General

  • Lyric copyright by Matthew Finkelman
    may sing to the tune of "I Got You Babe" (Sonny Bono and Cher)

    They say that your assumptions are strong.
    You have your critics, but I know you can't be wrong.
    Well I don't know if your prior is true
    but you got me, and Bayes-ie I got you.

    Bayes, I got you Bayes, I got you Bayes . . .

    Minimize average risk.
    I can't stand frequentists.
    When the prior's bad it might let you down,
    But do not get scared Persi's always around.

    You're so easy to learn, you're so easy to see
    Unless you're taught from chapter 4 TPE
    We'll never forget you, never at all,
    at least until after we finish the quals.

  • Lyric by Armin Schwartzman
    may sing to the tune of "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (John Lennon, Paul McCartney)

    Oh yeah, I'll teach you something.
    I hope you'll understand.
    Let's start testing something
    I want to teach you Stats
    I want to teach you Stats
    I want to teach you Stats

    Oh please, say to me
    If you don't understand
    And please, don't fall asleep
    Just please raise your hand.
    Now let me see your hand,
    Come on and raise your hand.

    And when I teach you, I feel happy inside.
    It's such a feeling to feel smart
    I can't hide, I can't hide, I can't hide.

    Yeah, you, please ask something,
    How much math can you stand?
    Let's now estimate something
    I want to teach you Stats
    I want to teach you Stats
    I want to teach you Stats

  • Lyric copyright by Armin Schwartzman and Matthew Finkelman
    may sing to the tune of "Obla Di Obla Da (John Lennon, Paul McCartney)

    What proof is he doing on the board today?
    All I know is I don't understand.
    I can't read his writing, but what can I say?
    I'm much too timid and I'll never raise my hand.

    x-y-z, theta-pi, class goes on, brah!
    La-la-la-la, class goes on

    In a couple of years they have built a theory, nice theory
    with a couple of kids running in the back
    the grad students doing the work.

    Happy is the master that we call the prof.
    Long live my superior advisor
    I can't understand him, but I do my job
    I'm much too timid and I'll never say a word

    x-y-z, theta-pi grad school rocks, brah!
    La-la-la-la, grad school rocks!

    And if you want some fun, take x-y-z-mu-pi

  • Lyric copyright by Armin Schwartzman
    may sing to the tune of "Give Peace a Chance" (John Lennon)

    Everybody's talking about
    Classification, estimation, information, validation,
    Integration, derivation, expectation, deviation
    All we are saying is give Stats a chance

    Everybody's talking about
    Simulation, computation, transformation, model selection,
    linear regression, ridge regression, spline regression,
    logistic regression
    All we are saying is give Stats a chance

    Everybody's talking about
    Univariate, multivariate, distribution, convolution
    Maximizer, minimizer, analyzer, optimizer
    Databases, smoothing bases, wavelet bases,
    So amazing!
    All we are saying is give Stats a chance

  • Lyric copyright by Giles Hooker
    may sing to the tune of "American Pie" (Don McLean)

    Long long time ago,
    Ingram can still remember when
    ANOVA used to be the thing.
    Small samples were all that we had
    And of the Normal we were glad
    And we all said R.A. Fisher was our kin
    But my data would never fit,
    No matter how I transformed it.
    Significance was too low;
    I did not know where to go.
    My referees all called it "crap",
    When a thought hit me with a slap:
    "You should try out the bootstrap."
    That's how I got published.

    CHORUS (slow):
    My, my, this assumptions a lie,
    But if we bootstrap we can use it and the paper will fly.
    We'll resample and kiss the normal goodbye
    Singing "Theory is too hard for this guy".

    Well Tukey in the olden days
    Used to sing the Jack-knife's praise
    'Though no-one knew exactly what it did.
    Mann and Whitney and Signed Ranks
    Received our non-parametric thanks
    When non-normality could not be hid.
    But if the data was over-dispersed
    And transforms seemed to make it worse:
    The Chi-squared wouldn't work
    The doctors went berserk!
    But Brad told us to resample,
    A few hundred times should be ample;
    Use the histogram empirical
    We'll call that the bootstrap.

    CHORUS

    Do you know that our confidence
    Can be put in places that make sense
    Even when the distribution is unknown?
    Do you have processing power
    To run this scheme within an hour
    And find a result that's not yet been shown?
    Any applied statistician
    Will almost always say "I can!"
    What ever task you bring
    "We'll bootstrap anything."
    A distribution we can plot
    For any statistic you've got;
    You've stepped into the perfect shop
    Here's the best thing on the lot.

