Resource Library

Hot streaks are a statistical illusion! This is a quote from the cartoon character Lisa Simpson created by cartoonist Matt Groening (1954 - ) in 1987. The quote occurs in an episode of The Simpsons entitled "MoneyBART" that originally aired on October 10, 2010. This episode was written by Tim Long (1969 - ).

I am not surely always in the wrong; 'Tis hard if all is false that I advance, A fool must now and then be right by chance. is a quote from English poet William Cowper (1731 - 1800. The quote comes from three lines in his 1782 poem "Conversation."

Although we often hear that data speak for themselves, their voices can be soft and sly. is a quote by American statistician Charles Frederick Mosteller (1916 - 2006). The quote is found on page 234 of his 1983 book "Beginning Statistics with Data Analysis".

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. is a quote from American computer scientist Donald E. Knuth (1938 - ). The quote was written on March 22, 1977 as the last sentence of a five-page memo entitled "Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion."

Experts often possess more data than judgment. is a quote by former U.S. four-star general and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell (1937 - ). The quote is found in lesson three in the article "Quotations from Chairman Powell: A Leadership Primer" by Oren Harari originally published in 1996 in "Management Review".

February 8, 2011 T&L webinar presented by Uri Treisman (Charles Dana Center, University of Texas at Austin) and hosted by Jackie Miller (The Ohio State University). Developmental education in America's community colleges has been a burial ground for the aspirations of our students seeking to improve their lives through education. Under the leadership for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Charles A. Dana Center, nineteen community colleges and systems are building accelerated pathways to and through developmental education with the goal of helping students with low levels of mathematical preparation complete a college credit bearing, transferable statistics course within one year. Uri will describe the work to date, the challenges the initiative faces, and the underlying ideas of improvement science that are driving its development.

This issue contains an interview with Sallie Keller-McNulty and an article about which came first -- the chicken or the egg. Other articles include a discussion related to an AP Statistics example of seeing the trees for the forest (this focuses on understanding variability between groups and within groups), a discussion of how high r can go, a simulation piece focused on shrinking students, poisoned children, and bootsraps, and an example of a permutation test of the Challenger O-Ring data.

This issue contains an article that provides an example of a paired samples test related to flying and gliding. It also includes an article about understanding confounding from lurking variables using graphs. Other articles include: a short description about what the t-tests actually tests, an interview with David Moore about why 30 is the "magic" number, a discussion about whether or not outliers should be deleted from a data set, a discussion of observational studies, and a simulation piece about random numbers from non-random arithmetic.

July 13, 2010 T&L webinar presented by Webster West (Texas A&M University) and hosted by Jackie Miller(The Ohio State University). In introductory statistics courses, web-based applets are often used to visually conduct large simulation studies illustrating statistical concepts. However, it is difficult to determine what (if anything) students learn from repeatedly pressing a button when using applets. More advanced options such as writing/running computer code are typically considered to be much too advanced for most introductory courses. The web-based software package, StatCrunch, now offers simulation capabilities that strike a middle ground between these two extremes. The instructor/student needs only to perform a small number of steps using the menu driven interface with each step being key to understanding the underlying data structure. This talk will cover the steps required to study concepts such as the central limit theorem, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and regression using StatCrunch.

A cartoon for use by teachers of night statistics classes. The cartoon is the work of Theresa McCracken and appears as #7178 on McHumor.com Free for non-profit use in statistics course such as in lectures and course websites.