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Showing posts from December, 2014

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Updated example of using baby names to illustrate bimodal distributions.

The thing about my way of teaching stats is that my cool, novel examples get old really fast. Like, pop culture is on a thirty-day cycle. Anyway, YEARS ago, 2014 to be exact, I blogged about illustrating bimodal data distributions  using baby name data from the Social Security Administration. Specifically, when an older name comes back into vogue, it has a bimodal distribution when you plot time on the X axis.  I stand by this example. However, all of the data illustrations come from 2014. When our traditionally aged college students were 6 or 7. Which makes this example feel a little stale. However, here is some data,  courtesy of Redditor  fevaah ,  showing  old names that are back in vogue through 2025 ! And Eleanor, Violet, Nora, and Hazel are here, illustrating bimodal distributions for a new generation. If you used my old baby-name data, this is a quick, easy refresh for your lectures (or a fun new addition if you didn't).  If this idea was help...

Justin Wolfers' "A Persuasive Chart Showing How Persuasive Charts Are"

NEVER MIND ABOUT THIS ONE, GUYS! https://hal.sorbonne-universite.fr/hal-01580259/file/Dragicevic_Jansen_2017.pdf (Note the second author). ___________________________________________________________ Wolfers (writing for the New York Times) summarizes a study from  Wansink and Tal  (2014) in which participants were either a) presented with just  in-text data about a drug trial or b) the text as well as with a bar graph that conveyed the exact same information. The results can be read below: Wolfers/NYT According to Wansink and Tal, the effects seem to be strongest in people who agreed with the statement "I believe in science". So, a graph makes a claim more "sciencier" and, therefore, more credible? Also, does this mean that science believers aren't being as critical because they already have an underlying belief in what they are reading?  I think this is a good way of conveying the power of graphs to students in a statistics class as well ...

Kristopher Magnusson's "Interpreting Cohen's d effect size"

Kristopher Magnusson (previously featured on this blog for his interactive illustration of correlation ) also has a helpful illustration of effect size . While this example probably has some information that goes beyond an introductory understanding of effect size (via Cohen's d ) I think this still does a great job of illustrating how effect size measures, essentially, the magnitude of the difference between groups (not how improbably those differences are). See below for a screen shot of the tool. http://rpsychologist.com/d3/cohend/, created by Kristopher Magnusson

UCLA's "What statistical analysis should I use?"

This resource from UCLA is , essentially, a decision making tree for determining what kind of statistical analysis is appropriate based upon your data (see below). Screen shot from "What statistical analysis should I use?" Now, such decision making trees are available in many statistics text book...however... what makes this special is the fact that with each test comes code/syntax as well as output for SAS, Stata, SPSS, and R. Which is helpful to our students (and, let's be honest, us instructors/researchers as well).

More memes for those who teach statistics

As created by Jess Hartnett.

Tessa Arias' "The Ultimate Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies"

I think this very important cookie research is appropriate for the Christmas cookie baking season. I also believe that it provides a good example of the scientific method. Arias started out with a baseline cookie recipe (baseline Nestle Toll House Cookie Recipe, which also served as her control group) and modified the recipe in a number of different ways (IVs) in order to study several dependent variables (texture, color, density, etc.). The picture below illustrates the various outcomes per different recipe modifications. For science! http://www.handletheheat.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-chocolate-chip-cookies Also, being true scientist, her original study lead to several follow up studies investigating the effect of different kinds of pans and flours  upon cookie outcomes. http://www.handletheheat.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-chocolate-chip-cookies-part-2 I used this example to introduce hypothesis testing to my students. I had them identify the null and alternative ...