Resource Library

A song to be used in discussions about Confidence Intervals. The lyrics were written by Alan Reifman from Texas Tech University and may be sung to the tune of Cat Stevens 1971 hit "Moon Shadow." Musical accompaniment realization and vocals are by Joshua Lintz from University of Texas at El Paso.

A poem consisting of two quasi Haikus that can used in discussing the Cramer-Rao lower bound on the variance of a normally distributed statistic. The poem was written by Ming-Lun Ho of Chabot College and was given a third place award in the 2015 A-mu-sing contest.

A poem for teaching about the Cramer-Rao lower bound on variance of estimators. The poem was written by Ming-Lun Ho, Chabot College. It won third place in the non-song category of the 2015 A-Mu-Sing competition.

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 to use in discussing the importance of indicating the variability associated with any prediction. The cartoon is the work of Theresa McCracken and appears as #5756 on McHumor.com (appearing here with a statistics-based caption change suggested by Dennis Pearl). Free for non-profit use in statistics course such as in lectures and course websites.

No matter how much reverence is paid to anything purporting to be statistics," the term has no meaning unless the source, relevance, and truth are all checked." is a quote by American English professor Tom B. Burnam (1913-1991). The quote is found on page 244 of his 1975 book "The Dictionary of Misinformation".

Indeed, the laws of chance are just as necessary as the causal laws themselves. is a quote of quantum physicist David J. Bohm (1917- 1992). The quote appears on page 23 of his 1957 book "Causality and Chance in Modern Physics". The quote also appears in "Statistically Speaking: A dictionary of quotations" compiled by Carl Gaither and Alma Cavazos-Gaither.

A cartoon to use when talking about confidence intervals. 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.

Most real life statistical problems have one or more nonstandard features. There are no routine statistical question; only questionable statistical routines. is a quote by British Statistician Sir David R. Cox (1924 - ). The quote may be found on page 240 in Christopher Chatfield's 1991 article "Avoiding Statistical Pitfalls" in "Statistical Science".

...the most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making is a quote by English author Douglas Noel Adams (1952-2001) that can be used in teaching the importance of understanding the assumptions being made that underlie statistical inference. The quote is from the 1990 book "Last Chance to See" that was co-written with Mark Carwardine. It is part of a passage that Adams wrote about his experience watching a silverback gorilla in Zaire and trying to imagine what the animal was thinking about him.