Media links for Biostats Course VHM 801 at AVC - Fall Semester 2026

This page provides links to media files and webpages used in the course. A vast selection of video clips on statistical topics is available at YouTube.

Scott Stephens supporting website (www.StevensStats.com)

• Video lectures for each chapter, including Your Turn problems
• Technology demonstrations (incl. Minitab)

Statistics links (specific topics)

• Example of serious misuse of probability/statistics: Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS):
  • Article on Sally Clark case, including the open letter from The Royal Statistical Society on SIDS convictions
  • TED talk by Peter Donnelly on statistics and probability calculations, with particular focus on its use as juridical evidence

• Journal articles:
  • "Kurtosis as Peakedness, 1905-2014. R.I.P." (The American Statistician, 2014:68, 191-195; full access at UPEI and Moodle).
  • "The birthday problem" (Significance, 2007:4, 124-127)
  • "Simple tools for understanding risks: from innumeracy to insight" (British Medical Journal, 2003:327, 741-744).

Images

• Normal wordgrams constructed by Fikret Er, Anadolu University, Turkey (idea attributed to Youden (1962) and Graham (1990)): classical, modern,
• Matthew Freedman (2006), A visual comparison of normal and paranormal distributions, J Epidemiol Community Health 60: 6.

Statistics and probability humour

• It is 1941 and the Germans are bombing Moscow. Most people in Moscow flee to the underground bomb shelters at night, except for a famous Russian statistician who tells a friend that he is going to sleep in his own bed, saying that "There is only one of me, among five million other people in Moscow. What are the chances I'll get hit?"
  He survives the first night, but the next evening he shows up at the shelter. His friend asks why he has changed his mind. "Well," says the statistician, "there are five million people in this city, and one elephant in the Moscow Zoo. Last night, THEY GOT THE ELEPHANT!" (Internet source no longer accessible)

• A famous statistician would never travel by airplane, because he had studied air travel and estimated that the probability of there being a bomb on any given flight was one in a million, and he was not prepared to accept these odds.
  One day, a colleague met him at a conference far from home. "How did you get here, by train?"
  "No, I flew"
  "What about the possibility of a bomb?"
  "Well, I began thinking that if the odds of one bomb are 1:million, then the odds of two bombs are (1/1,000,000) x (1/1,000,000). This is a very, very small probability, which I can accept. So now I bring my own bomb along!" (Internet source no longer accessible)