Fun with Statistics - Prof. Stine

What does it take to make a subject like statistics really enjoyable for a literature major. Is it real life examples, actual business situations from fortune majors or HBR cases? You can get more functional answers than these anywhere else. But ask the ISB class of 2008. The one answer would be "witty one-liners". Professor Bob Stine descended from Wharton and spent three weeks with this batch teaching the first half of the statistics course. In this really short time he has created a lifetime impact with his treatment of the subject and his wit. While i enjoy statistics normally, this time I enjoyed the wit more. I made a note of a good number his one-liners in class. here we go

"We are now comparing apples to donuts"

"This thing is spreading like wild flowers"

"Assume we are holding a stock for as long as a day"

"Don't put all your mangoes in one basket"

"I hope we are appropriately dubious about this assumption"

"SAIL is the puke green line on the chart"

"Ok. I'm done JMPing around here"

"'coz I don't have any kind of life here I played with excel solver"

"I'm extrapolating way outside my experience"

"Linear models terribly don't make much sense in global sense, and lot of times they don't make much sense in the local sense too"

"Average is not good. Like the guy who drowned in a river that was on average 4 feet deep"

"Don't call me Bobbie, 'coz I'll think you are my wife"

"People don't take square roots everyday" - Bob quoting his wife

"These are the god-forbidden log-scale values"

"You call demand as D and do you use P for price or something else perverse"

"9 times out of 8 people appreciate the effort you take to present things"

"You are not going to BS your way thru the exams as they are multiple choice"

"Some people remember some things, others remember other things, but I want you to remember something!"

"Normality is more of a prayer than a necessity"

"It's a hammer in search of a nail"

So that ends the fun and after my not so good show in the mid-terms, this blog about Prof. Stine makes me feel lil better. The weekend has officially started and unlike previous weeks we have one day less and one assignment more :-) !!!