The Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education is happy to announce our 69th Cartoon Caption Contest!  Each month a cartoon, drawn by British cartoonist John Landers, is posted for you and your students to suggest statistical captions (cartoons are posted at the beginning of the month and submissions are due at the end of the month).   The caption contest is offered as a fun way to get your students thinking independently about statistical concepts. 

The next cartoon and the entry rules for the contest ending February 28 are at  

https://www.causeweb.org/cause/caption-contest/february/2022/submissions

The best submission will be posted on CAUSEweb and the winner(s) will receive their choice of a coffee mug or t-shirt imprinted with the final cartoon or free registration for eCOTS.

Enjoy.

January Results:  The January caption contest featured children playing on a jungle-gym with a flagpole and some birds in a tree in the background.  The flagpole and the top of the jungle gym appear to form the axes of a scatterplot where the birds are the points with male (red) cardinals in a downward pattern and female (brown) cardinals in an upward pattern. The winning caption for the January contest was “Data analysis and presentation in our country should not be ‘left-wing’ or ‘right-wing’," written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso.  Larry’s caption invites conversation about the timely topic of conviction bias and the challenges that result when findings about controversial topics are presented and interpreted based on partisan beliefs.  Honorable mentions this month go to V.N. Vimal Rao, a student at University of Minnesota, for the caption “Regression trees aren't just for the birds” to discuss how relationships between variables might be expressed and communicated by classification and regression tree models.  A second honorable mention goes to Kelly Spoon from San Diego Mesa College for her caption “Combining groups in simple linear regression is for the birds!” for use in discussing how interactions are seen in a scatterplot and the problems with not incorporating that in the model.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a caption and congratulations to our winners!