Resource Library

"The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information - the data - and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses." A quote by Brown University economist Emily Fair Oster (1980 - ) that can be used in discussing the use of data in decision making or in discussing the Bayesian idea of updating prior knowledge with data. The quote is contained in an August 9, 2013 essay in the Wall Street Journal written by Dr. Oster.

"Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine." A quote by Peter Sondergaard (1965 - ), senior vice president and global head of Research at Gartner, Inc. The quote may be used in discussing the importance of data and data analytics. The quote came from a speech given by Mr. Sondergaard at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in October, 2011 in Orlando, Florida.

"America is shamefully inadequate at teaching statistics. A student can travel from kindergarten to a Ph.D. without ever encountering the subject. Yet statistics are ubiquitous in life, and so should be statistical reasoning." A quote by American economist Alan S. Blinder (1945 - ) that can be used for discussing the importance of statistics and statistical reasoning. The quote appeared in the New York Times Sunday Book Review on December 27, 2103 where Dr. Blinder was commenting on the importance of "The Signal and the Noise," a popular book by statistician Nate Silver.

A song to reflect on the excitement of discovering the discipline of statistics. The song is a parody of "walking in Memphis," the 1991 hit of Grammy-winning artist Marc Cohn. The lyrics were written by Lawrence Mark Lesser of University of Texas at El Paso who first published them in the August 2014 issue of Amstat News. This song could enhance an outreach context, a general celebration of statistics, or serve to overview a statistical literacy or introductory statistics class.

A poem that can be used in discussing how to critique a research study. The poem was written in 2015 by Professor Lawrence Mark Lesser from University of Texas at El Paso.

"Failing the possibility of measuring that which you desire, the lust for measurement may, for example, merely result in your measuring something else - and perhaps forgetting the difference - or in your ignoring some things because they cannot be measured." A quote by British statistician George Udny Yule that can be used in discussing the validity of measurements. The quote is contained on the last page of his famous 1921 British Journal of Psychology paper "The essentials of mental measurement." The quote is commonly paraphrased as "In our lust for measurement, we frequently measure that which we can rather than that which we wish to measure... and forget that there is a difference."

A joke that can be used in distinguishing the difference between the probability mass function (pmf) for discrete variables and the probability density function (pdf) for continuous variables. The idea for the joke came in 2016 from Judah Lesser, an AP Statistics student from El Paso Texas.

A joke to be used in discussing the assumption of normality in using the t-distribution for inference. The Joke was written in 2016 by Judah Lesser an AP statistics student from El Paso, Texas.

This webpage provides an active learning lesson for linear regression. Resources include an in-class student activity sheet for two different levels of classes (Algebra I and Junior), a PowerPoint showing faces of famous people, and sheet with updated (to the end of current year) actual ages of the celebrities.

A poem for teaching about the Cramer-Rao lower bound on variance of estimators. The poem was written by Ming-Lun Ho, Chabot College. It won third place in the non-song category of the 2015 A-Mu-Sing competition.