This cartoon caption is a funny way to start a conversation about the difference between a regression fit and a line plot and the type of data involved. The cartoon was used in the August 2023 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Javier Lopez, a student at Penn State University. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.
This cartoon caption is a good reminder that graphical presentations are more readily digested by viewers than mere statistical summaries. The cartoon was used in the July 2023 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Carolyn Showalter from Ocean County College. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.
This cartoon caption is a good reminder that the 0’s and 1’s underlying the computational aspects of Data Science helps to transform data into useful knowledge. The cartoon was used in the June 2023 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Julie Skokie from North Broward Preparatory School. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.
This cartoon caption is a good reminder that graphics can convey a more convincing and realistic view of what data are telling us than merely presenting numerical or tabular results. The cartoon was used in the May 2023 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Jim Alloway from EMSQ Associates. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.
This music video describing the meaning/interpretation of an influential point in a regression analysis was created by Mary McLellan, a teacher at Aledo High School in Texas, who wrote the lyric and performed and produced the video. The song is sung to the tune of the 1978 song “You’re the one that I want” from the movie Grease. The song was part of a pair of songs that took third place in the 2019 A-mu-sing Contest.
This music video describing the problem with extrapolating beyond the range of the data in making predictions was created by Mary McLellan, a teacher at Aledo High School in Texas, who wrote the lyric and performed and produced the video. The song is sung to the tune of the 1984 Bruce Springsteen hit “Born in the U.S.A.” The song was part of a pair of songs that took third place in the 2019 A-mu-sing Contest.
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 lyric was written and recorded/sung by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in 2017 to the tune of the Miley Cyrus hit “Wrecking Ball.” The song won honorable mention in the 2019 A-mu-sing contest and is designed to be a vehicle to discuss common instances of expected value as a benchmark for making real-world decisions in one’s life. In particular, students should be aware that most people sometimes choose to buy something (an insurance policy, a warranty, a lottery ticket, etc.) whose expected value is negative, but that is still outweighed by other considerations. The second verse refers to an episode of “Deal or No Deal” (Season 4, Episode 7) that NBC aired on October 22, 2008.
A poem reflecting on the idea of standardization in statistics by Dane C Joseph from George Fox University in Oregon that earned an honorable mention in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest. In his submission for the contest Dr. Joseph indicated:
"I wrote this poem to highlight the essential importance of standardization to some of the most basic scientific and social endeavors. Far from a perfect solution to many of the sociopolitical, educational, and technological issues we face, standardization is still immensely powerful when aptly done and is arguably indispensable to our daily lives—from making policy and admissions decisions to calibrating instruments and building machines. My hope is that learners will acquire a sense of the tension between the usefulness and appropriateness of standardization, appreciate how very simple tools like Z-scores can help us to responsibly rank various objects, as well as openly critique why they can also lead to problems when the objects to be ranked and compared are human attributes. Among other things, instructors should encourage students to explore the meaning of the contrasting big 'M' little 'm' moniker, and allusions to central tendency (e.g., C grades)."
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.