Resource Library

At their best, graphics are instruments for reasoning about quantitative information. is a quote by American statistician and political scientist Edward R. Tufte (1942 - ). The quote appears on page 9 of Tufte's 1983 book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information".

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.

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.

The same set of statistics can produce opposite conclusions at different levels of aggregation. is a quote useful in teaching about Simpson's Paradox from American Economist Thomas Sowell (1930 - ). The quote may be found on page 102 of his 1996 book "The vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy". The quote may also be found at the science history website www.todayinsci.com.

This applet shows a scatterplot of height versus foot length. Users can add or delete points and then guess the regression line by clicking "Your Line" and moving the blue regression line. By clicking "Regression Line" users can see the actual regression line. The applet also shows the correlation and R-square for the data as well as the residuals and squared residuals for the guessed regression line and the actual regression line.

This applet generates a histogram for two provided datasets, or by clicking "Edit Data", users can input their own data. Users can also manipulate the axes and bin width.

Research has shown that marital status and employment are correlates of desistance. That is, adolescents involved with crime were more likely to discontinue offending in adulthood if they were married and had a good job. Most of what criminologists know about the process of desistance from crime is based on a sample of adult males in the 1950's. There is no question that life in America has changed drastically in the past fifty years. Given the importance of examining historical change inherent in the life course perspective, it is important to determine how changes in the social structure over time impact individuals. Therefore, the goals of this data analysis exercise are to examine changes in marriage and employment over the last fifty years. The purposes are to identify the changes that have taken place, and to hypothesize how these changes may affect the process of desistance from crime today.

This module provides an activity were students will attempt to explain how each of the following variables is related to child poverty within the United States: Race, Age, Family Type, Family Size, and Immigrant Status.

This collection of datasets covers many application areas, but are all for time series analysis. The data are in text format.

This module is designed to illustrate the effects of selection bias on the observed relationship between premarital cohabitation and later divorce. It also serves as a review of key methodological concepts introduced in the first part of the course.