A satirical song about data science written by Dick De Veaux from Williams College that received an honorable mention in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest. The song lampoons arguments over control of the field of data science and its defining characteristics.
A 3rd-place winner in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest, “Backyard” was written, performed, and recorded in 2025 by Lawrence Mark Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso. The song takes the famous quote of John Wilder Tukey (“The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard.”) and illustrates it with a variety of statistical applications in actual backyard settings! This can help recap or preview multiple topics of a course as well as celebrate and promote the interdisciplinary nature of our field, as well as discuss how modern tools in data science have precursors in the Exploratory Data Analysis techniques developed by John Tukey.
A 3rd-place winner in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest, “College GAISE” was written, performed, and recorded in 2025 by Lawrence Mark Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso. The song describes key components of the College Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education and provides extra value for those studying the GAISE report by providing the numbered guideline referred to in each line of the song - with the numbers taken from Perrett, J. (2024). Revising the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction of Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report. Scatterplot, 1(1).
A cartoon to use in explaining how hypothesis testing typically includes a null hypothesis that nothing is going on except random chance and p-values are calculated under that assumption. The cartoon was created by Joy Reeves from the Rachel Carson Council of Duke University and took first place in the cartoon/joke category of the 2025 A-mu-sing competition.
This poem (slightly revised from its publication in the January 2013 Journal of Humanistic Mathematics) was written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. It is a vehicle to discuss equiprobability bias – the misconception that all outcomes must always be equally likely.
A haiku poem that makes a parallel of parsimony between poetry and a statistical model (imagine changing its middle line to “predictors to a model”).
The poem was written by Lawrence Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in February 2021 and published in the April 2021 Amstat News.
A piece of mathematical wordplay-based art displayed in the 2024 Bridges Exhibition of Mathematical Art, Craft, and Design (see https://gallery.bridgesmathart.org/exhibitions/bridges-2024-exhibition-o...). The lowest level of understanding the arithmetic mean (Pre-K-12 GAISE II, p. 18) is a “fair share value” -- each person’s portion if a resource were shared equally. This is also a “levelling value” corresponding to the height x of the A’s extended crossbar, and x is the mean of the 4 letters’ heights if they were .5x, .5x, 2x, x. A higher level of understanding the mean is as a “balance point,” where A’s apex is the fulcrum placed where unit weights at M and E balance two weights stacked at N: the mean of the 4 weights’ x-coordinates is the x-coordinate of the fulcrum.
This poem, written in July 2024 by Lawrence M. Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso, is in the form of a bimodal distribution, reflected in the poem’s real-world context. Before showing the poem, a teacher could first ask students to reflect on what they would expect a histogram of ages of pedestrians killed (or severely injured) to have and why (chances are some of their suggested rationale will be captured in the poem!).
Afterwards, students wanting to examine or discuss real-world evidence of such a distribution may look for data on their own, or be shown section 1.1.3 of
Roe, M., Shin, H., Ukkusuri, S., Blatt, A., Majka, K. et al. (2010), “The New York City Pedestrian Safety Study and Action Plan Technical Supplement,” New York City Department of Transportation. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nyc_ped_safety_study_action_plan_technical_supplement.pdf .
This visual poem may also inspire students to write their own short statistics poem using (and connecting to) a data set with a differently shaped distribution.
These clerihew poems (chronologically by statistician) written by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso were written in 2023 and appeared in the April 2024 Amstat News or the July 2024 Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.. Each clerihew poem takes a famous statistician and (like all clerihew poetry) starts with their name and finishes the two couplets with playful or quirky details about their career or life. Such poems could be used to humanize the class and because of the short simple form involved students could be invited to create their own about other statisticians.
This haiku collection by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso was written in 2020 and won second place in the 2021 A-mu-sing Competition. Each haiku in the collection addresses some property or real-world application of expected value that can be explored in class: the math and psychology in the structuring of an internationally syndicated game show (Deal or No Deal), tree diagrams (that students can do a calculation to verify in a realistic popular context of college basketball, showing how the EV need not correspond to the most likely outcome), an engaging probability paradox (in the context of the most popular animal Americans own as pets), the interaction with utility when making consumer decisions, a concrete visual analogy for a distribution’s expected value (inspired by Figure 2 of Martin’s July 2003 JSE article), and the concept of an estimator’s bias, and the how EV and mean express the same idea but in different contexts (random variable versus a sample, population or probability distribution).