The Indiana Jones Grail Tablet
After a week of non-stop work on a demanding project for a resident genius, my brain has been lacking in poetic verbiage. Instead, I’ve been on number and wording check overdrive with, thankfully, a wonderful team of colleagues. Last week my sister and I had a conversation about crazy work weeks and we concurred that in order to really love what you do, no matter what the sector, position or field, it’s important to have excellent people beside you in the trenches.
One such colleague offered up this poem, a respite amid the madness, which apparently came from the pen of a university student in a statistics class. In our field of public opinion research, and even more so on the consultancy side, you have to be able to not only understand certain concepts, but be able to talk about them in layperson language, which is not always easy. Even if you know what the concepts are, how they are run and the syntax to run them, it’s still a gift to be able to tell someone in plain speech. In other words, it’s one thing to read the Olde English version of Beowulf while using an archaic dictionary, or even a middling modern translation of the epic poem, but quite another to read the beautiful version translated by Seamus Heaney. In the poet’s translation, the spirit of the original words come alive-- evoked by the use of perfectly conjoined words like “God-cursed Grendel,” which allows for an action-packed brevity to this great work more in tune with its true rendering.
So, this one is for my colleagues, who, on a regular basis work with me in translating numbers into stories and turn complex statistical methods into real English that, just maybe, even Seamus Heaney could understand.
On statistical terminology
by Cory Lation
Whoever invented statistical terms
Had a head that was stuffed with worms.
All these new words are so much junk,
And if I don't learn them, I'm really sunk.
Why's the bell-shaped curve called normal?
Is it normal to be so formal?
There's nothing mean about the mean.
Its just average, as is clearly seen.
And what's so standard about that deviation?
Its a really malicious creation.
Confusing students is its only function.
It frustrates and mystifies, in conjunction.
And who needs the variance?
It only rhymes with hairy ants.
Variance is what analysis is of,
But all my friends would just love
To take all the sums of squares we've seen
And put them within the instructor's between.
I'm just not sure about probability.
I think it caused the prof's early senility.
I often frequent relatively conditional joints,
But that won't get me statistical points.
"Histogram" throws me, at least a bit.
I remember the first time I heard of it.
I wanted an antihistogram to get rid of it.
But then I studied it, and after some beers,
I learned its a bar chart--there went my fears.
Just a bar chart--like Norm's tab at Cheers.
Skewness and kurtosis, there's a pair:
Something you'd wash out of your hair.
Research design, such a burn,
Just more weird terms to learn.
Your constructs are valid, so's your internal,
But if your validity isn't also external,
You should flush your data down the urinal
Or you'll go to a place where the heat is infernal
And study statistics for time eternal.
Then there's t, a test with jam and bread?
And F, the test that we all dread.
And what's so square about the chi?
If I don't get to the root of it, I'll just die.
Scatterplots, boxplots, stems-and-leaves grow,
Sounds like a radio gardening show.
Heteroscedasticity, now there's a word.
I think its when a turtle mates with a bird.
Then we study regression analysis,
A major cause of mental paralysis.
Least squares I like--minimize the nerds!
They like numbers better than words.
The most cools straight line--that's what we need.
I think I know where that line will lead.
Straight out of this class.
Were nearly done with this morass,
And my rhymes are running out of gas.
There's no chance I'll ever pass....
