Resource Library

In this activity, students explore calculations with simple rates and proportions, and basic time series data, in the context of news coverage of an important statistical study. From 1973 to 1995, a total of 4578 US death penalty cases went through the full course of appeals, with the result that 68% of the sentences were overturned! Reports of the study in various newspapers and magazines fueled public debate about capital punishment.

This glossary gives definitions for numerous statistical terms, concepts, methods, and rules.

Song addresses the famous probability example of Birthday Problem by contrasting the often confused events of "some people matching" with "someone matches with ME". May be sung to the tune of "Happy Birthday to You" (Mildred J. Hill and Patty Smith Hill). Originally appeared in Winter 2002 "STATS". Recorded June 26, 2009 at the OSU Whisper Room: Larry Lesser, vocals/guitar; Justin Slauson, engineer.

This FLASH based applet illustrates the sampling distribution of the mean. This applet allows the user to pick a population from over 2000 pre-defined populations. The user can then choose size of the random sample to select. The applet can produce random samples in one, 10, 100, or 1000 at a time. The resulting means are illustrated on a histogram. The histogram has an outline of the normal distribution and vertical lines at 1, 2, and 3 standard deviations. The applet can be viewed at the original site or downloaded to the instructors machine.

Joke from "The Little Black Book of Business Statistics", by Michael C. Thomsett (1990, Amacom) p. 117. also quoted in "Statistically Speaking" compiled by Carl Gaither and Alma Cavazos-Gaither.

Song includes basic vocabulary from ANOVA. May be sung to "Nowhere Man" (John Lennon, Paul McCartney)

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. This quote is generally attributed to George Box. It appears in "Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces" (Wiley 1987) p. 424 by George E.P. Box & Norman R. Draper.

This article describes data from the television game show Friend or Foe. The data can be used to determine factors affecting contestants' strategies using descriptive statistics, testing for differences in means or proportions, and regression analysis. Key Words: Discrete choice analysis.

The dataset presented in this article contains information on respiratory function and smoking. The data can be used to explore descriptive statistics, graphical analysis, regression, and observational studies. The data are in .dat format.

This dataset contains the time of birth, sex, and birth weight for 44 babies born in one 24-hour period at a hospital in Brisbane, Australia. The data can be used for studying some common distributions like the normal, binomial, geometric, Poisson, and exponential.