Resource Library

A sketch by Anastasia Mandel reinterpreting Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Cristofano Allori (1615) with the statistical caption "Segmentation; this one even helped to disperse an army." This is part of a collection of sketches by Anastasia Mandel and their accompanying statistical captions discussed in the paper "How art helps to understand statistics" (Model Assisted Statistics and Applications, 2009) by Stan Lipovetsky and Igor Mandel in volume 4 pages 313-324. Free to use in classrooms and on course websites.

Many of us, while teaching an introductory statistics course, have mentioned some of the history behind the methodology, perhaps just in passing. We might remark that an English chap by the name of R. A. Fisher is responsible for a great deal of the course content. We could further point out that the statistical techniques used in research today were developed within the last century, for the most part. At most, we might reveal the identity of the mysterious "Student" when introducing the t-test to our class. I propose that we do more of this. This webinar will highlight some opportunities to give brief history lessons while teaching an introductory statistics course.

This 6 minute 39 second video can be used to teach the difference between correlation and causation. For example, that a relationship between X and Y might be explained by X causing Y, Y causing X, or a third factor that drives them both. The video is episode #109 (Nov 10, 2009) in the Psych Files podcast series produced and hosted by Michael A. Britt, Ph.D. at www.thepsychfiles.com. Video is free to use in the classroom or on course websites under a non-commercial ShareAlike creative commons license.

This simulation allows you to roll two dice and compare empirical and probability histograms for the sum or product of the two outcomes.

This applet performs the Student's t test on two sets of data, and reports the average and variance for both sets of data, the t score, degrees of freedom, and one and two tailed P values.

This java applet can be used to determine whether or not the means in two sample populations are significantly different.

This page of Statistical Java describes 11 different probability distributions including the Binomial, Poisson, Negative Binomial, Geometric, T, Chi-squared, Gamma, Weibull, Log-Normal, Beta, and F. Each distribution has its own applet in which users can manipulate the parameters to see how the distribution changes. The parameters are described on the main page as well as situations that would use each distribution. The equations of the distributions are not given. To select between the different applets you can click on Statistical Theory, Probability Distributions and then the Main Page. At the bottom of this page you can make your applet selection. This page was formerly located at http://www.stat.vt.edu/~sundar/java/applets/

This site contains links to and descriptions of over 600 applets that can be used for demonstrations or analysis of topics commonly covered in introductory statistics courses.