Have You Seen This?...

The Rossman/Chance Applet collection by Neville Davies: There are many statistical applets on the web, but a particularly useful collection that are suitable for illustrating elementary statistical principles and ideas can be found on Beth Chance’s web site at California Polytechnic State University, USA. The authors (Beth Chance and Allan Rossman) classify them as ‘currently under development’, but as they stand, with some work, they could be incorporated into non-specialist (and specialist?) quantitative courses. With judicious use I believe that they have the potential to enhance the statistical numeracy of students in the early stages of learning statistics. The applets cover: Simulating Confidence Intervals for Population Parameter; Behavior of Regression Line; Histogram Bin Width; Guess the Correlation, Dotplot Summaries and focusing on sampling distributions…/…The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century by David Salsburg; pp340,W.H. Freeman and Company, contributed by Beth L Chance: Ever wish you could sit down for a cup of tea with William Gosset? Curious who came up with the idea of a pie chart and why? Want to know how the term “statistically significant” came about? And why are so many results named after the wrong person anyway? The book provides an insightful glimpse into the minds and lives of 20th century “statisticians” (many of the contributors were not necessarily statisticians). This book discusses many of the techniques developed during this time, but at a very nontechnical level. Without using formulas, he describes the reasoning behind randomized designs, maximum likelihood, Bayesian statistics, Monte Carlo methods and so on…