Resource Library

These clerihew poems (chronologically by statistician) written by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso were written in 2023 and appeared in the April 2024 Amstat News.  Each clerihew poem takes a famous statistician and (like all clerihew poetry) starts with their name and finishes the two couplets with playful or quirky details about their career or life.  Such poems could be used to humanize the class and because of the short simple form involved students could be invited to create their own about other statisticians. 

This haiku collection by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso was written in 2020 and won second place in the 2021 A-mu-sing Competition.  Each haiku in the collection addresses some property or real-world application of expected value that can be explored in class: the math and psychology in the structuring of an internationally syndicated game show (Deal or No Deal), tree diagrams (that students can do a calculation to verify in a realistic popular context of college basketball, showing how the EV need not correspond to the most likely outcome), an engaging probability paradox (in the context of the most popular animal Americans own as pets), the interaction with utility when making consumer decisions, a concrete visual analogy for a distribution’s expected value (inspired by Figure 2 of Martin’s July 2003 JSE article), and the concept of an estimator’s bias, and the how EV and mean express the same idea but in different contexts (random variable versus a sample, population or probability distribution). 

A cartoon that invites conversation about the type of biases that may result from the way a pollster handles the logistics of taking a survey and thus the importance of careful planning.  The cartoon was used in the February 2022 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by Don Bell-Souder a student at University of Colorado, Boulder. Two alternative captions with the same basic learning object are “Selection bias is in the eye of the beholder” written by Sarah Arpin and “ACME polling finds that bootstrapping still reflects self-reporting bias.” Written by Rosie Garris who are also both students at University of Colorado, Boulder. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

A poem written in 2023 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso that can offer a vehicle for students to reflect on parallels (in language or process) between poetry and statistics.  The poem was first published with commentary in the Autumn 2023 issue of Consilience. 

A video from the 2019 US Conference On Teaching Statistics where Dennis Pearl from Penn State University is introducing the winner of that year's CAUSE/USCOTSLifetime Achievement Award in Statistics Education.  He tells a story that can be useful in teaching the lesson that linear regression is inappropriate for making predictions well outside the range of the data. The story is loosely based on the phone call he made in ordering the trophy for the award.

A song presenting common hypothesis tests and the steps in doing them with lyrics by Jamie Tan Xin Yee, Joelyn Chong, Deston Tang, Christine Sia, Nellie Lee, Josiah Tan, and Lee Yi Yuan who were all students at Singapore Management University taught by Rosie Ching Ju Mae.  May be sung to the tune of "LOVE" by Bert Kaempfert and Milt Gabler and recorded by Nat King Cole in 1965.  The vocals and guitar soundtrack on the audio were done by Joelyn. Editing of the soundtrack was done by the entire student team.The song placed tied for second in the 2023 A-mu-sing competition (see associated publicity).

A cartoon to show the misleading nature of graphs with a y-axis scale that does not start at zero (here real data is plotted to make it appear that the population of Dublin, Ireland doubled in a single year between 2021 and 2022).   The cartoon was based on an idea by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in May, 2023.

A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about model fitting techniques and the different messages a visualization puts forward based on the model used to fit the data . The cartoon is number 2048 (Sept, 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.

A song for discussion of the uses of weighting. In particular, Verse 1 hits the weighted mean (with a nod to Simpson’s paradox), Verse 2 connects with how/why poll data are weighted to help the sample more accurately reflect population characteristics, which can launch a discussion of what we adjust for (probability, sample design, demographics) and how (raking, matching, propensity weighting). This can be supported by examples in GAISE (https://www.amstat.org/docs/default-source/amstat-documents/gaisecollege...) and apps (e.g., https://sites.psu.edu/shinyapps/2018/12/03/weight-adjustment-in-surveys/). Finally, the Bridge touches on weighted regression. Lyrics by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso; may be sung to the tune of the 1981 hit "The Waiting" by Tom Petty.  The song received an honorable mention in the 2023 A-mu-sing competition.  Thanks to UTEP’s Jose Villalobos for the song title and for contributing backing vocals and guitar to Larry’s on the recording.

A joke to initiate a conversation about the importance of understanding your Sampling Frame when conducting surveys.  The joke was written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in 2021.