STAT 220: Basic Statistics for Quantitative Students

Essay assignment

Here are some comments I have after reading your rough drafts:

  1. Cite your references. For the most part, each of your essays will include only a single reference, namely the article you read. Thus, it's not necessary to have a formal "references" section at the end of your essay. However, you should make it clear that you are writing about a journal article and include adequate bibliographic information about that article somewhere in your essay. If you wish, you may simply type the bibliographic information as a header for your essay, almost like the title. Here is another example:

    In his article "College students' conceptions of probability" (2003, The American Statistician 57:1, pages 37-45), James Albert discusses the...

    I am not picky about the format you choose in order to display the title, author, journal title, volume and issue, and page numbers, but please make sure you put them somewhere. And of course, if you use other sources you should be sure to cite them somewhere as well.

  2. Do some statistics. This is a statistics class, and the thing I'm most interested in hearing about in your essays is the statistical content you've read and learned. It is difficult to write any strict rules here because each article is different, but you should really make sure that your essay, whatever you write about, has some statistical content.

Goal: Read and understand (as best you can) an article from an internationally known journal of statistics (The American Statistician). Write an essay (of roughly five pages, depending on the complexity of the topic you select) describing what you learn about the topic of this article.

Due date: A rough draft is due NO LATER THAN Monday, April 17. I will return your rough draft, with comments, no later than two class periods after you hand in your rough draft (no matter when that may be; you are free to hand it in prior to April 17). The final draft is due on Friday, April 28.

Assignment details: Select your article from the list below. This will take quite a bit of effort. You will probably want to skim several of the articles before you make your decision. Some of the articles have quite a bit of mathematical content and some have less, but it is for you to decide which article you find interesting and within your capabilities. Obviously, you will not have to learn all of the mathematics if the article is difficult, but there will always be some new material that you are capable of learning. As usual, I am happy to help you if you get stuck. Finally, keep in mind that the essay you write should be your work alone. You should NOT choose the same article as your best friend, as this would be very suspicious!
Once you have selected your article, read it, then reread it. Study it. Get to know it. Take notes about it. Put it under your pillow at night if you have to, but understand as much of what it is saying as you can. Consult other sources if you feel they would be helpful; I'm happy to make suggestions if you want.
Finally, write your essay. Describe the subject of the article. Summarize the statistical ideas it contains. You should assume your audience is statistically savvy (you don't have to explain what a sample mean is), but knows nothing about the particular article you have chosen.

Grading: The essay will be part of your homework grade. It will be worth 10% of your final semester grade. I will judge the essay on the following criteria:

The articles: Each of these articles comes from the journal called The American Statistician. You can obtain these articles online through the Penn State library site: Go to http://www.libraries.psu.edu/articles.html and click on the E-journals link. Then type "American statistician". When the list of journals appears, American Statistician should be at the top. Click its title or the "get it" button, at which point you'll be asked for the year, volume, issue, and start page of the article. I recommend using the "ProQuest ABI complete" blanks. You may be asked to login using your username and password.

