This issue contains articles about Karl Pearson (150 years after his birth); finding more ways to make learning statistics fun; simulating capture-recapture sampling in Excel and by hand; common misconceptions in statistics; a correlation-based puzzler and a STAT.DOKU puzzle.
June 22, 2010 Activity webinar presented by Paul Roback, St. Olaf College and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. This webinar describes an in-class activity, motivated by Case Study 1.1.1 in The Statistical Sleuth, in which students compose haiku poems about statistics. Their poems are used to introduce two-sample t-tests and randomization tests. In addition, the in-class experiment leads to good discussion about experimental design issues, where students compare our design to the actual experiment described in Amabile et al.(1985) "Motivation and Creativity: Effects of Motivational Orientation on Creative Writers", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48(2): 393-399. I use this activity on the first day of our second course in applied statistics (Statistical Modeling), but it could easily be used in an introductory course as well. Examples of haiku poems which have resulted from this activity can be found under CAUSEweb > Resources > Fun > Poem (direct link), or at www.causeweb.org/cwis/SPT--FullRecord.php?ResourceId=1883.
This java applet can be used to determine whether or not the means in two sample populations are significantly different.
This applet performs the Student's t test on two sets of data, and reports the average and variance for both sets of data, the t score, degrees of freedom, and one and two tailed P values.