Data Presentation

The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself is a quote attributed to former British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965). However scholars at the Churchill Centre (www.winstonchurchill.org) can not find this quote in any of Winston Churchill's books, articles, or speeches.

This laboratory introduces students to the basics of the Minitab software. Students make use of a basic example (water consumption and temperature) to introduce students to manipulation of data, calculation of descriptive statistics, creation of histograms, boxplots and scatterplots. Students are asked to hand in the results they have produced. Accompanying documents give model solutions.

In this free online video program, "students will advance from histograms through smooth curves to normal curves, and finally to a single normal curve for standardized measurement, as this program shows ways to describe the shape of a distribution using progressively simpler methods. In a lesson on creating a density curve, students also learn why, under steadily decreasing deviation, today's baseball players are less likely to achieve a .400 batting average." This individual video is accessed by scrolling down to the "Individual Program Descriptions - 4. Normal Distributions" and click the "VOD" icon at the top-right of the description.