Linear Models

A cartoon to be used for discussing the normality assumption in statistical models. The cartoon was used in the September 2016 CAUSE Cartoon Caption Contest. The winning caption was submitted by Eugenie Jackson, a student at University of Wyoming while the drawing was created by John Landers using an idea from Dennis Pearl. A second winning caption was by Amy Nowacki from Cleveland Clinic/Case Western Reserve University whose entry “The dangers of driving more than 3 standard deviations below the speed limit,” would be useful in a classroom discussion of z-scores (see "Cartoon: Pile-UP II") Honorable mentions that rose to the top of the judging in the September caption contest included “Big pile-up at percentile marker -1.96 on the bell-curve. You might want to take the chi-square curve to avoid these negative values,” written by Mickey Dunlap from University of Tennessee at Martin; “Call the nonparametric team! This is not normal!” written by Semra Kilic-Bahi of Colby-Sawyer College; “I assumed the driving conditions today would be normal!” written by John Vogt of Newman University; and “CAUTION: Z- values seem smaller than they appear. Slow down & watch for stopped traffic reading these values,” written by Kevin Schirra, a student at University of Akron.

A quote to initiate discussions of model building By British Statistician and Epidemiologist Hilda Mary Woods (1892-1971). The quote is from her paper "The influence of external factors on the mortality from pneumonia in childhood and later adult life" in the Journal of Hygiene 1927 pages 36-43 (quote is on page 42).

A short joke that might be used in discussing the common statistical model that observations follow different normal curves under different treatments. The joke was written by Lawrence Lesser from University of Texas at El Paso in 2016.