Resource Library

Lyrics by John Bailer from Miami University about the value of successful statistical modeling that won an honorable mention in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest. The song is a parody of the 1972 hit song by Johnny Nash "I Can see Clearly Now" and the vocals on the audio were performed by Kent Peterson from Oxford Presbyterian Church in Miami Ohio.  In using the song for teaching, John suggests that each verse could be connected to a question or two.  Here are examples:

Verse 1:  How does an effective visualization reveal pattern? What types of patterns might emerge? How might such patterns be captured in a model?

Verse 2: What are ways variables are 'engineered' as part of an analysis?

Verse 3: How does the introduction of a confounder in a model potentially impact the estimated coefficients of other variables in a model?

Verse 4: AUC* is one way the predictive quality of a model is described. What are other features of a useful model?

* AUC stands for Area Under the Curve for the Receiver Operator Characteristic

Bridge:  Residuals following a normal distribution are expected for some types of models. What other distributions might be expected? What else might be learned from the residuals?

Verse 5: Why are we more confident with interpolations than extrapolations?

A satirical song about data science written by Dick De Veaux from Williams College that received an honorable mention in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest. The song lampoons arguments over control of the field of data science and its defining characteristics.

"P-value's More than Alpha" is a music video by David Yew, an undergraduate student at Singapore Management University, that reviews introductory normal theory testing.  The music is a fun parody of Billy Joel's 1989 hit song "We Didn't Start the Fire" and took second place in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest. David also credits his statistics instructor, Rosie Ching, for providing feedback.

A 3rd-place winner in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest, “Backyard” was written, performed, and recorded in 2025 by Lawrence Mark Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso.  The song takes the famous quote of John Wilder Tukey (“The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard.”) and illustrates it with a variety of statistical applications in actual backyard settings!   This can help recap or preview multiple topics of a course as well as celebrate and promote the interdisciplinary nature of our field, as well as discuss how modern tools in data science have precursors in the Exploratory Data Analysis techniques developed by John Tukey.

A cartoon to use in explaining how hypothesis testing typically includes a null hypothesis that nothing is going on except random chance and p-values are calculated under that assumption.  The cartoon was created by Joy Reeves from the Rachel Carson Council of Duke University and took first place in the cartoon/joke category of the 2025 A-mu-sing competition.

This poem (slightly revised from its publication in the January 2013 Journal of Humanistic Mathematics) was written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso.  It is a vehicle to discuss equiprobability bias – the misconception that all outcomes must always be equally likely.

A haiku poem that makes a parallel of parsimony between poetry and a statistical model (imagine changing its middle line to “predictors to a model”).  

The poem was written by Lawrence Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in February 2021 and published in the April 2021 Amstat News. 

A haiku poem written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso to spark discussion about multivariable thinking and confounding variables, which are a major emphasis of the 2016 GAISE College Report.  The poem is part of a collection of 8 poems published with commentary in the January 2020 issue of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

This poem, written in July 2024 by Lawrence M. Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso, is in the form of a bimodal distribution, reflected in the poem’s real-world context.  Before showing the poem, a teacher could first ask students to reflect on what they would expect a histogram of ages of pedestrians killed (or severely injured) to have and why (chances are some of their suggested rationale will  be captured in the poem!).

Afterwards, students wanting to examine or discuss real-world evidence of such a distribution may look for data on their own, or be shown section 1.1.3 of 

Roe, M., Shin, H., Ukkusuri, S., Blatt, A., Majka, K. et al. (2010), “The New York City Pedestrian Safety Study and Action Plan Technical Supplement,” New York City Department of Transportation. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nyc_ped_safety_study_action_plan_technical_supplement.pdf . 

This visual poem may also inspire students to write their own short statistics poem using (and connecting to) a data set with a differently shaped distribution.

These clerihew poems (chronologically by statistician) written by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso were written in 2023 and appeared in the April 2024 Amstat News or the July 2024 Journal of Humanistic Mathematics..  Each clerihew poem takes a famous statistician and (like all clerihew poetry) starts with their name and finishes the two couplets with playful or quirky details about their career or life.  Such poems could be used to humanize the class and because of the short simple form involved students could be invited to create their own about other statisticians.