the sample is biased (e.g. starting with a random sample of n=100 but then having individuals drop out one at a time based on a non-ignorable reason).  The song was written IN MARCH 2019 by Lawrence Lesser, The University of Texas at El Paso, and Dennis Pearl, Penn State University, using the mid-20th century recursive folk song "99 Bottles of Beer." The idea for the song came from an article by Donald Byrd of University of Indiana in the September 2010 issue of Math Horizons where he suggested using the song for various learning objectives in Mathematics Education.

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  • A poem generally celebrating statistics.  The poem was written by Sally Maughan and was chosen as the winner of an online contest seeking a Pi-Ku in the online mathematics education journal Aperiodical in 2020. A "Pi-ku" is like a Haiku except, instead of a 5-7-5 structure, it uses a 3-1-4 structure (the first three digits of π. 

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  • A song to be used in discussing the value of visualizations in telling a data story along with the importance of using "clean" data in doing so.   The lyrics were written by Dennis K Pearl from Penn State University in July, 2022.  May be sung to the tune of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" written by Paul McCartney and released by the Beatles in 1969.

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  • This limerick was written April 2021 by Larry Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso to be used as a vehicle for discussing probabilities and expected values involved in playing a typical pari-mutuel lottery.  The limerick was also published in the June 2021 issue of AmStat News.

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  • This limerick was written in April 2021 by Larry Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso to be used as a vehicle for​ discussing the issues and pitfalls of using .05 as a bright-line threshold for declaring statistical significance, in light of ASA recommendations.  The poe was also published in the June 2021 AmStat News.

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