Statistical Inference & Techniques

A poem for teaching about the Cramer-Rao lower bound on variance of estimators. The poem was written by Ming-Lun Ho, Chabot College. It won third place in the non-song category of the 2015 A-Mu-Sing competition.

This is a song suitable for middle school level statistics in reinforcing key elements of the scientific method. College-level use might include playing before a lecture to lighten the mood while setting up. The song's lyrics and music were composed by Jeff Hall audio file is a performance by the scientific jam band (see www.scientificjam.com/scijam2.htm)

Everyone believes in the normal law, the experimenters because they imagine that it is a mathematical theorem, and the mathematicians because they think it is an experimental fact. is a quote by French physicist Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann (1945-1921). The quote may used in a class discussion of the assumption of normality. It can be found in Henri Poincare's 1896 book "Calcul de Probabilities" (in French).

There is no free hunch. is quote by American psychologist and political scientist Robert P. Abelson (1928 - 2005). The quote is found on page 142 of his 1995 book "Statistics as a Principled Argument". It is referred to as "Abelson's Sixth Law" in a discussion of the generalizability of estimated effects.