Christophe,
You may already know it, but Gelman has a book on teaching statistics
that contains many good examples. One that comes to mind (I think I
found it there, at least) involves conditional probabilities involving
being drunk and having a car accident at night. The upshot is that
P(accident at night | drunk) is low, but P(drunk | accident at night) is
high (above .5, if I recall).
There is also a contingency table example from the tv show Mythbusters,
where they study whether yawning is contagious. They do not use
statistics in the tv show and end up drawing the wrong conclusion. See,
for example,
http://www.statisticool.com/mythbusters.htm
Ed
--
Ed Merkle, PhD
Assistant Professor
Dept. of Psychology
Wichita State University
Wichita, KS 67260
Message: 1
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:09:22 +0200
From: Christophe Genolini <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: [R-sig-teaching] Statistics are SO boring...
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Hi the list,
As a statistics teacher, I teach to NOT-scientists student, public that
it is permanently necessary to motivate. I am thus in search of examples
both scientific and playful to illustrate my courses. It is not always
easy to find. As other teacher might be in the same case, I say to
myself that we could maybe share our 'best' examples?
So I start: a social psychologist (Nicolas Gueguen, article here
http://nicolas.gueguen.free.fr/index.html) has establishes that if we
approach a perfect unknown lady on a beach and we ask for its phone
number, we have 9 % of chance to obtain it. If we call her by touching
her slightly on the front arm, we have 19 % (!!!) of chances to obtain
it (test of chi2, p < 0.01). Surprising, isn't it?
So what are your 'best examples' ?
Christophe Genolini
--
-----------------------------------------
Christophe Genolini
Maitre de conf?rences
INSERM U669, Equipe Biostatistiques
UFR STAPS, Universit? de Paris Ouest-Nanterre-La D?fense
Web: http:\\christophe.genolini.free.fr
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