    CHORUS

    Twenty-five long years have come and gone
    Since Efron's idea came along
    And now you see it everywhere.
    With computers now so very fast
    Simulation is a blast
    And for all that theory we don't really care.
    Though Donoho still rails away
    At the lack of rigor found today;
    Models are complicated,
    Distributions are not stated.
    And though there is no guarantee
    That the truth is what we'll see,
    When consulting comes to me
    I'll still say "Let's bootstrap".

    CHORUS (x2: soft then fast)

  • Lyric copyright by Dennis Pearl
    may sing to the tune of "King of the Road" (Roger Miller)

    Lectures for sale or rent, fifty topics that make no sense.
    No loan - no school, I bet, I ain't got no internet.
    Ah but, two hours of pushin' chalk,
    could have been a two-minute talk.
    I'm a man of means by no means, king of the mode.

    Third moment x-bar to explain, notation to hang your brain.
    Old worn out teaching views, I don't care if students lose.
    I run old stories into the ground, short but not too profound.
    I'm a man of means by no means, king of the mode.

    I know every engineer I'm s'pose to train
    All the students but none of their names
    And every handout in every town
    And every talk that ain't a talk 'cause no-ones around
    I sing...

    Lectures for sale or rent, fifty topics that make no sense.
    No loan - no school, I bet, I ain't got no internet.
    Ah but, two hours of pushin' chalk,
    could have been a two-minute talk.
    I'm a man of means by no means, king of the mode.

  • Lyric copyright by Robert Carver
    may sing to the tune of "They Can't Take That Away from Me" (George and Ira Gershwin)

    There are many many crazy things
    That will keep me loving you
    And with your permission
    May I list a few:

    The way to fit Y-hat
    The way to test with t
    The memory of all that
    No, they can't take stat away from me.

    Oh, center, shape and spread
    The look of symmetry
    It's all within my head!
    No, they can't take stat away from me

    I may never, never build another model that I love
    But I'll always, always know the meaning of

    The bootstrap and jackknife,
    Joint probability,
    The way it changed my life!
    No, they can't take stat away from me.
    No, they can't take stat away from me.

  • Lyrics copyright Nyaradzo Mvududu
    may sing to the tune of "Imagine" (John Lennon)

    Imagine there's no Pearson
    And there's no Spearman too
    No correlation
    Whatever can we do
    Imagine all the factors
    With no way to relate

    Imagine there's no Gosset
    And z test just won't do
    'Coz sigma is a mystery
    For samples you have two
    Imagine all the difference
    Without Student's t

    People said they were dreamers
    How could variance be fun?
    I'm so glad for stats heroes
    For the world is now a better one

    Imagine there's no Fisher
    And more groups to compare
    Do not compound the error
    Probe at the sum of squares
    Imagine the assistance
    From ANOVA man

    People said they were dreamers
    How could variance be fun?
    I'm so glad for stats heroes
    For the world is now a better one

  • Lyric ©2013 by Lawrence Mark Lesser
    may sing to the tune of "We Are the Champions" (Freddy Mercury)

    I've sought my mu's time after time
    I have made errors of both kinds.
    And bad mistakes -- I've made a few:
    I've had anecdotes and bias and no control, too!
    But I went on and on and on and on
    We... are the statletes, my friend
    And we'll . . ., keep designing, with big N!
    We are the statletes, we are the statletes
    Make time for random,
    'Cause we are the statletes . . ., of the world!

  • Lyrics copyright by Rob Carver
    may be sung to the tune of "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" (Schonberg and Kretzmer)

    There's a skill that we've been teaching
    Obsolete, yet it goes on.
    Empty time with normal tables:
    Once our friends, they should be gone.
    With the software revolution,
    Are the publishers to blame?
    Extra pages in our textbooks
    Filled with tables that are lame.

    Throw those tables in the dumpster!
    We can see a course reborn:
    Students using their computers--
    I can see them now!
    The probabilities they had wrung
    From a z- tabulation,
    Add point five, or subtract
    From one.

    Oh my friends, my friends forgive me.
    We will thrive once they are gone
    There's a quicker computation
    With no pain that lingers on.
    Phantom values in the columns
    Throw those pages on the floor
    Empty time with normal tables
    Our students can learn so much more.

    Oh my friends, my friends, don't ask me
    What Appendix A was for . . .
    Empty time with normal tables
    Where our students will hunt no more . . .

Pages

register