Internet Sites about Statistics

What follows is a listing of Internet sites and a brief description of each that focus on the general areas of statistics and measurement. Also included are sites where data (on many different topics) have been collected and can be accessed.

As you use these, keep in mind the following:

• Internet addresses (known as URLs) often change, as does the content. If one of these Internet addresses does not work, search for the name of the site using any search engine.
• Any Internet site is only as good as its content. For example, N or N − 1 might be given as the correct denominator for a formula, and although that might be true, you should double check any information with another Internet resource or a book on the subject.
• If you find something that is inaccurate on a site, contact the Webmaster or the author of the site and let him or her know that a correction needs to be made.

Name: http://statistics.com

Where to find it: http://www.statistics.com/

If there is a queen of statistics sites, then http://statistics.com is it. It offers not only links to hundreds of other sites and an online introductory statistics course, but also online professional development courses. You can try statistics software, look at the free stuff available on the Web, get help if you're a teacher with quizzes and other teaching materials, and even participate in online discussions. This is the place to start your travels.

Name: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics

Where to find it: http://www.bls.gov/

Local, state, and federal government agencies are data warehouses, full of information about everything from employment to demographics to consumer spending. This particular site (which is relatively old at 10 years on the Web) is for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the principal fact-finding agency for the federal government in the areas of labor economics and statistics. It is full of numbers and ideas. Some of the data can be downloaded as HTML or Excel files, and you can also get historical data going back 10 years in some instances.

Name: Probability and Quintile Applets Where to find it: http://www.stat.stanford.edu/~naras/jsm/FindProbability.html

Applets are small programs that can visually represent an idea or a process very effectively. These two, by Balasubramanian Narasimhan from Stanford University, do such things as compute the probability of a score under the normal curve (see Figure 1 on the following page) and calculate the quintiles (fifths) of a distribution. They are easy to use, fun to play with, and very instructional. You can find another similar applet by Gary McClelland at http://psych.colorado.edu/~mcclella/java/normal/handleNormal.html

Figure 1 Probability Applet

Name: FedStats

Where to find it: http://www.fedstats.gov/

Here's another huge storehouse of data that is the entry point for many different federal agencies. You can easily access data from individual states or from agencies by subjects (such as health), access published collections of statistics, and even get the kids involved in child-oriented agency Web sites both entertaining and educational.

Name: Random Birthday Applet

Where to find it: http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~susan/surprise/Birthday.html

This is an incredible illustration of how probability works. You enter the number of birthdays you want generated at random, and the laws of probability should operate so that in a group of 30 such random selections, the odds are very high that there will be at least two matches for the same birthday. Try it—it works.

Name: The Statistics Homepage

Where to find it: http://www.statsoftinc.com/textbook/stathome.html

Here you'll find a self-contained course in basic statistics, brought to you by the people who developed and sell StatSoft, one of many statistical programs. On this site, you will find tutorials that take you from the elementary concepts of statistics through the more advanced topics, such as factor and discriminant analysis.

Name: National Center for Health Statistics

Where to find it: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/

The National Center for Health Statistics compiles information that helps guide actions and policies to improve health in the United States. Among other things, these data are used to help identify health problems, evaluate the effectiveness of programs, and provide data for policymakers.

Name: The World Wide Web Virtual Library: Statistics

Where to find it: http://www.stat.ufl.edu/vlib/statistics.html

The good people at the University of Florida's Department of Statistics bring you this page, which contains links to statistics departments all over the world. It provides a great deal of information about graduate study in these areas as well as other resources.

Name: Social Statistics Briefing Room

Where to find it: http://www.whitehouse.gov/fsbr/ssbr.html

This service, which calls the White House home, provides access to current federal social statistics and links to information from a wide range of federal agencies. This is a very good, and broad, starting point to access data made available through different agencies.

Name: Statistics on the Web

Where to find it: http://my.execpc.com/~helberg/statistics.html

More groupings of URLs and Internet addresses from Clay Helberg. A bit like http://statistics.com, but full of listings of professional organizations, publications, and software packages (many of which you can download for a trial).

Name: Food and Agriculture Organization for the United Nations

Where to find it: http://faostat.fao.org/

If you want to go international, this is a site containing online information (in multilingual formats) and databases for more than 3 million time series records covering international statistics in areas such as production, population, and exports.

Name: Web Pages That Perform Statistical Calculations!

Where to find it: http://members.aol.com/johnp71/javastat.html

At the time of this writing, this site contains more than 600 links to books, tutorials, free software, and interactive tools, such as a guide to what statistical test to use to answer what questions, all assembled by John Pezzullo.

Name: Free Statistical Software

Where to find it: http://freestatistics.altervista.org/stat.php

An extensive collection of statistical analysis software packages that range from simple programs for students to advanced programs that do everything from statistical visualization to time series analysis. Many of these programs are freeware, and many are open source, available to be modified by users.

