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!