Resource Library

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.

A sketch by Anastasia Mandel reinterpreting Fortune-Teller by Michail Vrubel (1895) with the statistical caption "It helps when other statistical techniques fail." 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.

In this video (which lasts almost 20 minutes), statistics guru Hans Rosling debunks myths about the so-called "developing world."

In earlier times they had no statistics and so they had to fall back on lies. This is a quote by Canadian economist Stephen Leacock (1869 - 1944). The quote is found on page 265 of his 1938 book "In Model Memoirs and Other Sketches from Simple to Serious"

I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk. includes the quote attributed to Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann (1903 - 1957). The full quote was relayed by Enrico Fermi in 1953 when he was asked about the value of a result that used four free parameters in fitting experimental results. (see "A meeting with Enrico Fermi" "Nature" 427: p. 297.)

Normal is the average of deviance is a quote by American writer and political activist Rita Mae Brown (1944 - ). The quote may be found on page 126 of her 1993 novel "Venus Envy", spoken by the main character Mary Frazier Armstrong.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. This is a quote by American computer scientist Alan C. Kay (1940 - ). The quote was said at a 1971 meeting of Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center.

September 22, 2009 Activity Webinar presented by Diane Evans, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. This webinar is based on an activity found at www.lhs.logan.k12.ut.us/~jsmart/tank.htm and other on-line resources (see references). During World War II, the British and U.S. statisticians used estimation methods to deduce the productivity of Germany's armament factories using serial numbers found on captured equipment, such as tanks. The tanks were numbered in a manner similar to 1, 2, 3, ..., N, and the goal of the allies was to estimate the population maximum N from their collected sample of serial numbers. The purpose of this activity is to introduce students to the concept of an unbiased estimator of a population parameter. Students develop several estimators for the parameter N and compare them by running simulations in Minitab. Extra materials available for download free of charge.