Name: Java Applets

Where to find it: http://www.stat.duke.edu/sites/java.html

The Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences at Duke University and NWP Associates put together a collection of Java applets (Java is the language in which these small programs are written, and applets are small applications) that allows the user to demonstrate interactively various statistical techniques and tools, such as constructing histograms and illustrating how the central limit theorem works.

Name: HyperStat Online Textbook

Where to find it: http://davidmlane.com/hyperstat/

This site contains an entire online course in basic statistics from David Lane that covers every topic from simple descriptive statistics to effect size. The “Hyper” nature of the site allows the user to easily move from one topic to another through the extensive use of live links. And, as a bonus, each new screen has additional links to sites that focus on learning statistics.

Name: Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics

Where to find it: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lane/rvls.html

This is where the HyperStat Online Textbook has its home and is the main page (also done by David Lane) of Rice University's statistics program. In addition to the HyperStat link, it has links to simulations, case studies, and a terrific set of applets that are very useful for teaching and demonstration purposes.

Name: Reliability, Validity, and Fairness of Classroom Assessments

Where to find it: http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/methods/assment/as5relia.htm

A discussion of the reliability, validity, and fairness of classroom testing from the North Central Educational Laboratory.

Name: The Multitrait Multimethod Matrix

Where to find it: http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/mtmmmat.htm

A very good site for a discussion of validity issues in measurement in general and specific discussion about the multitrait multimethod brought to you by William M. K. Trochim.

Name: Content Validity, Face Validity, and Quantitative Face Validity

Where to find it: http://www.burns.com/wcbcontval.htm

Although a bit dated (around 1996), this Web site offers a detailed discussion by William C. Burns on content, face, quantitative, and other types of validity.

Name: The National Education Association

Where to find it: http://www.nea.org/parents/testingguide.html. also

This national organization of teaching professionals provides assistance to parents, teachers, and others in understanding test scores.

Name: The Learning Center

Where to find it: http://webster.commnet.edu/faculty/~simonds/tests.htm

It's a reality that other than through studying, test scores can be improved if test takers understand the different demands of different types of tests. This item contains information on using different strategies to increase test scores.

Name: The Advanced Placement

Where to find it: http://apbio.biosci.uga.edu/exam/Essays/

This is an old site, but people at the University of Georgia have posted items from a variety of different topic areas covered in the Advanced Placement (AP) exams that high school students can take in a step to qualify for college credit.

Name: Essay Question

Where to find it: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/05/25/computer_grading/

http://Salon.com offers a discussion of automated grading in general and specially, as well as essay question grading using computers.

Name: Matching Questions on Minerals and Rocks

Where to find it: http://www.usd.edu/esci/exams/matching.html

A good example of how easy it is to adapt matching questions to an interactive electronic format.

An increasingly large part of doing research, as well as other intensive, more qualitative projects, involves specially designed software. At http://www.scolari.com/, you can find a listing of several different types and explore which might be right for you if you intend to pursue this method (interviewing) and this methodology (qualitative).

FairTest—The National Center for Fair and Open Testing at http://www.fairtest.org/index.htm has as its mission to “end the misuses and flaws of standardized testing and to ensure that evaluation of students, teachers and schools is fair, open, valid and educationally beneficial.” A really interesting site to visit.

Preparing Students to Take Standardized Achievement Tests (at http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=1&n=11) was written by William A. Mehrens (and first appeared in Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation) for school administrators and teachers and discusses what test scores mean and how they can be most useful in understanding children's performance.

The Clifton StrengthsFinder™ at http://education.gallup.com/content/default.asp?ci=886 is a Webbased assessment tool published by the Gallup Organization (yep, the poll people) to help people better understand their talents and strengths by measuring the presence of 34 themes of talent. You might want to take it and explore these themes.

Find out just about everything you ever wanted to know (and more) about human intelligence at Human Intelligence: Historical Influences, Current Controversies and Teaching Resources at http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/

The following text is taken from Neil J. Salkind's best-selling introduction to statistics text, Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics, 2nd edition (2004).

Pages and pages of every type of statistical resource you can want has been creatively assembled by Professor David W. Stockburger at http://www.psychstat.smsu.edu/scripts/dws148f/statisticsresourcesmain.asp. This site receives the gold medal of statistics sites. Don't miss it.

For example, take a look at Berrie's page (at http://www.huizen.dds.n~berrie/) and see some QuickTime (short movies) of the effects of changing certain data points on the value of the mean and standard deviation. Or, look at the different home pages that have been created by instructors for courses offered around the country. Or, look at all of the different software packages that can do statistical analysis.

Want to draw a histogram? How about a table of random numbers? A sample-size calculator? The Statistical Calculators page at http://www.stat.ucla.edu/calculators/ has just about every type (more than 15) of calculator and table you could need. Enough to carry you through any statistics course that you might take and even more.

For example, you can click on the Random Permutations link and complete the two boxes (as you see in Figure 2 for 2 random permutations of 100 integers), and you get the number of permutations you want. This is very handy when you need a table of random numbers for a specific number of participants so you can assign them to groups.

