Famous historical datastets, cataloged by the CMU stat deptartment.
Mostly selected to illustrate an intro statistics topic (like for instance
handling outliers). All come with an overview 'story' describing the
dataset.
Several common data sets, downloadable in
Excel (and other formats); includes a story about the dataset (click on
the dataset name). A really nicely done website as part of an education
grant.
Australian Data And Story Library. Some of these data sets are
potentially simple enough for an elementary analysis.
CMU Dataset Archive
A potentially useful collection of datasets in text format, some of them
large, most with some description. For instance, the dataset on IQ versus
Brain Size is fairly small and potentially quite interesting.
Small data sets pertaining to physical experiments that were actually done
(e.g., hanging a slinky; rolling a ball down a wooden ramp), as well as
some real-world data (e.g., height and speed of major roller coasters;
track times for the Men's 10-m Olympic run).
Another way that will work (requires intermediate use of Word):
drag and copy data from web browser
in Word, select edit...paste (Note: if the data is
wide, you may need to change to Landscape mode in Word, and maybe even
widen the margins, to avoid wrapping)
Do Save As..., switch to type 'text only'
in Excel, select Data --> Get External Data --> Import Text File.
Info pertaining to text material:
Logical
Fallacies
This website gives more extensive coverage than our text of the cataloged
types of logical fallacies. Includes examples, and Latin terms.
A recent debate about nanotechnology in which the 'straw man' fallacy is
made reference to.
Pertaining to Exercise # 14, section A1:
Here
is a link where you can view a Real Media version of the infamous "Daisy
Girl" 1964 campaign ad (now considered the first 'negative campaign ad');
Here
is a story about an anti Al Gore redux of the ad (since dubbed "Daisy
II") by the Bush campaign during the 2000 election;
and
here
is a story about the daisy ad being revived yet again ("Daisy III"?) by
anti Iraq war protesters this past year.
Pertaining to the last exercise of section 1C -- Gauss' formula for
the sum of the first n integers, here
is a page briefly describing Gauss, the famous anecdote, and some of his
accomplishments.
last updated on 16 January 2004 by Gordon Weinberg.
All information subject to change without appearance here.
This page:
http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonw/quant-reasoning/spring2004quant-reasoning.html
Gordon's homepage: http://www.pitt.edu/~gordonw/
Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations
expressed in this material are those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the views
of the University of Pittsburgh or Carlow College.