Resource Library

This is a chapter on ethics excerpted from a book on data science. The book is “Modern Data Science with R,” and the authors are Benjamin J. Baumer, Daniel T. Kaplan, and Nicholas J. Horton. The chapter presents several ethical dilemmas, then a framework to use when evaluating ethical issues. Then it discusses the dilemmas again, now resolving them.

This site is a lesson on using SQL. It starts with a simple SELECT query. The user must type in the correct command to select certain columns from a database. Once the user has completed the first lesson, then he or she may continue to more complicated lessons.

This site is a government-run repository of information on current and completed clinical trials. Users can search for clinical trials by disease type and also by whether the trial is currently recruiting. Then a detailed description of the trial is given. This can be used in a classroom setting to discuss design issues and ethical issues with clinical trials.

This website is a summary of a randomized controlled trial of a metropolitan police department's body-worn camera program. It is useful in class to talk about the design of the experiment and also to talk about how they state their results. Their results are given as confidence intervals for differences.

A song that can be used in discussing lurking variables - unobserved variables that may drive the relationships seen in the data. The lyrics were written by Mary McLellan from Aledo High School in Aledo, Texas as one of several dozen songs created for her AP statistics course. The song may be sung to the tune of the 2013 song “Happy,” written by Pharrell Williams for the animated movie Despicable Me 2. Also, an accompanying video may be found at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWf-8_UjUyg

A song that may be used in discussing how confounding variables may provide alternate explanations for the data making causal interpretations difficult. The lyrics were written by Mary McLellan from Aledo High School in Aledo, Texas as one of several dozen songs created for her AP statistics course. The song may be sung to the tune of the mid-20th century folk song 99 Bottles of Beer. Also, an accompanying video may be found at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-daUPdUV8C4

A song that may be used in discussing the difference between cluster sampling and stratified sampling  and the value of them when you have groups known to be homogeneous for the variable under study.  The lyrics were written by Mary McLellan from Aledo High School in Aledo, Texas as one of several dozen songs created for her AP statistics course. The song may be sung to the tune of Mike Chapman and Nicky Chin’s 1979 song "Kitty", popularized by Toni Basil in her 1981 recording of the song as "Mickey". Also, an accompanying video may be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX9erSAH9WY

A cartoon to be used for discussing the advantages and disadvantages of random assignment when n is small and there are clear confounders (here the assignment might be to which product is tested first). The cartoon was used in the May 2017 CAUSE Cartoon Caption Contest. This caption was written by John Bailer from Miami University and took honorable mention in the contest. The drawing was created by British cartoonist John Landers based on an idea from Dennis Pearl of Penn State University. The winning caption in the May competition may be found at www.causeweb.org/cause/resources/fun/cartoons/product-testing-i (written by Jim Alloway of EMSQ Associates) and an honorable mention may be found at www.causeweb.org/cause/resources/fun/cartoons/product-testing-ii written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso.

A cartoon to be used for discussing the value of stratification in reducing the variability of population estimates (and the difficulty in doing so when the population weights are unknown).. The cartoon was used in the May 2017 CAUSE Cartoon Caption Contest. The winning caption was submitted by Jim Alloway of EMSQ Associates. The drawing was created by British cartoonist John Landers based on an idea from Dennis Pearl of Penn State University. Two honorable mentions that rose to the top of the judging in the May competition may be found at https://www.causeweb.org/cause/resources/fun/cartoons/product-testing-ii written by Larry Lesser from University of Texas at El Paso and at https://www.causeweb.org/cause/resources/fun/cartoons/product-testing-iii written by John Bailer from Miami University.

This tutorial on SQL teaches the most used commands. There is a short explanation, then the user is asked a simple question. If the typed answer is correct, the user continues to the next lesson.