Data Presentation

  • This lyric was written and recorded/sung by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in 2017 to the tune of the Miley Cyrus hit “Wrecking Ball.”  The song won honorable mention in the 2019 A-mu-sing contest and is designed to be a vehicle to discuss common instances of expected value as a benchmark for making real-world decisions in one’s life. In particular, students should be aware that most people sometimes choose to buy something (an insurance policy, a warranty, a lottery ticket, etc.) whose expected value is negative, but that is still outweighed by other considerations.  The second verse refers to an episode of “Deal or No Deal” (Season 4, Episode 7) that NBC aired on October 22, 2008.

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  • A poem reflecting on the idea of standardization in statistics by Dane C Joseph from George Fox University in Oregon that earned an honorable mention in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest. In his submission for the contest Dr. Joseph indicated:
    "I wrote this poem to highlight the essential importance of standardization to some of the most basic scientific and social endeavors. Far from a perfect solution to many of the sociopolitical, educational, and technological issues we face, standardization is still immensely powerful when aptly done and is arguably indispensable to our daily lives—from making policy and admissions decisions to calibrating instruments and building machines. My hope is that learners will acquire a sense of the tension between the usefulness and appropriateness of standardization, appreciate how very simple tools like Z-scores can help us to responsibly rank various objects, as well as openly critique why they can also lead to problems when the objects to be ranked and compared are human attributes. Among other things, instructors should encourage students to explore the meaning of the contrasting big 'M' little 'm' moniker, and allusions to central tendency (e.g., C grades)."

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  • 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.

     

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  • 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. 

     

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  • A piece of mathematical wordplay-based art displayed in the 2024 Bridges Exhibition of Mathematical Art, Craft, and Design (see https://gallery.bridgesmathart.org/exhibitions/bridges-2024-exhibition-o...). The lowest level of understanding the arithmetic mean (Pre-K-12 GAISE II, p. 18) is a “fair share value” -- each person’s portion if a resource were shared equally. This is also a “levelling value” corresponding to the height x of the A’s extended crossbar, and x is the mean of the 4 letters’ heights if they were .5x, .5x, 2x, x. A higher level of understanding the mean is as a “balance point,” where A’s apex is the fulcrum placed where unit weights at M and E balance two weights stacked at N: the mean of the 4 weights’ x-coordinates is the x-coordinate of the fulcrum.

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  • 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.

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  • This haiku collection by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso was written in 2020 and won second place in the 2021 A-mu-sing Competition.  Each haiku in the collection addresses some property or real-world application of expected value that can be explored in class: the math and psychology in the structuring of an internationally syndicated game show (Deal or No Deal), tree diagrams (that students can do a calculation to verify in a realistic popular context of college basketball, showing how the EV need not correspond to the most likely outcome), an engaging probability paradox (in the context of the most popular animal Americans own as pets), the interaction with utility when making consumer decisions, a concrete visual analogy for a distribution’s expected value (inspired by Figure 2 of Martin’s July 2003 JSE article), and the concept of an estimator’s bias, and the how EV and mean express the same idea but in different contexts (random variable versus a sample, population or probability distribution). 

     

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  • A video from the 2019 US Conference On Teaching Statistics where Dennis Pearl from Penn State University is introducing the winner of that year's CAUSE/USCOTSLifetime Achievement Award in Statistics Education.  He tells a story that can be useful in teaching the lesson that linear regression is inappropriate for making predictions well outside the range of the data. The story is loosely based on the phone call he made in ordering the trophy for the award.

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  • A cartoon that  can be used in discussing how data visualizations help in thinking about the interpretation of data and stimulate critical thinking about the topic of the plot.  The cartoon was used in the March 2023 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Larry Lesser at 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.

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  • A cartoon that  can be used to introduce ideas of the bias (degree of being on target) and reliability (degree of deviation) of estimators. The cartoon was used in the February 2023 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Laurie Baker at the College of the Atlantic.  The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

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