Resource Library

March 24, 2009 Activity webinar presented by Nicholas Horton, Smith College, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Otterbein College. Students have a hard time making the connection between variance and risk. To convey the connection, Foster and Stine (Being Warren Buffett: A Classroom Simulation of Risk and Wealth when Investing in the Stock Market; The American Statistician, 2006, 60:53-60) developed a classroom simulation. In the simulation, groups of students roll three colored dice that determine the success of three "investments". The simulated investments behave quite differently. The value of one remains almost constant, another drifts slowly upward, and the third climbs to extremes or plummets. As the simulation proceeds, some groups have great success with this last investment--they become the "Warren Buffetts" of the class. For most groups, however, this last investment leads to ruin because of variance in its returns. The marked difference in outcomes shows students how hard it is to separate luck from skill. The simulation also demonstrates how portfolios, weighted combinations of investments, reduce the variance. In the simulation, a mixture of two poor investments is surprisingly good. In this webinar, the activity is demonstrated along with a discussion of goals, context, background materials, class handouts, and references (extra materials available for download free of charge)

When performing a hypothesis test about the population mean, a possible reason for the failure of rejection of the null hypothesis is that there's an insufficient sample size to achieve a powerful test. Using a small data set, Minitab is used to check for normality of the data, to perform a 1-Sample t test, and to compute Power and Sample Size for 1-Sample t.

Big data analysis is explained in this online course that introduces the user to the tools Hadoop and Mapreduce. These tools allow for the parallel computing necessary to analyze large amounts of data.

A joke for discussing how transformations can make data more normal and stabilize variances across groups with different means (here the square root transformation for Poisson data). The joke was written in 2016 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso.

A joke to be used in teaching about the use of randomization in experiments or about the Pearson correlation coefficient. The idea for the joke came from Lawrence Mark Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso in 2012.

This site is a description of the mathematics behind survival analysis. It starts with a definition of the survival function. Then it discusses estimating the survival function with the Kaplan-Meier curve.  Then it discusses comparing survival curves. Finally, there is a discussion of Cox Proportional Hazards regression analysis.

This website is a summary of a randomized controlled trial of a metropolitan police department's body-worn camera program. It is useful in class to talk about the design of the experiment and also to talk about how they state their results. Their results are given as confidence intervals for differences.

Song incorporates various terms from areas such as experimental design, graphing, and hypothesis testing. May be sung to the tune of "Desperado" (The Eagles). Musical accompaniment realization are by Joshua Lintz and vocals are by Mariana Sandoval from University of Texas at El Paso.

This online booklet, Start Teaching with R, by Randall Pruim, Nicholas J. Horton, and Daniel T. Kaplan comes out of the Mosaic project. It describes how to get started teaching Statistics using R, and gives teaching tips for many ideas in the course, using R commands.

A song that can be used in discussing the standard deviation of p-hat and how to estimate it in making confidence intervals. The lyrics were written by Mary McLellan from Aledo High School in Aledo, Texas as one of several dozen songs created for her AP statistics course. The song may be sung to the tune of the 1972 hit “I Can See Clearly Now,” by Johnny Nash. Also, an accompanying video may be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a2e2O0o0lg