Resource Library

An honorable mention winner in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest, “Bell Curve Areas” was written in 2024 by Lawrence Mark Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso to give students a rough but aesthetically concise mnemonic (it “rings a bell”) for accessing approximate fractions of area under a bell curve between successive whole-number z-scores.  (Students can use an applet or table to assess and discuss how good the approximation is, comparing the poem’s numbers of .3333, .1250, and .0200 to .3413, .1359, and .0214, for the normal distribution respectively.)  More important than the convenience of a first-order assessment of answer reasonableness, this poem could be used to inform class discussions about confidence intervals because students often initially have the misconception that confidence is spread evenly throughout a confidence interval and the poem helps them realize there's more confidence closer to the estimate (since they'd know that 1/3 is much bigger than 1/8 which is much bigger than two percent. Finally, the final line of the poem recalls the common rule of thumb that a z-score greater than 3 is an outlier, as well as offering a vehicle to discuss hypothesis testing.

A poem reflecting on Type I errors and the use of the null hypothesis in testing by Micah Wascher, a high school student at North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.  The poem won an honorable mention in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest. 

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 3^rd-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.