Resource Library

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. is a famous quote of English historian Sir John Dalberg-Acton (1834 - 1902). Of course, Lord Acton was not referring to statistical hypothesis testing when he made the remark in an April 1887 letter to Mandell Creighton. However, the widespread knowledge of the quote by students makes it an interesting way to cover the idea that statistical significance is not the same as practical significance.

Sampling Samba is a video that may be used to discuss and compare various methods of sampling. The methods described include random sampling, systematic sampling, stratified sampling, and cluster sampling. The video was written by Camilla Guatteri (SeeYouGee on You-Tube) and edited by Alessandro Pederzoli.

A cartoon to teach the idea that the mean of a distribution is found by integrating xf(x).

Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that. This is a quote from the cartoon character Homer Simpson created by cartoonist Matt Groening (1954 - ) in 1987. The quote occurs in an episode of "The Simpsons" entitled "Homer the Vigilante" that originally aired on January 6, 1994. This episode was written by John Swartzwelder (1950 - )

A study in the Washington Post says that women have better verbal skills than men. I just want to say to the authors of that study: 'Duh.' This a quote from American comedian and talk show host Conan O'Brien (1963 - ) delivered on his TV show "Late Night with Conan O'Brien".

;;; statistics is not a branch of mathematics. Indeed so; the whole of applied mathematics is merely a branch of statistics in which random error is reduced to zero. This a quote from Statistician and former associate director of the Census Bureau and ASA President Barbara Bailar (1935 - ). The quote is found in the January 1988 "College Mathematics Journal" as part of her written response to David Moore's article "Should Mathematicians Teach Statistics?."

This song is an ode to bad teaching in statistics written by Dennis Pearl to be sung to the tune of Roger Miller's 1965 classic country/pop tune "King of the Road." Musical accompaniment realization and vocals are by Joshua Lintz from University of Texas at El Paso.

The true method of knowledge is experiment. This is a quote of British poet and artist William Blake (1857 - 1827). The quote is found in his 1788 book "All religions are one".

In the philosophic sense, observation shows and experiment teaches. This is a quote by French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813 - 1878). The quote is from his 1865 book "An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine" as translated by Henry Greene (the first printing of this english translation was in 1927 by Macmillan).

Every careful measurement in science is always given with the probable error... every observer admits that he is likely wrong, and knows about how much wrong he is likely to be. This is a quote by Welsh Mathematician and philosopher Bertrand A.W. Russell (1872 - 1970). The quote may be found in his 1931 book "The Scientific Outlook" and is also found on the science history website www.todayinsci.com