GARY C. RAMSEYER'S FIRST INTERNET GALLERY OF STATISTICS JOKES BY TOPIC

Did you know that if you torture the data long enough, that eventually it will confess?

*Does this include using the Chinese water torture? Thanks Cliff Lee from Caterpillar for passing this one my way.

Two statisticians and their accountant buddy were having lunch together one day at a top-secret government research installation in the desert. The two statisticians were discussing how that afternoon they would finish analyzing data from four groups of aliens captured from spacecrafts. The first statistician stated firmly that the experimentwise error rate should be controlled by using Tukey. The second statistician disagreed vigorously and replied that the experimentwise error rate should be controlled by using Bonferonni. Suddenly the accountant's face became white as a sheet. He yelled, "I always knew that experiment with aliens would get us into big trouble someday. Since the aliens are going to attack us this afternoon you are both dead wrong. The only way to control the AIR RAID is to use the installation's bomb shelter!!!! I'm out of here........"

*The above was inspired by a graduate student in an intermediate level class one day. After what I thought was a scintillating lecture on error rate, the puzzled student asked me at the end of the hour what an AIR RAID had to do with statistics.

Did you hear about the statistician who was about to analyze data gathered from a nudist colony? He didn't know whether to use a one or a two-tailed test!!!!

*This joke was told to me by my good friend and colleague Jazzbo Johnson a counseling psychologist in the Psychology Department at Illinois State University. He assured me that it meets all the standards for a PG rated joke!

Two students were walking out of statistics class one day. One was grinning ear to ear and the other was frowning woefully. The one that was grinning said, " Boy the instructor sure gave an inspired lecture on hypothesis testing today. He said that out of the four outcomes that can occur when you test the null hypothesis, two are correct decisions and two are errors. He praised this procedure as the Holy Grail of statistical analysis."

The other student looked at his classmate in dismay. He stated, "Well I certainly was not impressed with his lecture and totally disagree with him. ANY STATISTICAL PROCEDURE FOR MAKING A CORRECT DECISION THAT IS NO BETTER THAN FLIPPING A COIN IS PRETTY BAD!!!"

*This discussion would make Neyman turn over in his grave. Please Sir Ronald don't force me to reject or not reject my joke!!!

Three of the Most Embarassing Outcomes for a Statistician and Their Workarounds:

(1) Result: The intercorrelations between a fairly large set of variables has exactly 5% of the coefficients that are significant at the .05 level. Solution: Try to remain upbeat. Lighten up and use the .10 level of significance and stress to the readers that these results represent an early exploratory study!

(2) Result: In a 3x3x4x4x5 Factorial ANOVA the Five-Way Interaction turns up significant at the .01 level. Solution: Curse under your breath that you used a five-factor design. Then instruct your graduate assistant to conduct FIVE Four-Way ANOVAs, one for each of the five levels of the 5th independent variable, to take two aspirin, and call back in the morning!

(3) Result: The F-test for a One-Way ANOVA with five treatment groups is significant at the .05 level but NONE of the pairwise comparisons between the five means is significant. Solution: Cry hard and then work your tail off to find some obscure, meaningless complex comparison that is significant such as the average of the first three treatment means is significantly different from the average of the last two treatment means!

*The above are my own dreaded results. I am sure the readers have their own convoluted and shocking statistical anomalies. Please email me your most feared and or realized statistical outcome and I will put it in the Gallery.

Variance is what any two statisticians are at. How sad because this automatically violates the assumption of homogeneity of variance. However, if the statisticians are robust then everything will work out between them.

*Thanks to Sweta Sorab of GE Energy Servicees Marketing Forcasting for forwarding me the first line of this quip. I added several lines to continue the fun-poking at the statisticians.

I don't know why people are so negative about statistics and statisticians. I'm only a first-year student, and statistics has already taught me everything I need to know about life--always Proceed with Caution and Reject H₀!

*Thanks to Priscilla Mok at the Hong Kong International School for sending me this little testimonial about the field of statistics. Don't forget, Priscilla, to mention that the statistical literature is laced with all those positive Chi-Squares and F-ratios that also perk up your day.

Then there was the story of the sociological statistician who retired early from his teaching position at the university. He had grown up on the farm as a youth and still feeling quite chipper, decided to buy a large dairy farm in southern Wisconsin. After a short time the milk and cheese from his herd of cows became famous for miles around. Since his research at the university had demanded the use of many Chi-Square Goodness of Fit Tests, he thought he should commemorate all these procedures. Every year he invited the public to what became the most publicized and extravagant wine and cheese festival in Wisconsin. It was fondly called the GOODNESS OF TIT FEST!!!

*Some of you experienced statisticians out there may well of heard this little reversal of letters before but not my story behind it. Maybe you heard it back in your graduate training days and all the snickers that accompanied it. I know I did. However, I always thought the original moniker was an awkward use of words and should have been renamed(Hear that Mr. Karl Pearson). The fact remains that this test is one of the most frequently appearing procedures in the literature, particularly in testing the independence of two nominal or ordinal variables.

What is the name of the only known Motel chain that caters to professional draftsmen?

Hotelling's T² !

*The wonderful statisticians who pioneered the field of multivariate analysis in the 1930's and 40's need much more recognition than what they have received and Harold Hotelling was among these (And think about this--they did it without computers!!!). This statistic, of course, is the bivariate counterpart of the univariate t-test. Story has it that William S. Gosset was granted a lifetime pass to any motel in Dr. Hotelling's chain.

Did you know Santa once took a statistics class?
He had trouble remembering which hypothesis should have the equal sign so he would keep repeating: the null hypothesis, the null hypothesis, the null hypothesis. In fact to this day you can hear him say Ho, Ho, Ho!

*Many thanks to Mark Eakin of the University of Texas at Arlington for allowing me to reprint his joke which is singularly appropriate this time of the year. By the way, Santa cell phoned me from the North Pole instructing me to announce to all statisticians that he is packing his bag of hand- carved walnut small case sigma signs to deliver to every "good" statistician on Christmas Eve.