A song to teach about when the mean versus the median is better for describing a distribution. The lyric was authored by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. The song may be sung to the tune of Taylor Swift's Grammy-winning 2010 hit "Mean". Free for use in non-commercial teaching.
Descriptive Statistics are like Real Estate plus. They are all about location, location, location ... plus variation, variation, variation. quote from Dennis Pearl (1951 - )
A cartoon to teach basic ideas about survey sampling. The cartoon is #1271 in the web comic Piled Higher and Deeper by Panamanian cartoonist Jorge Cham (1976- ): see www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1271. It originally appeared in that series on January 20, 2010. Free for use in classrooms and course websites with acknowledgement (i.e. "Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com should be on or next to the cartoon in your display). Commercial users must contact the copyright holder for permissions.
A cartoon to help in teaching the importance of labeling the axes of a graph. The cartoon is number 833 (December 2010) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.
A fun song about the average by American humorist and singer-songwriter Carla Ulbrich. The song was a finalist in the novelty category of the 2018 USA Songwriting Competition. The song is also available at www.theacousticguitarproject.com/artist/carla-ulbrich/ and more about the singer can be found at her website at www.carlau.com. For classroom use, you might ask which lines in "Totally Average Woman" refer to ways in which the woman in the song is at the mean, and which refer to ways in which she is at the median. Permission from singer is for free use for teaching in classroom and course websites with attribution. Commercial users must contact the copyright holder.
Explore the Hubble Deep Fields from a statistical point of view. Watch out for the booby traps of bias, the vagueness of variability, and the shiftiness of sample size as we travel on a photo safari through the Hubble Deep Fields (HDFs).
This program focuses on the teamwork required to produce a successful mission and the importance of statistics in project design and management. Using the video and a hands-on lesson, students learn about statistical analysis and how people use statistics, such as mean, median, mode and range, to make decisions. Members of the Penske Racing Team and engineers from Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne help students investigate the relationship between work, energy and power as they look at race car design, the space shuttle and the International Space Station.
In this free online video program, "students will understand inference for simple linear regression, emphasizing slope, and prediction. This unit presents the two most important kinds of inference: inference about the slope of the population line and prediction of the response for a given x. Although the formulas are more complicated, the ideas are similar to t procedures for the mean sigma of a population."
In this free online video program, "students will discover how to convert the standard normal and use the standard deviation; how to use a table of areas to compute relative frequencies; how to find any percentile; and how a computer creates a normal quartile plot to determine whether a distribution is normal. Vehicle emissions standards and medical studies of cholesterol provide real-life examples."
November 23, 2010 Activity Webinar presented by Stacey Hancock, Reed College, Jennifer Noll, Portland State University, Sean Simpson, Westchester Community College, and Aaron Weinberg, Ithaca College, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. Extra materials available for download free of charge. Many instructors ask students to demonstrate the frequentist notion of probability using a simulation early in an intro stats course. Typically, the simulation involves dice or coins, which give equal (and known) probabilities. How about a simulation involving an unknown probability? This webinar discusses an experiment involving rolling (unbalanced) pigs. Since the probabilities are not equal, this experiment also allows the instructor to have students think about the concept of fairness within games.