In honor of the 2017 ASA Symposium on Statistical Inference, Lawrence Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso rewrote the Bee Gees’ Grammy-winning hit, Stayin’ Alive, to inspire discussion about the use of p-values and the 0.05 cutoff.
Lyric © 2017 Lawrence Mark Lesser; reprinted with permission
Well you can tell by the way some do a test
They’re where to buy ativan just lookin’ for values blessed;
Draw a line and guard it strong
Against an error of Type One.
With point oh-four-nine, it’s okay:
Their work may see the light of day.
We can try to understand
What makes results significant.
Z of more than 2 lets shaded tails accrue
below point-oh-five, point-oh-five.
That’s what Fisher mused so everybody used
point-oh-five, point-oh-five.
Ah, ha, ha, ha, point-oh-five, point-oh-five
Ah, ha, ha, ha, point-oh-fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive
Lesser also wrote ‘Florence’: A Statistics Song.
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