Resource Library

Hot streaks are a statistical illusion! This is a quote from the cartoon character Lisa Simpson created by cartoonist Matt Groening (1954 - ) in 1987. The quote occurs in an episode of The Simpsons entitled "MoneyBART" that originally aired on October 10, 2010. This episode was written by Tim Long (1969 - ).

I am not surely always in the wrong; 'Tis hard if all is false that I advance, A fool must now and then be right by chance. is a quote from English poet William Cowper (1731 - 1800. The quote comes from three lines in his 1782 poem "Conversation."

Although we often hear that data speak for themselves, their voices can be soft and sly. is a quote by American statistician Charles Frederick Mosteller (1916 - 2006). The quote is found on page 234 of his 1983 book "Beginning Statistics with Data Analysis".

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. is a quote from American computer scientist Donald E. Knuth (1938 - ). The quote was written on March 22, 1977 as the last sentence of a five-page memo entitled "Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion."

January 11, 2011 T&L webinar presented by Rakhee Patel(University of California - Los Angeles, UCLA) and hosted by Jackie Miller (The Ohio State University). Since formal hypothesis testing and inference methods can be a challenging topic for students to tackle, introducing informal inference early in a course is a useful way of helping students understand the concept of a null distribution and how to make decisions about whether to reject it. We will present two computer labs, both using Fathom, that illustrate these concepts using permutation in a setting where students will be answering interesting investigative questions with real data.

...the most misleading assumptions are the ones you don't even know you're making is a quote by English author Douglas Noel Adams (1952-2001) that can be used in teaching the importance of understanding the assumptions being made that underlie statistical inference. The quote is from the 1990 book "Last Chance to See" that was co-written with Mark Carwardine. It is part of a passage that Adams wrote about his experience watching a silverback gorilla in Zaire and trying to imagine what the animal was thinking about him.

A joke that might be used in discussing correlation - especially in health studies. The joke is adapted from a joke told by comedic magician Omar Covarrubias. The revised joke was written by Larry Lesser, University of Texas at El Paso, for use in the statistics classroom.

Every time man makes a new experiment he always learns more. He cannot learn less. is a quote of American inventor and author Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983). The quote appears in his 1963 book "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth".

This issue contains an interview with Sallie Keller-McNulty and an article about which came first -- the chicken or the egg. Other articles include a discussion related to an AP Statistics example of seeing the trees for the forest (this focuses on understanding variability between groups and within groups), a discussion of how high r can go, a simulation piece focused on shrinking students, poisoned children, and bootsraps, and an example of a permutation test of the Challenger O-Ring data.

This issue contains an article that provides an example of a paired samples test related to flying and gliding. It also includes an article about understanding confounding from lurking variables using graphs. Other articles include: a short description about what the t-tests actually tests, an interview with David Moore about why 30 is the "magic" number, a discussion about whether or not outliers should be deleted from a data set, a discussion of observational studies, and a simulation piece about random numbers from non-random arithmetic.