Resource Library

A cartoon that can be used in discussing the effect of outliers – especially on significance testing. The cartoon was used in the April, 2018 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was submitted by Debmalya Nandy, a graduate student at Penn State University.  An alternative caption that was a co-winner in that month’s contest was "Actuaries write umbrella policies to cover freak accidents" written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

A cartoon that can be a vehicle to discuss how interesting discoveries are often made by investigating outliers.The cartoon was used in the March 2018 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Jim Alloway from EMSQ Associates. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

A cartoon that can provide a nice avenue for facilitating discussions of the importance of having a plan to clean dirty/messy data.The cartoon was used in the February 2018 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Jennifer Ann Morrow from University of Tennessee. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

A cartoon that can be helpful in introducing scree plots and their interpretation in an exploratory principal components analysis to determine the number of factors to be used.  The cartoon is arendition of Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream”. The cartoon was used in the January 2019 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was submitted by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. An alternative caption: "The feeling you get when the p-value is 0.055," was submitted by Minu Bhunia, a student at University of Minnesota, and can be used in discussing the interpretation of p-values and the arbitrary nature of the 0.05 cutoff.The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

A cartoon that can be helpful in discussing how computational advances affect the processing and analysis of big data. The cartoon was used in the November 2018 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was submitted by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

A cartoon that can be a vehicle to discuss the nature of convenience samples and how they are likely to differ from probability-based samples. The cartoon was used in the January, 2018 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was submitted by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

A cartoon to provide a nice avenue for facilitating discussions of power in significance testing.The cartoon was used in the November, 2017 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by John Dawson from Texas Tech University. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

A cartoon that provides a nice avenue for facilitating discussions of the importance of modeling in making forecasts. The cartoon was used in the December, 2017 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was submitted by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

A cartoon to provide a nice avenue for facilitating discussions of planning for adequate sample sizes in experiments.The cartoon was used in the October, 2017 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Greg Snow from Grigham Young University. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

A cartoon to start a discussion on the importance of appropriate axis labels. The cartoon was used in the September, 2017 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was submitted by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University. Another caption noticed the lack of any scale on the charts read simply "Label your axes!" and was submitted by Kyle Falbo of the College of the Redwoods.  A different use of the cartoon can be made with the caption "Looks like a bad case of Regression to the Mean," which might be used in discussing that topic since the sicker patient in the cartoon is improving more.