The Atlantic's "Congratulations, Ohio! You Are the Sweariest State in the Union"

While it isn't hypothesis driven research data, this data was collected to see which states are the sweariest. The data collection itself is interesting and a good, teachable example. First, the article describes previous research that looked at swearing by state (typically, using publicly available data via Twitter or Facebook). Then, they describe the data collection used for the current research:

"A new map, though, takes a more complicated approach. Instead of using text, it uses data gathered from ... phone calls. You know how, when you call a customer service rep for your ISP or your bank or what have you, you're informed that your call will be recorded? Marchex Institute, the data and research arm of the ad firm Marchex, got ahold of the data that resulted from some recordings, examining more than 600,000 phone calls from the past 12 months—calls placed by consumers to businesses across 30 different industries. It then used call mining technology to isolate the curses therein, cross-referencing them against the state the calls were placed from."

Nice big sample size, archival data, AND data collected in a very naturalistic setting of folks calling and complaining to companies. You could also discuss how this data may be more representative of the average American versus data collected only from folks who use FB or Twitter.

In addition to swearing, they also analyzed the data for courtesy. Way to go, South Carolina!

From The Atlantic

Washington Posts's "GAO says there is no evidence that a TSA program to spot terrorists is effective"

The Travel Security Agency implemented SPOT training in order to teach air port security employees how to spot problematic and potentially dangerous individuals via behavioral cues. This intervention has cost the U.S. government $1 billion+. It doesn't seem to work.

By discussing this with your class, you can discuss the importance of program evaluations as well as validity and reliability. The actual government issued report goes into great detail about how the program evaluation data was collected to demonstrate that SPOT isn't working. The findings (especially the table and figure below) do a nice job of demonstrating the lack of reliability and the lack of validity. This whole story also implicitly demonstrates that the federal government is hiring statisticians with strong research methods backgrounds to conduct program evaluations (= jobs for students).

Here is a summary of the report from the Washington Post.

Here is a short summary and video about the report from CBS.

Here is the actual report.

This table from the official report demonstrates a lack of inter-rater reliability.

This figure from the report demonstrates a lack of validity in terms of SPOT leading to arrests (also demonstrates the concept of false positives/Type I error)

The New York Times "As ‘Normal’ as Rabbits’ Weights and Dragons’ Wings"

The Central Limit Theorem, explained via bunnies and dragons. Brilliant. I hope that someone commissions a statistics textbook from Shu-Yi Chiou immediately.

Property of Shu-Yi Chiou