Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel

Sexually coercive male chimpanzees sire more offspring.

In sexually reproducing animals, male and female reproductive strategies often conflict. In some species, males use aggression to overcome female choice, but debate persists over the extent to which this strategy is successful. Previous studies of male aggression toward females among wild chimpanzees have yielded contradictory results about the relationship between aggression and mating behavior. Critically, however, copulation frequency in primates is not always predictive of reproductive success. We analyzed a 17-year sample of behavioral and genetic data from the Kasekela chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) community in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, to test the hypothesis that male aggression toward females increases male reproductive success. We examined the effect of male aggression toward females during ovarian cycling, including periods when the females were sexually receptive (swollen) and periods when they were not. We found that, after controlling for confounding factors, male aggression during a females swollen periods was positively correlated with copulation frequency. However, aggression toward swollen females was not predictive of paternity. Instead, aggression by high-ranking males toward females during their nonswollen periods was positively associated with likelihood of paternity. This indicates that long-term patterns of intimidation allow high-ranking males to increase their reproductive success, supporting the sexual coercion hypothesis. To our knowledge, this is the first study to present genetic evidence of sexual coercion as an adaptive strategy in a social mammal.

Teaching Statistical Thinking in the Data Deluge

Engaging with data is at the heart of statistical thinking, but readily-available data are now complex and large, and so statistical thinking is perhaps also more complex than in the recent past. We discuss an undergraduate event, DataFest, as a means for supplementing classroom approaches to teaching statistical thinking, and discuss lessons learned from observations during two DataFests held at two universities in the United States.

Infrastructure and Tools for Teaching Computing Throughout the Statistical Curriculum

ABSTRACT Modern statistics is fundamentally a computational discipline, but too often this fact is not reflected in our statistics curricula. With the rise of big data and data science, it has become increasingly clear that students want, expect, and need explicit training in this area of the discipline. Additionally, recent curricular guidelines clearly state that working with data requires extensive computing skills and that statistics students should be fluent in accessing, manipulating, analyzing, and modeling with professional statistical analysis software. Much has been written in the statistics education literature about pedagogical tools and approaches to provide a practical computational foundation for students. This article discusses the computational infrastructure and toolkit choices to allow for these pedagogical innovations while minimizing frustration and improving adoption for both our students and instructors. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Taking a Chance in the Classroom: La Quinta is Spanish for “Next to Denny's”

The observation that “La Quinta is Spanish for ‘next to Denny’s’” is a joke made famous by the late comedian Mitch Hedberg. Last year, John Reiser, on his new jersey geographer blog, wrote up an analysis of this joke using data scraped from the respective websites of Denny’s (a diner chain) and La Quinta Inns and Suites (a hotel chain). We have used Reiser’s work as inspiration for developing a team-based homework assignment in both our undergraduateand master’s-level statistical computing courses at Duke University. As part of this assignment, students replicate Reiser’s analysis by scraping location information from both Denny’s and La Quinta’s websites using R (instead of Python) and then analyzing and visualizing the validity of Mitch Hedberg’s joke. There are a few reasons why we like this application:

Interactivity online and on-campus: Data Analysis and Statistical Inference

“Professor Cetinkaya-Rundel does an amazing job teaching the class. Clickers are a unique way to engage students and to make lectures interesting. The videos, though at times a bit repetitive, are thorough and very helpful. The professor’s willingness to gather new data sets and incorporate real-world events into lectures is much appreciated– the associations help make the material much more interesting.”

Taking a Chance in the Classroom: A Classroom Project for Generation Z

The Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE): College Report recommends using real data in introductory statistics courses to provide context and authenticity to re...

Taking a Chance in the Classroom: The Real Secret to Genius? Reading Between the Lines

In October of 2012, Dr. Franz Messerli, a cardiologist, published “Chocolate Consumption, Cognitive Function, and Nobel Laureates” in the Occasional Notes section of The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) regarding the association between a country’s chocolate consumption and its rate of Nobel prize winners. This research article presents a formal argument as to why chocolate is hypothesized to improve cognitive function in people and establishes the number of Nobel laureates per capita as a surrogate for population-level cognitive function. Dr. Messerli gathered data from the Internet regarding chocolate consumption and Nobel prize winners from 23 countries, and statistical analysis showed a high, positive correlation between the two. Although this gem of an article is ripe with tongue‐in‐cheek comments, general readers who skimmed the article or who forfeited their morning coffee are likely to miss Dr. Messerli’s satirical tone. In fact, many outlets of the general media misinterpreted the article. Sensational headlines such as “Secret to Winning a Nobel Prize? Eat More Chocolate” (USA Today), “Want to Win a Nobel Prize? Eat More Chocolate” (msnNOW), and “The Secret to Genius? It Might Be More Chocolate” (NPR) ensued. msnNOW even stated, “No, this isn’t some wonderful hoax: The study was authored by Franz Messerli, a genuine doctor, and published in the NEJM, a genuine medical publication.” While the story was reported with varying levels of accuracy, some outlets like NPR and Reuters did manage to get the joke and even provided an insightful interview excerpt with Dr. Messerli (despite their misleading headlines). The stats.org article “Cacao or Caca? How the Media Bit into Chocolate Nobel Prize Link” provides a nice overview of the media’s pitfalls. While Dr. Messerli’s shtick is to poke fun at the p‐value, this article provides a valuable platform for discussing other important ideas in an introductory statistics course at both the high-school and college levels, including study design, confounding variables, the real secret to Genius? reading between the lines

Taking a Chance in the Classroom: Making the Old New Again

making the old new Again The harmful effects of high blood-lead levels in children have been known and reported for more than 35 years, yet related headlines are still common. Using the internet it is not hard to find recent reports to convince students that lead poisoning in children, a problem discovered long ago, is an important modern-day global health concern. Excerpts from three postings within the last year are included here:

Taking a Chance in the Classroom: Exploring Google's Transparency Report

In October of 2011, Google released its transparency report, revealing the number of requests received from government agencies and courts around the world for content removal from web search results or other Google-owned sites such as YouTube and Blogger, as well as data on users involved in criminal cases. Google summarizes why they chose to release this information in their report: “Transparency is a core value at Google. As a company, we feel it is our responsibility to ensure that we maximize transparency around the flow of information related to our tools and services. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom, and ultimately more power for the individual.” Using the original data released by Google and additional countrylevel variables such as population, Internet access, and indicators of development and democracy, we show how teachers and students can investigate relationships between countries’ data request behavior, Google’s compliance rate, and other country characteristics. This data set is timely and likely to be of interest to students at all levels, especially at a time when Internet censorship and data privacy are such hot topics. It is also a rich data set for thorough exploratory data analysis and illustrating problems with missing and censored data. Standard inferential techniques are not really appropriate for analyzing these data since the 42 countries included in the data set do not constitute a representative Exploring Google’s transparency report