Resource Library

A quote that could be used in discussing the idea that results of an individual experiment are random and highly variable compared with the stability of the "long run". The quote is by Native American author Mourning Dove (1884 – 1936), also known as Christal Quintasket, in her 1927 novel "Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range"

A quote that might be used in discussing how statistical models attempt to incorporate the main relevant explanatory factors and assume that small components are part of random error term. The quote is by American novelist Anne Tyler (1941 - ) and appeared in the New York Times in 2004

A quote that might be used in discussing the Law of Large Numbers. The quote is by English author and satirist Delarivier Manley (1663 – 1724) from her 1709 book "Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes."

A quote to help in discussing the ideas of sampling without replacement (and more specifically in 5-card poker games). The quote is by Canadian author Isabel Huggan (1943 - ) from her 1984 book The Elizabeth Stories.

A quote to stimulate a discussion about Bayesian estimation and the relationship between the degree of ignorance about a parameter and its probability distribution. The quote is by English novelist Mary Anne Evans (1819-1880) who wrote under the pen name George Eliot. The quote is from her 1876 novel Daniel Deronda.

A quote to motivate discussion of how knowledge builds from a base. The quote is by Austrian-American Mathematician Hilda Geiringer (1893-1973) who used it in connection to her philosophy of probability and how it should build from a firm mathematical base but be connected to real world problems. The quote is contained in her 1964 preface to Mathematical Theory of Probability and Statistics by Richard von Mises (von Mises was her husband and she wrote and compiled the book from his notes after his death).

This is an e-book tutorial for R. It is organized according to the topics usually taught in an Introductory Statistics course. Topics include: Qualitative Data; Quantitative Data; Numerical Measures; Probability Distributions; Interval Estimation; Hypothesis Testing; Type II Error; Inference about Two Populations; Goodness of Fit; Analysis of Variance; Non-parametric methods; Linear Regression; and Logistic Regression.

"Availability Heuristic" is a poem by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. The poem was originally published in the January 2017 Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. Classroom discussion the poem may spark includes comparing and contrasting mathematical and statistical roles and language for generality, looking up and discussing the meaning of the title (a phenomenon identified by Kahneman and Tversky in 1973), exploring the"someone, somewhere" idea of Utts' Seeing Through Statistics, or discussing how many people have poor intuition with the birthday problem ("probability of at least one match in the room") because they confuse it with the birthdate ("probability at least one match with ME") problem (see letters in the summer 2014 Teaching Statistics).

"A Given A" is a song that Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas of El Paso adapted from his poem "P(A|A)" that was originally published in the January 2017 Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. In addition to providing a vehicle for general discussion (about pitfalls of post hoc analysis, multiple comparisons, or confusing the direction of causation or conditioning), the song may spark particularly lively discussion with the second verse's reference to the Bible Code, popularized by Michael Drosnin's so-named books and discussed in 1994 and 1999 papers in Statistical Science.

These slides from the 2014 ICOTS workshop describe a minimal set of R commands for Introductory Statistics. Also, it describes the best way to teach them to students. There are 61 slides that start with plotting, move through modeling, and finish with randomization.