The Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education is happy to announce our 53rd Cartoon Caption Contest – now ongoing every month for over four years! 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 October 31 are at
https://www.causeweb.org/cause/caption-contest/october/2020/submissions
The best captions will be posted on CAUSEweb and the winner(s) will receive their choice of a coffee mug or t-shirt imprinted with the cartoon and their caption.
Enjoy.
September Results: There were 16 entries for the September caption contest that featured a cartoon showing a man taking part in a virtual meeting with a diverse group of people. At the bottom of the screen it says “Mean = 37.5 Standard Deviation = 73.3.” The winning caption for the September contest was “With CV around 2, Zoom meetings have high variation!” Written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. Larry’s caption is a nice way to introduce the Coefficient of Variation as a measure of relative variability in this era of virtual meetings. An honorable mention goes to Joe Nolan from Northern Kentucky University for the caption "Diversity is such an important concept that a mean and standard deviation simply can't do it justice." that can be used in general discussions about quantifying concepts such as diversity into valid measurements. A second honorable mention goes to Michael Drozin from The University of Akron for his caption “Hmm, I see this semester's students aren't the Normal type.” to use in discussing the idea that most distributions do not follow the normal curve.
Thanks to everyone who submitted a caption and congratulations to our winners!