Even trained statisticians often fail to appreciate the extent to which statistics are vitiated by the unrecorded assumptions of their interpreters is a quote by Irish playwright George Benard Shaw (1856 - 1950). The quote may be found in the author's preface to his 1906 play "The Doctor's Dilemma", that contains an essay on his views of statistics and quantitative literacy amongst the public.
I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias. is a quote by American political satirist Stephen Tyrone Colbert (1964 - ). The quote is from a performance on April 29, 2006 at the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.
A collection of Statistics related Haikus collected by Nicholas Horton from his Math 190 (statistical Methods for Undergraduate Research) course at Smith College in Spring, 2010. These are included in the Statistics Haiku Project at http://www.math.smith.edu/~nhorton/haikustat.html
A collection of Statistics related Haikus collected by Nicholas Horton from his Math 190 (statistical Methods for Undergraduate Research) course at Smith College in Spring, 2005. These are included in the Statistics Haiku Project at http://www.math.smith.edu/~nhorton/haikustat.html
A game to aid in teaching experimental design and significance testing (especially one sample, two sample, and matched pair situations). Tangrams are puzzles in which a person is expected to place geometrically shaped pieces into a particular design. The on-line Tangram Game provides students the opportunity to design many versions of the original game in order to test which variables have the largest effect on game completion time. A full set of student and instructor materials are available and were created by Kevin Comiskey (West Point), Rod Sturdivant (Ohio State University) and Shonda Kuiper (Grinnell College) as part of the Stat2Labs collection.
This is my take on the ubiquitous M&Ms counting activity. Each student records the color proportions in a fun-size bag of M&Ms. We pool the class data and run a Chi-Square goodness-of-fit test to determine whether or not the color proportions match those claimed on the manufacturer's website. We consistently find that the proportions do not match. The blue M&Ms, in particular, are underrepresented. This activity also includes a review of the 1-proportion z confidence interval.
This activity uses student's own data to introduce bivariate relationship using hand size to predict height. Students enter their data through a real-time online database. Data from different classes are stored and accumulated in the database. This real-time database approach speeds up the data gathering process and shifts the data entry and cleansing from instructor to engaging students in the process of data production.
an old "walks into a bar" joke with a statistics twist.
A cartoon to teach about the use of placebos in experiments. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.
A cartoon to teach about the importance of blinding the researcher to which comparison group the subjects are in. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.