This article argues that the Normal distribution is often not a good model for anthropomorphic data.

The Internet offers a huge array of teaching resources for statistics. Here we present a selection of engaging Web-based tools, ranging from class surveys to individual simulation experiments.

The use of the Internet as a teaching tool continues to grow in popularity at colleges and universities. We consider, from the students' perspective, the use of an Internet approach compared to a lecture and lab-based approach for teaching an introductory course in statistical methods. We conducted a survey of introductory statistics students.…

Computational formulae are a throwback to a time when computers were not widely available. Today their teaching obscures important underpinnings of statistical theory and practice.

The surprising property of many data sets that their first significant digits follow Benford's Law provides examples that can pique and hold students' interest. Several ideas for student activities are presented.

Our pig game involves a series of tosses of a die with the possibility of a player's score improving with each additional toss. With each additional toss, however, there is also the chance of losing the entire score accumulated so far. Two different strategies for deciding how many tosses a player should attempt are developed and then compared in…

This short article gives a geometrical interpretation of the relationship between the harmonic mean, the arithmetic mean and the self-weighted mean. (Contains 1 figure.)

Statistical charts can be used with very young children in order for them to understand and communicate effectively in other subject areas. This practical activity was aimed at understanding more about forces. (Contains 3 figures.)

Learning basic statistical concepts does not need to be tedious or dry; it can be fun and interesting through cooperative learning in the small-group activity of Statistics Poker. This article describes a teaching approach for reinforcing basic statistical concepts that can help students who have high anxiety and makes learning and reinforcing…

This article shows how to use Microsoft Excel to get data from the Internet into a statistically usable form.

This article re-examines the much maligned piechart and provides justification for its use. It identifies common pitfalls when drawing piecharts in Microsoft Excel and offers advice on how to avoid them. (Contains 6 figures and 5 tables.)

This article studies various holiday distributions, the most interesting one being Easter. Gauss' Easter algorithm and Microsoft Excel are used to determine that the Easter distribution can be closely approximated by the convolution of two well-known uniform distributions. (Contains 8 figures.)

In this article, the authors focus on hypothesis testing--that peculiarly statistical way of deciding things. Statistical methods for testing hypotheses were developed in the 1920s and 1930s by some of the most famous statisticians, in particular Ronald Fisher, Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson, who laid the foundations of almost all modern methods of…

As a branch of knowledge, Statistics is ubiquitous and its applications can be found in (almost) every field of human endeavour. In this article, the authors track down the possible source of the link between the "Siren song" and applications of Statistics. Answers to their previous five questions and five new questions on Statistics are presented.

When people speak of "the Law of Gravity" they are generally referring to what is more specifically known as "Newton's Law of Gravitation." This law states that the gravitational force (that is, the mutual attraction) between any two physical bodies is directly proportional to the product of their individual masses and inversely proportional to…