... statistics - whatever their mathematical sophistication and elegance - cannot make bad variables into good ones. Quoted from "Analysis of Nominal Data" by H.T. Reynolds (Sage, 1984) p. 8
A statistician's wife had twins. He was delighted. He rang the minister who was also delighted. "Bring them to church on Sunday and we'll baptize them," said the minister. "No," replied the statistician. "Baptize one. We'll keep the other as a control." This is joke number 30 on Gary Ramseyer's First Internet Gallery of Statistics Jokes at http://www.ilstu.edu/~gcramsey/Gallery.html
This website provides links to instructions for performing basic statistics such as confidence intervals, hypothesis tests, discrete distributions, linear regression, etc. for TI 83, TI 84, and TI 86 calculators.
This article provides the example of student form orders to demonstrate the unreliability of combining data from two different distributions (or subjects).
This paper presents rules for determining whether an index variable in such a table is part or whole depending on whether the associated margin value is an average, a sum or a 100% sum. Tables with missing margin values -- date-indexed tables, half tables and control tables -- are analyzed. Recommendations are made to improve reader understanding of any table involving rates or percentages.
This article discusses teaching causality without being discipline specific. It explains the causal differences between description, prediction and explanation.
This is a three day lesson plan. The first day is an introduction to concepts in probability. The second day is an application of probability in the field of genetics. The third day is a time for students to expand their understanding of probability and genetics via short research project. The site includes resources, advice, and notes to the teacher. Probability topics include: law of large numbers, simple and compound events, sample size, sample space, and more.
This Department of Energy website provides weekly average gasoline prices for several regions, states and cities. The averages are produced from a weekly survey of around 800 retail gasoline stations. The site includes information on data collection methods, survey methodology and historical data.
This article presents data for examining the ability of individuals to choose numbers randomly. Three datasets of six-tuples selected by a lottery game, generated by S-Plus, and chosen by college students can be compared using descriptive statistics and goodness of fit tests to explore bias and randomness. Key Words: Boxplots; Chi-squared tests; Minimum gap; QQ plots.
This article describes a dataset on the readability of booklets about cancer and the reading levels of patients with cancer. Students should be familiar with scales of measurement, data reduction, measuring center, constructing and interpreting displays, and reaching conclusions in real problems. Key Words: Ordinal data, Means, Medians, Histograms
