Resource Library

...making an appeal to the eye when proportion and magnitude are concerned, is the best and readiest method of conveying a distinct idea. is a quote by Scottish political economist William Playfair (1759 - 1823) often credited as the originator of statistical graphics. The quote is found in the preface to his 1801 book "The Statistical Breviary: Shewing, on a Principle Entirely New, The Resources of Every State and Kingdom in Europe" (the book where he introduced the piechart)

There is a magic in graphs. The profile of a curve reveals in a flash a whole situation - the life history of an epidemic, a panic, or an era of prosperity. The curve informs the mind, awakens the imagination, convinces. is a quote by Henry David Hubbard (1870-1943) who was the first secretary of the National Bureau of Standards; serving from 1901 to 1938. The quote appears in his introduction to the 1939 book "Graphic Presentation" by William Brinton. The entire one-page essay by Mr. Hubbard is an outstanding description of the value of graphical displays and can be found at http://www.archive.org/stream/graphicpresentat00brinrich#page/2/mode/1up

The conception of chance enters in the very first steps of scientific activity in virtue of the fact that no observation is absolutely correct. I think chance is a more fundamental conception that causality; for whether in a concrete case, a cause-effect relation holds or not can only be judged by applying the laws of chance to the observation. is a quote by German and British nobel prize winning physicist Max Born (1882 - 1970). The quote appears in his 1949 book "Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance" published by Clarendon Press.

The WISE Bootstrapping Applet can be used to demonstrate bootstrapping by creating a confidence interval for a population mean or median. The user can manipulate the population distribution, sample size, and number of resamples. An associated guide gives suggestions for teaching bootstrapping.

A cartoon for use in discussing outliers. The cartoon is by New Zealand cartoonist Nick Kim (see www.lab-initio.com). This copyrighted cartoon is available for free use in classes and on course webistes at non-profit educational institutions. Commercial inquiries should be directed to the artist (e-mail:nick@lab-initio.com).

A cartoon for use in discussing Uniformly Most Powerful Tests. 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 cartoon to use in teaching about the dangers of extrapolation in the context of predicting the future. 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.

An animated video for use in a biostatistics or consulting class to spark a discussion about collaborative research. The animation was created using the free software available at www.xtranormal.com and distributed here with permission for non-profit use by statistics teachers in their classes or course websites. The script for the animation was written August 4, 2010 by xtranormal user "JosiesJavaMoma". Requests for commercial use should be directed to xtranormal.com

This site includes several short tutorials that showcase different features of JMP 7. There is also another site with JMP tutorials at http://stat.fsu.edu/tutorials/

This issue contains articles about steroids in baseball; finding ways to make learning statistics fun; an interview with Joan Garfield about Statistics Education; an introduction to response surface methodology; and a look at the vocabulary used in experimental design.