Resource Library

August 25, 2009 Activity webinar presented by Michelle Everson, University of Minnesota and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. In a classroom setting, students can engage in hands-on activities in order to better understand certain concepts and ideas. Replicating hands-on activities in an online environment, however, can be a challenge for instructors. The purpose of this webinar is to present an applet that was created to replicate a "Post-it Note" activity commonly used in classroom sections of an undergraduate introductory statistics course at University of Minnesota. The Post-it Note activity is meant to help students develop a more conceptual understanding of the mean and the median by moving a set of Post-it Notes along a number line. During the webinar, participants have an opportunity to see and experience just how online students are able to interact with an applet named the "Sticky Centers" applet, and the webinar presents the kinds of materials and assignments that have been created to use in conjunction with this applet. The webinar ends with a preview of a newer applet that is being developed in order to replicate the famous "Gummy Bears in Space" activity (presented in Schaeffer, Gnanadesikan, Watkins & Witmer, 1996). A supplemental student handout is available for download free of charge.

A cartoon to teach the idea that averages are less variable than individual values. The cartoon is free for use on course websites or in the classroom. Commercial uses must contact the copyright holder - British cartoonist John Landers (cartoons@landers.co.uk) who drew this cartoon based on an idea from Dennis Pearl.

...no good statistician existed unless he, or she, had been so involved in practical experimentation that they appreciated and understood the problems of the experimenter, the process worker, the farmer and the laboratory assistant. is a quote of British applied statistician Stella V. Cunliffe (1917 - 2012). The quote comes from her Presidential address on November 12, 1975 to the Royal Statistical Society (she was the first women to hold the position). The full presentation can be found in "JRSS series A" vol 139 p. 1-19 and contains many interesting examples from her years working at Guiness Brewery and for the government at the Home Office.

Care must be taken in planning experiments so that the differences to be examined for significance should be those which furnish an answer to the question which we are asking. is a quote from British statistician William Sealy Gosset (a.k.a. Student: 1876 - 1937). The quote appears in a 1931 letter to "Biometrika" in which he was addressing some criticism of his work by Karl Pearson.

... one of the main functions of an analogy or model is to suggest extensions of the theory by considering extensions of the analogy, since more is known about the analogy than is known about the subject matter of the theory itself. is a quote by English science philosopher Mary B. Hesse. The quote is found in her 1952 paper "Operational Definition and Analogy in Physical Theories" "British Journal for the Philosophy of Science" (1952).

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer. This is a quote by German Physicist Max Planck (1858 - 1947). The quote (translated into English in the book "Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers" page 110 (1949)

..the goal is to transform data into information, and information into insight is a quote by American businesswoman Carly Fiorina (1954 - ). The quote was from a December 6, 2004 speech to the Oracle OpenWorld meeting in San Francisco while she was the CEO of Hewlett Packard.

Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist. This is a quote by American author George Vincent Higgins (1939 - 1999). The quote was printed in "The Guardian" on June 17, 1988.

A movie frame given the statistical caption "Kolmogorov-Smirnov test: many think its still the best, especially for a non-parametric mood." This is part of a collection of statistical captions to accompany art work written by Stan Lipovetsky and Igor Mandel that took first place in the cartoon & art category of the 2009 A-Mu-sing contest sponsored by CAUSE. The collection and their accompanying statistical captions discussed in the paper "How art helps to understand statistics" (Model Assisted Statistics and Applications, 2009) by Stan Lipovetsky and Igor Mandel in volume 4 pages 313-324. The still shot came from the 1959 movie "Our Man in Havana" starring Alec Guinness and Ernie Kovacs. Free to use in classrooms and on course websites.

A sketch by Anastasia Mandel reinterpreting "The Dead Poet Borne by a Centaur" by Gustave Moreau (c. 1890) with the statistical caption "Mixed model: a centaur may yield only mixed results." This is part of a collection of sketches by Anastasia Mandel and their accompanying statistical captions written by Stan Lipovetsky and Igor Mandel that took first place in the cartoon & art category of the 2009 A-Mu-sing contest sponsored by CAUSE. The collection and their accompanying statistical captions discussed in the paper "How art helps to understand statistics" (Model Assisted Statistics and Applications, 2009) by Stan Lipovetsky and Igor Mandel in volume 4 pages 313-324. Free to use in classrooms and on course websites.