Resource Library

This poem, with an accompanying video reading of the poem by Michael A. Posner from Villanova University, took first place in the poetry category of the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest. The poem is designed to teach about word (or term) frequencies in text mining which involves thoughtful construction in defining the actual measurements to use.  Instructors might have students go over this poem and then discuss how to define what words or stems of words should be included or excluded in a different textual application.

A joke to teach the idea that the average of independent measurements are more reliable than individual measurements from the same process.  The joke should help start a discussion of the importance of the independence assumption in this idea.  The joke was written by Dennis Pearl, Penn State University and Larry Lesser, The University of Texas at El Paso in September, 2022.

An interesting sestina poem to discuss measurement scales and can also be used while discussing spurious correlations if the teacher provides a guiding question such as “What part of the poem describes the relationship between quantitative variables, rather than just descriptions of quantitative variables? Are those relationships examples of 'Spurious Correlations' (per the title of the poem)? Explain briefly."   If the students need further help, the instructor might suggest that they focus on the second to last stanza.  The was written by Jules Nyquist, the founder of Jules' Poetry Playhouse, a place for poetry and play and published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (2022) v. 12 #2 p.554.

A cartoon suitable for use in discussing the validity of indexes constructed to be relevant for a concept. The cartoon is number 1571 (August, 2015) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.

Explore the Hubble Deep Fields from a statistical point of view.  Watch out for the booby traps of bias, the vagueness of variability, and the shiftiness of sample size as we travel on a photo safari through the Hubble Deep Fields (HDFs).

This page will compute the One-Way ANOVA for up to five samples. The design can be either for independent samples or correlated samples (repeated measures or randomized blocks). This page will also perform pair-wise comparisons of sample means via the Tukey HSD test

This page will perform a two-way factorial analysis of variance for designs in which there are 2-4 levels of each of two variables, A and B, with each subject measured under each of the AxB combinations.

This applet generates a graph of the sampling distribution of sample means and displays the probabilities associated with that distribution. Users enter the mean and standard deviation of the source population and the size of the samples. The applet also calculates the standard error of the sample means.

This page will perform an analysis of variance for the situation where there are three independent variables, A, B, and C, each with two levels. The user may enter data directly or copy and paste from a spreadsheet or other application.

A joke that can be used when teaching six sigma process control ideas or chi-squared goodness-of-fit tests. The joke was written in 2013.