Resource Library

The true method of knowledge is experiment. This is a quote of British poet and artist William Blake (1857 - 1827). The quote is found in his 1788 book "All religions are one".

Every careful measurement in science is always given with the probable error... every observer admits that he is likely wrong, and knows about how much wrong he is likely to be. This is a quote by Welsh Mathematician and philosopher Bertrand A.W. Russell (1872 - 1970). The quote may be found in his 1931 book "The Scientific Outlook" and is also found on the science history website www.todayinsci.com

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer. This is a quote by German Physicist Max Planck (1858 - 1947). The quote (translated into English in the book "Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers" page 110 (1949)

This pdf text file gives a short introduction to the methods of Bayesian inference. It gives a simple example that deals with jumping a paper frog. The topics listed in this document include: An example, comparison of frequentist and Bayesian methods, credible vs. confidence intervals, choice of prior and its effect on the posterior distribution.

A series of 19 songs used to teach Structural Equations Modeling (SEM) by Alan Reifman of Texas Tech University. A video of an in-class performance of the musical on April 27, 2007, is also available at the website. The Musical took second place in the 2007 A-Mu-sing competition.

This interactive lecture activity motivates the need for sampling. "Why sample, why not just take a census?" Under time pressure, students count the number of times the letter F appears in a paragraph. The activity demonstrates that a census, even when it is easy to take, may not give accurate information. Under the time pressure measurement errors are more frequently made in the census rather than in a small sample.

A cartoon to teach about the measurement issues of bias, reliability, and validity. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

This module is designed to illustrate the effects of selection bias on the observed relationship between premarital cohabitation and later divorce. It also serves as a review of key methodological concepts introduced in the first part of the course.

This collection of datasets comes from several phases of drug research. Each dataset comes with a full description and questions to answer from the data.

A statistician's wife had twins. He was delighted. He rang the minister who was also delighted. "Bring them to church on Sunday and we'll baptize them," said the minister. "No," replied the statistician. "Baptize one. We'll keep the other as a control." This is joke number 30 on Gary Ramseyer's First Internet Gallery of Statistics Jokes at http://www.ilstu.edu/~gcramsey/Gallery.html