Resource Library

A cartoon for use in discussing the issues of causation versus correlation and the assumptions underlying Structural Equations Modeling (SEM) for students who have been introduced to that technique. The idea for the cartoon came from David Lane of Rice University and the cartoon was drawn by Ben Shabad, a student at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. The cartoon was awarded a tie for first place in the cartoon category of the 2011 CAUSE A-Mu-sing competition. For for use in statistics courses at non-profit institutions.

JOpenChart is a free Java Toolkit and library for embedding charts into different kinds of applications, no matter if they are server side, desktop or web applications.

Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say. A quote by English professor William Whyte Watt (1912 - 1996) in his book "An American Rhetoric" (Rinehart and Co.; 1958 3rd edition, page 382).

It is better to be satisfied with probabilities than to demand impossibilities and starve. A quote attributed to German philosopher, poet, and dramatist Friedrich Schiller (1759 - 1805). The quote may also be found in "The New Book of Unusual Quotations" by Rudolf Flesch (Harper & Row, 1966)

Experiment is the sole source of truth. It alone can teach us something new: it alone can give us certainty. A quote from French mathematician and physicist Jules Henri Poincare (1854 - 1912) found in "The Foundations of Science", page 127, The Science Press, 1913. The quote also appears in "Statistically Speaking: A dictionary of quotations" compiled by Carl Gaither and Alma Cavazos-Gaither.

Hiawatha Designs an Experiment is a poem by English statistician Sir Maurice George Kendall (1907 - 1983). The poem can be used in teaching about the trade-off between reliability and bias found in many inference problems and in designing experiments and interpreting the results of an ANOVA. The poem was originally published in "The American Statistician" December, 1959.

Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one, a quote by French Philosopher Francois-Marie Arouet (1694 - 1778), more commonly known by his pen name Voltaire. The quote appeared in a letter to Frederick II of Prussia in 1767.

Song advocating a preference for Bayesian inferential procedures. May sing to the tune of Neil Diamond's 1966 song "I'm a Believer" made popular by the Monkees. Lyrics by Bradley Carlin (2002). Free to use for non-commercial educational purposes. Contact author to use in publications or for commercial purposes. Accompanying musical track was recorded Sunday September 16, 2002. The lyrics were written by Brad for the Valencia 7 conference, Tenerife, Spain, June 2002;and was first performed there by the Bayesian Band (Brad Carlin, Mark Glickman, and David Heckerman). The lyrics may be found in volume 37, issue 1 of "IMS Bulletin" and in the "Bayesian Songbook" (www.biostat.umn.edu/~brad/cabaret.html).

A cartoon to teach about one difficulty in conducting education research arising from problems in obtaining reliable and valid endpoints. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

A sketch by Anastasia Mandel reinterpreting Cattle by a Lake by Sidney Richard Percy (1862) with the statistical caption "A multimodal distribution with small outliers." This is part of a collection of sketches by Anastasia Mandel 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.