Clear-Sighted Statistics PowerPoint Lectures: Now Available on Dropbox
In 2020, when I posted my files for Clear-Sighted Statistics on Open Educational Resource sites, I made a troubling discovery; my PowerPoint files were too big to upload. I tried creating zip files, but they were not appreciably smaller. Instead, I created videos of my lectures and posted them on YouTube. This worked well then as I was teaching mostly online due to COVID. Then on September 1, 2023, I retired. I do not expect to teach again, so I forgot about my PowerPoint lectures. And since I no longer have access to Adobe Creative Suite, I cannot update Clear-Sighted Statistics, which I created using Adobe InDesign.
A few months ago, I saw that there were over 40,000 downloads of my Clear-Sighted Statistics files. I returned to my PowerPoint lectures, made some minor stylistic changes, and posted them on DropBox. You can download and use them in your classroom. Here is the link:
As with all files I posted with my Clear-Sighted Statistics OER, my PowerPoint lectures have a Creative Commons license. Please note that these Creative Commons icons appear on all files.
You may download these files, adapt them for your needs, and share them for non-commercial purposes only. All I ask is that you attribute my work to me and share any derivatives of this work under the same Creative Commons restrictions.
My PowerPoint lectures follow the Clear-Sighted Statistics book closely. You probably will find many of these lectures too long for your classroom. Please feel free to skip some of the topics I covered. When I taught Statistics, my lectures did not include all the topics I reviewed in these PowerPoints.
Back in 1984, I worked at the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency in account management. I convinced Ogilvy’s management to buy two early Macs and a laser printer. Our vendor arranged for me to become a beta site for the pre-launch, pre-Microsoft version of PowerPoint. I have used every version of PowerPoint since. I have been shocked by the vast number of truly horrible PowerPoint presentations I have been subjected to. My PowerPoint files are designed so that the presenter is the star of the lectures. The last thing I want is for endless bullet points to torture and divert the audience’s attention from the presenter. Typically, there is only one idea per slide. Each slide is presented with as few words as possible so that the presenter can interact more with the class by talking to students and asking them questions. I also avoid overly dramatic animations and transitions because I do not want to divert the audience’s attention from the presenter.
Why I Wrote Clear-Sighted Statistics
During the Fall 2006 semester, as part of my first full-time academic job, I started teaching Statistics. The textbook my college used has many good qualities, but I was shocked that there were no changes in content since I took my first Statistics class as a sophomore in 1969. This surprised me because I thought and hoped that Statistics was not a dead discipline.
I earned my doctorate in political science from Columbia University. I passed the Ph.D. requirement for Statistics, but I never used it in my research because my concentration was political theory. My dissertation, for example, was a critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Marxism. Upon earning my doctorate in the Spring of 1978, there was a dearth of teaching positions in my field. I left academia. I was accepted into a pilot program to train liberal arts Ph.Ds. for business careers. With 49 other newly minted Ph.D.’s and Assistant Professors with no chance of tenure, I spent the summer at the NYU Graduate School of Business getting a “mini-MBA.” Again, I found myself in a Statistics classroom. While our professor was brilliant, the curriculum was essentially the same mid-century Frequentist Statistics I was exposed to as an under-graduate and graduate student. From 2006 until my retirement in 2023, the newly published introductory Statistics textbooks continued to focus on basic Frequentist Statistics. These books typically lacked any discussion of Effect Size, Statistical Power, the difference between statistical and practical significance, or Bayesian Statistics. In 2019, I went on sabbatical to write my open access introductory Statistics textbook, which I titled Clear-Sighted Statistics. I added the material not covered in the introductory textbooks that publishers’ representatives had tried to get me to assign.
In the final chapter of Clear-Sighted Statistics, I ask whether the discipline of Statistics is undergoing a paradigm shift. To quote my favorite Yogi Berra malapropism, “It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” But when I talk to friends conducting advanced statistical analysis, or when I read the current literature on Statistics, it is clear that the once ridiculed Bayesian Statistics has become a very important analytical tool. Clear-Sighted Statistics, does not have an introduction to Bayesian Statistical Analysis. But if I were writing it today, I would add at least one chapter on this topic instead of the couple of pages I did include. Nevertheless, I believe that Clear-Sighted Statistics is a better introductory Statistics textbook for business, economics, and other social science students taking their first Statistics class than the expensive textbooks publishers still offer. And my PowerPoint lectures will further enable instructors to deliver compelling lectures.
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