Probability

  • A haiku poem that uses a fortuitous numerical fact about a birthday probability that can launch discussion of the "68-95-99.7 rule" and how 99.73% of values are within 3 standard deviations of the mean for a normal distribution. Here 364/365 ≈ 0.9973 (365/366 is the same out to four decimals so this also applies to leap years).  Students can also recognize that birthdays do not follow a normal distribution, but approximately a uniform distribution (so that the approximate chance that two people have different birthdays is about .9973) . The poem was written by Lawrence Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in February, 2021.

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  • A limerick to teach the inclusion-exclusion rule for finding the probability of the union of two events.  The poem was written by Marion D. Cohen from Drexel University and published in the January 2021 issue (vol 11 number 1) of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

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  • A limerick to teach the addition rule for finding the probability of the union of disjoint (mutually exclusive) events.  The limerick was written by Marion D. Cohen from Drexel University and published in the  January 2021 (vol. 11, issue 1) Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

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  • A cartoon with a neat double pun that can be a nice vehicle to discuss how the expectations of non-linear functions of a random variable is not the same as the function of the expectations. The cartoon was used in the February 2019 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Joseph Gerda from College of the Canyons. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

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  • A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about how the precision of measurements propagate when mathematical operations are applied to them . The cartoon is number 295 (April, 2020) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a Creative Commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.

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  • A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about the chance of rare events and the memoryless property. The cartoon is number 2203 (September, 2019) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a Creative Commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.

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  • A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about interpreting probabilities. The cartoon is number 2142 (April, 2019) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a Creative Commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.

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  • A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about the normal density function. The cartoon is number 2118 (March, 2019) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a Creative Commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.

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  • A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about risks and the problem with making post hoc comparisons. The cartoon is number 2107 (February, 2019) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a Creative Commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.

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  • A cartoon with an unusual graph suitable for use in teaching about cumulative distribution functions – topics for discussion include how a cdf looks like a step function for a discrete variable and a continuously increasing function over the range of a continuous variable (ask the class if the cartoon gets this correct or not). The cartoon is number 2092 (December, 2018) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a Creative Commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.

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