Resource Library

A song about the different assumptions needed for parametric statistical methods and the importance of checking how well they hold and what effect they may have on the results and conclusions. The lyrics were written in 2017 by Dennis K. Pearl from Penn State University and may be sung to the tune of "Every Breath You Take" written by Sting and made popular by The Police on their 1983 album "Synchronicity." Audio of the parody was produced and sung by students in the commercial music program of The University of Teas at El Paso.

A cartoon suitable for use in teaching ideas about independence and conditional probability. The cartoon is number 795 (September, 2010) 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 light bulb joke that can be used in discussing how the choice of model might affect the conclusions drawn.  The joke was submitted to AmStat News by Robert Weiss from UCLA and appeared on page 48 of the October, 2018 edition.

A song for teaching ideas about hypothesis testing including interpretation of significance and the difference between significance and practical relevance. Lyrics written by Denise Tran, a student at University of Toronto, Mississauga in Fall 2010 as part of an assignment in a biometrics class taught by Helene Wagner. May be sung to the tune of the 2001 Grammy award winning song "Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)" by the rock band Train (Patrick Monahan, Robert Hotchkiss, James Stafford, Scott Underwood, and Charlie Colin). The song won first place in the song category and best overall entry in the 2011 CAUSE A-Mu-sing competition.

A song about examining the assumptions in statistical procedures especially dealing with skewed distributions. The lyrics were written by Robert Carver of Stonehill College and were awarded second place in the song category of the 2011 CAUSE A-Mu-sing competition. The song is a parody of the 1961 classic pop song "Runaround Sue" written by Ernie Maresca and Dion DiMucci and sung by Dion backed by the vocal group, The Del-Satins. Musical accompaniment realization and vocals are by Joshua Lintz from University of Texas at El Paso.

Even trained statisticians often fail to appreciate the extent to which statistics are vitiated by the unrecorded assumptions of their interpreters is a quote by Irish playwright George Benard Shaw (1856 - 1950). The quote may be found in the author's preface to his 1906 play "The Doctor's Dilemma", that contains an essay on his views of statistics and quantitative literacy amongst the public.

This chapter explains the structure/steps of hypothesis testing, the concept of significance, the relationship between confidence intervals and hypothesis testing, and Type I/II errors.

This text explains the differences between t-tests, z-tests, tests with proportions, and tests of correlation.

This hour long radio podcast focuses on stochasticity, or randomness. According the website: "Stochasticity (a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness), may be at the very foundation of our lives. To understand how big a role it plays, we look at chance and patterns in sports, lottery tickets, and even the cells in our own body. Along the way, we talk to a woman suddenly consumed by a frenzied gambling addiction, meet two friends whose meeting seems to defy pure chance, and take a close look at some very noisy bacteria." Several guests appear in this radio podcast, including Deborah Nolan.

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.