Facebook Data Science's "What are we most thankful for?"

Recently, a Facebook craze asked users to list three things you are thankful for for five days. Data scientis ts Winter Mason, Funda Kivran-Swaine, Moira Burke, and Lada Adamic at Fa cebook have analyzed this dat a to better understand the patterns of gratitude publically shared by Facebook users.

The data analysts broke down data by most frequently listed gratitude topic:

Most frequently "liked" gratitude posts: (lots of support for our friends in recovery, which is nice to see).

Gender differences in gratitude...here is data for women. The wine gratitude finding for women was not present in the data for men. Ha.

Idiosyncratic data by state. I would say that Pennsylvania's fondness for country music rings true for me.

How to use in class: This example provides several interesting, easy to read graphs, and the graphs show how researchers can break down a single data set in a variety of interesting ways (by gender, by age, by state). Additionally, this data strikes me as a replication of Seligman's gratitude exercise from the positive psychology literature. You could use this example to discuss the ways in which students think this data (specifically, the things Facebook users say they are grateful for) would differ when the data is collected via Facebook's public forum versus when participants keep a private journal. How might a public display of gratitude differ from a private reflection upon gratitude?

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Logical Fallacy Ref Meme

So, I love me some good statsy memes. They make a brief, important point that sticks in the heads of students. I've recently learned of the Logical Fallacy Ref meme. Here are a couple that apply to stats class:

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