Happy New Year!
Statistically Speaking
Look out “Bell"-ow
Island Time
They Won’t Actually Rhyme
300

A craze which began in the summer of 2016 stemmed from a video of a man successfully doing this rather simple action at a high school talent show, inspiring compilations and competitions of mostly middle school-aged boys doing the same to sprout up online.

Bottle Flip

300

The Expected Value is another name for this highly-descriptive summary statistic, telling you what value to expect of the long-run average when sampling from a distribution.

Mean
300

Helll-oo! He invented the telephone

Alexander Graham Bell

300

If you find yourself on an Island in the Sun, then this band might be playing in the background

Weezer

300

A single unit of language & a sharp weapon with a long blade

Word & Sword

600

This hit 2016 movie later became the subject of “Envelopegate,” a mix-up at the 2017 Oscars which mistakenly announced it as Best Picture instead of the true winner, Moonlight.

La La Land

600

This type of testing is named after the step in the Scientific Method where a researcher develops their claim, with the goal being to disprove an assumption by a preponderance of the evidence.

Hypothesis Testing

600

This fairy's love for Peter didn't pan out

Tinker Bell

600

In the news recently, this island is one of the least densely populated places on the planet

Greenland

600

A fashion show runway walker & to sing in a style that fluctuates between falsetto & normal

Model & Yodel

900

In 2016, we were in this Era of Taylor Swift’s pop stardom, with the titular album for the time winning the Grammy Award for the Album of the Year.

1989

900

The correlation coefficient, which measures the strength of a linear relationship on a scale from -1 to 1, is represented by this letter, which is also the name of a popular coding language.

R

900

On July 8, 1776 it was sounded in the tower of Independence Hall

Liberty Bell

900

The Hawaiian Islands are the result of this phenomenon, where an area of the mantle is especially warm below the middle of a tectonic plate

A hotspot

900

An unrecognized person & fury

Stranger & Anger

1200

The 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio were the first Games in over 100 years to feature this classic recreational sport played on the “links,” with the golds going to Justin Rose of Great Britain and Inbee Park of South Korea.

Golf

1200

This statistical measure quantifies the amount of variation in a set of data relative to its mean; you will often see this metric on Canvas announcements detailing average exam scores.

Standard Deviation

1200

Sailors wore these long before the groovy folks in the '60s

Bell-Bottoms

1200

This small volcanic island 750 miles south of Tokyo is administratively part of the city, although no civilians have lived there since 1944.

Iwo Jima

1200

Your immortal part & a ball out of play

Soul & Foul

1500

A corporate megamerger between this tech giant and this widely-used networking platform was announced in June 2016 and closed by December 2016, connecting the former’s cloud-based software to the latter’s professional data.

Microsoft and Linkedin

1500

This type of random variable involving the Euler constant e has a density function that exhibits “memorylessness,” meaning that the probability that X > (a+b) given that X > a is the same as the probability that X > b.

Exponential Random Variable

1500

As one word, it's a plant also called deadly nightshade; as 2 words, a Stevie Nicks album

Belladonna/"Bella Donna"

1500

The largest and most populated of the Canary Islands, this was the site of the worst accident in aviation history

Tenerife

1500

A large carnivorous feline of Asia & a landlocked desert nation of West Africa

Tiger & Niger

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