Figure 1 Generating a Set of Random Numbers

The History of Statistics page located at http://www.Anselm.edu/homepage/jpitocch/biostatshist.html contains portraits and bibliographies of famous statisticians and a time line of important contributions to the field of statistics. So, do names like Bernoulli, Galton, Fisher, and Spearman pique your curiosity? How about the development of the first test between two averages during the early 20th century? It might seem a bit boring until you have a chance to read about the people who make up this field and their ideas—in sum, pretty cool ideas and pretty cool people.

SurfStat Australia (at http://www.anu.edu.au/nceph/surfstat/surfstat-home/surfstat.html) is the online component of a basic stat course taught at the University of Newcastle, Australia, but has grown far beyond just the notes originally written by Annette Dobson in 1987, and updated over several years' use by Anne Young, Bob Gibberd, and others. Among other things, SurfStat contains a complete interactive statistics text. Besides the text, there are exercises, a list of other statistics sites on the Internet, and a collection of Java applets (cool little programs you can use to work with different statistical procedures).

This online tutorial with 18 lessons, at http://www.davidmlane.com/hyperstat/index.html, offers nicely designed and userfriendly coverage of the important basic topics. What we really liked about the site was the glossary, which uses hypertext to connect different concepts to one another. For example, in Figure 3, you can see the definition of descriptive statistics also linked to [Page 1078]other glossary terms, such as mean, standard deviation, and box plot. Click on any of those and zap! you're there.

Figure 1 Sample HyperStat Screen

There are data all over the place, ripe for the picking. Here are just a few. What to do with these? Download them to be used as examples in your work or as examples of analysis that you might want to do, and you can use these as a model.

• Statistical Reference Datasets at http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/strd/
• United States Census Bureau (a huge collection and a gold mine of data) at http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/DatasetMainPage-Servlet?_lang=en
• The Data and Story Library (http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/DASL/) with great annotations about the data (look for the stories link)
• Tons of economic data sets at Growth Data Sets (at http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Economics/Growth/datasets.htm)

Then there are all the data sets that are available through the federal government (besides the census). Your tax money supports it, so why not use it? For example, there's FEDSTATS (at http://www.fedstats.gov/), where more than 70 agencies in the U.S. federal government produce statistics of interest to the public. The Federal Interagency Council on Statistical Policy maintains this site to provide easy access to the full range of statistics and information produced by these agencies for public use. Here you can find country profiles contributed by the (boo!) CIA; public school student, staff, and faculty data (from the National Center for Education Statistics); and the Atlas of the United States Mortality (from the National Center for Health Statistics). What a ton of data!

The University of Michigan's Statistical Resources on the Web (at http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/stats.html) has hundreds and hundreds of resource links, including those to banking, book publishing, the elderly, and, for those of you with allergies, pollen count. Browse, search for what exactly it is that you need—no matter, you are guaranteed to find something interesting.

At http://mathforum.org/workshops/sum96/data.collections/datalibrary/data.set6.html, you can find a data set including the 1994 National League Baseball Salaries or the data on TV, Physicians, and Life Expectancy. Nothing earth-shaking, just fun to download and play with.

The World Wide Web Virtual Library: Statistics is the name of the page, but the one-word title is misleading because the site (from the good people at the University of Florida at http://www.stat.ufl.edu/vlib/statistics.html) includes information on just about every facet of the topic, including data sources, job announcements, departments, divisions and schools of statistics (a huge description of programs all over the world), statistical research groups, institutes and associations, statistical services, statistical archives and resources, statistical software vendors and software, statistical journals, mailing list archives, and related fields. Tons of great information is available here. Make it a stop along the way.

Statistics on the Web at http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~gks/webguide/datasets.html is another location that's [Page 1079]just full of information and references that you can easily access. Here, you'll find information on professional organizations, institutes and consulting groups, educational resources, Web courses, online textbooks, publications and publishers, statistics book lists, software-oriented pages, mailing lists and discussion groups, and even information on statisticians and other statistical people.

Figure 1 Selecting the Correct Stat Technique to Use—Just a Few Clicks Away

If you do ever have to teach statistics, or even tutor fellow students, this is one place you'll want to visit: http://noppa5.pc.helsinki.fi/links.html. It contains hundreds of resources on every topic that was covered in Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics and more. You name it and it's here: regression, demos, history, Sila (a demonstration of inference), an interactive online tutorial, statistical graphics, handouts to courses, teaching materials, journal articles, and even quizzes! Whew, what a deal. There tends to be a lot of material that may not be suited to what you are doing in this class, but this wide net has certainly captured some goodies.

http://Statistics.com (http://www.statistics.com) has it all—a wealth of information on courses, software, statistical methods, jobs, books, and even a homework helper. For example, if you want to know about free Webbased stat packages, click on that link on the left-hand side of the page. Here's one (see Figure 4) from Dr. Bill Trochim…. You just click your way through answering questions to get the answer to what type of analysis should be used.