  1. "Monotone regrouping, regression, and Simpson's paradox" Yosef Rinott, Michael Tam. May 2003. Vol. 57, Iss. 2; p. 139
  2. "Reliability of the uncertified ballots in the 2000 presidential election in Florida" Kirk Wolter, Diana Jergovic, Whitney Moore, Joe Murphy, Colm O'Muircheartaigh. Feb 2003. Vol. 57, Iss. 1; p. 1
  3. "College students' conceptions of probability" James H Albert. Feb 2003. Vol. 57, Iss. 1; p. 37
  4. "Illustrating the law of large numbers (and confidence intervals)" Jeffrey D Blume, Richard M Royall. Feb 2003. Vol. 57, Iss. 1; p. 51
  5. "Seek whence: Answer sequences and their consequences in key-balanced multiple-choice tests" Maya Bar-Hillel, Yigal Attali. Nov 2002. Vol. 56, Iss. 4; p. 299
  6. "You can load a die, but you can't bias a coin" Andrew Gelman, Deborah Nolan. Nov 2002. Vol. 56, Iss. 4; p. 308
  7. "Quantitative analysis of literary styles" Roger D Peng, Nicolas W Hengartner. Aug 2002. Vol. 56, Iss. 3; p. 175
  8. "Is human height bimodal?" Mark F Schilling, Ann E Watkins, William Watkins. Aug 2002. Vol. 56, Iss. 3; p. 223
  9. "Let's practice what we preach: Turning tables into graphs" Andrew Gelman, Cristian Pasarica, Rahul Dodhia. May 2002. Vol. 56, Iss. 2; p. 121
  10. "Tiered polychotomous regression: Ranking NFL quarterbacks" Chris White, Scott Berry. Feb 2002. Vol. 56, Iss. 1; p. 10
  11. "Statistics in preschool" Sterling C Hilton, Scott D Grimshaw, Genan T Anderson. Nov 2001. Vol. 55, Iss. 4; p. 332
  12. "The National Hockey League entry draft, 1969-1995: An application of a weighted pool-adjacent-violators algorithm" Don Dawson, Lonnie Magee. Aug 2001. Vol. 55, Iss. 3; p. 194
  13. "Do baseball players regress toward the mean?" Teddy Schall, Gary Smith. Nov 2000. Vol. 54, Iss. 4; p. 231
  14. "Using beam and fulcrum displays to explore data" David P Doane, Ronald L Tracy. Nov 2000. Vol. 54, Iss. 4; p. 289
  15. "The impact of Six Sigma improvement--A glimpse into the future of statistics" Gerald J Hahn, William J Hill, Roger W Hoerl, Stephen A Zinkgraf. Aug 1999. Vol. 53, Iss. 3; p. 208
  16. "The NBA as an evolving multivariate system" Sangit Chatterjee, Mustafa R Yilmaz. Aug 1999. Vol. 53, Iss. 3; p. 257
  17. "Can the NCAA Basketball tournament seeding be used to predict margin of victory?" Tyler Smith, Neil C Schwertman. May 1999. Vol. 53, Iss. 2; p. 94
  18. "Multi-tiered playoffs and their impact on professional baseball" Jess S Boronico. Feb 1999. Vol. 53, Iss. 1; p. 56
  19. "The blind paper cutter: Teaching about variation, bias, stability, and process control" Richard A Stone. Aug 1998. Vol. 52, Iss. 3; p. 244
  20. "Lessons from sports statistics" Frederick Mosteller. Nov 1997. Vol. 51, Iss. 4; p. 305
  21. "Robust sports ratings based on least absolute errors" Gilbert W Bassett Jr. May 1997. Vol. 51, Iss. 2; p. 99
  22. "Who is the fastest man in the world?" Robert Tibshirani. May 1997. Vol. 51, Iss. 2; p. 106
  23. "Waiting time and expected waiting time--paradoxical situations" V C Hombas. May 1997. Vol. 51, Iss. 2; p. 130
  24. "A technique for estimating the probability of detecting a nongaming drug user" Jules I Borack. May 1997. Vol. 51, Iss. 2; p. 134
  25. "A look at the rule of three" B D Jovanovic, P S Levy. May 1997. Vol. 51, Iss. 2; p. 137
  26. "Data-based choice of histogram bin width" M P Wand. Feb 1997. Vol. 51, Iss. 1; p. 59
  27. "On the peculiar distribution of the U.S. stock indexes' digits" Ley, Eduardo. Nov 1996. Vol. 50, Iss. 4; p. 311
  28. "Sample quantiles in statistical packages" Hyndman, Rob J, Fan, Yanan. Nov 1996. Vol. 50, Iss. 4; p. 361
  29. "P values: What they are and what they are not" Schervish, Mark J. Aug 1996. Vol. 50, Iss. 3; p. 203
  30. "Using exam scores to estimate the prevalence of classroom cheating" Kvam, Paul H. Aug 1996. Vol. 50, Iss. 3; p. 238
  31. "Revisiting Olympic track records: Some practical considerations in the principal component analysis" Naik, Dayanand N, Khattree, Ravindra. May 1996. Vol. 50, Iss. 2; p. 140
  32. "Double-elimination tournaments: counting and calculating" Feb 1996. Vol. 50, Iss. 1; p. 27
  33. "More probability models for the NCAA regional basketball tournaments" Schwertman, Neil C, Schenk, Kathryn L, Holbrook, Brett C. Feb 1996. Vol. 50, Iss. 1; p. 34
  34. "Improved NCAA basketball tournament modeling via point spread and team strength information" Carlin, Bradley P. Feb 1996. Vol. 50, Iss. 1; p. 39
  35. "Evaluating the impact of the 65 mph maximum speed limit on Iowa rural interstates" Ledolter, Johannes, Chan, K S. Feb 1996. Vol. 50, Iss. 1; p. 79