Resource Library

February 8, 2011 T&L webinar presented by Uri Treisman (Charles Dana Center, University of Texas at Austin) and hosted by Jackie Miller (The Ohio State University). Developmental education in America's community colleges has been a burial ground for the aspirations of our students seeking to improve their lives through education. Under the leadership for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Charles A. Dana Center, nineteen community colleges and systems are building accelerated pathways to and through developmental education with the goal of helping students with low levels of mathematical preparation complete a college credit bearing, transferable statistics course within one year. Uri will describe the work to date, the challenges the initiative faces, and the underlying ideas of improvement science that are driving its development.

This issue contains articles about statistics in sports, including batting average, using scatterplots to predict the winners of long-distance races, regression analysis and the NFL, determining the greatest cyclist ever, simulation in public opinion polls, and determining the "best" athletes for cycling and baseball.

Experts often possess more data than judgment. is a quote by former U.S. four-star general and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell (1937 - ). The quote is found in lesson three in the article "Quotations from Chairman Powell: A Leadership Primer" by Oren Harari originally published in 1996 in "Management Review".

This issue contains articles about binomial confidence intervals; the team effect in stock car racing; using multiple tests (one-sample t-test and sign test); the "two-envelope exchange paradox" (similar to the Monty Hall problem) with discussions of expectation, likelihood, and inference; regression line vs. trend line; calculations of standard normal table values and pi; teaching at a small liberal arts college; modeling extreme events.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. is a quote from American computer scientist Donald E. Knuth (1938 - ). The quote was written on March 22, 1977 as the last sentence of a five-page memo entitled "Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion."

This issue contains articles about steroids in baseball; finding ways to make learning statistics fun; an interview with Joan Garfield about Statistics Education; an introduction to response surface methodology; and a look at the vocabulary used in experimental design.

Although we often hear that data speak for themselves, their voices can be soft and sly. is a quote by American statistician Charles Frederick Mosteller (1916 - 2006). The quote is found on page 234 of his 1983 book "Beginning Statistics with Data Analysis".

Hot streaks are a statistical illusion! This is a quote from the cartoon character Lisa Simpson created by cartoonist Matt Groening (1954 - ) in 1987. The quote occurs in an episode of The Simpsons entitled "MoneyBART" that originally aired on October 10, 2010. This episode was written by Tim Long (1969 - ).

This issue contains articles on: The advantages and pitfalls of using online panel research, including a discussion of improving data quality and designing the survey research strategically, sequential sampling and testing in a "simple against simple" situation, including a description of Abraham Wald's historical and theoretical contributions to the theory, and R code for running simulations, and the experience and results of an exit poll conducted by two students in Washington D.C. during the 2008 presidential election.

This site contains a small collection of videos about how to use Minitab.