While I was attending the Teaching Institute at APS, I attended Wind Goodfriend's talk about using case studies in the classroom. Which got me thinking about fun case studies for statistics. But not, like, the classic story about Guinness Brewery and the t-test . I want case studies that feature a regular person in a regular job who used their personal expertise to deduce from data to do something great. An example popped into my head while I was walking my dog and listening to the Hamilton soundtrack: Hercules Mulligan. Okieriete Onaodowan, portraying Hercules Mulligan in Hamilton He was a spy for America during the American Revolution. He was a tailor and did a lot of work for British military officers. This gave him access to data that he shared through a spy network to infer the timing of British military operations. Here is a better summary, from the CIA:  I like this example because he wasn't George Washington. And he wasn't Alexander Hamilton. He had t...

NOTE: SPOILERS ABOUND. The Good Place is on NBC. And I love it.  At the heart of the show is one demon's (Michael) efforts to create a new version of hell that is only hellish because every person is already being punished by who and what they are. Right, I know. Anyway, in Season 3, Episode 11, Michael's bosses argue that this hell isn't working because it actually leads to self-improvement and fulfillment for everyone is supposed to be tormented. And the bosses argue that the self-improvement is a fluke. So one of the other characters, a philosopher named Chidi, suggests...SCIENTIFIC REPLICATION!! The whole episode is great, but here are some screenshots to get started.

I am a fan of explaining the heart of a statistical analysis conceptually with words and examples, not with math. Information Is Beautiful has a gorgeous new interactive, Diversity in Tech , that uses data visualization to present gender and ethnic representation among employees at various big-name internet firms. I think this example explains why we might use Chi-Square Goodness of Fit. I think it could also be used in an I-O class. So, what this interactive gives you is a list of the main, big online firms. And then the proportions of different sort of people who fall into each category. See below: When I look at that US Population baseline information, I see a bunch of expected data. And then when I see the data for different firms, I see Observed data. So, I see a bunch of conceptual examples for chi-square Goodness of Fit. For example, look at gender. 51% of the population is female. That is you Expected data. Compare that to data for Indiegogo. They have 50% female e...

In my stats classes, we discuss popular claims that have been proven/disproven by research. So, learning styles. Vitamins. One claim we dig into are the wide array of claims made about the health benefits of different foods and folk beliefs about nutrition. But how to get into it? That is such a big field, looking at different foods used for different conditions. Send your students to InformationIsBeautiful's Snake Oil Super foods , which sorted through all of good studies and created an interactive data viz to summarize. For instance, these are three foods, backed by science, for very specific issues: BUT GET THIS: If you scroll over any of them, you get a quick summary of the findings AND a link to the research article. See below for Oats. NOICE. The information isn't limited to slam dunks, either, it fleshes out promising foods and weak links as well. AND...this is great...below the visualization there is all sorts of information on their methodo...

TL; DR- Effect size interpretation requires more than numeric interpretation of the effect size. You need to think about what would be considered a big deal, real-life change worth pursuing, given the real-world implications for your data. For example, there is a  malaria vaccine with a 30% success rate undergoing  a large scale trial in Malawi . If you consider that many other vaccines have much higher success rates, 30% seems like a relatively small "real world" impact, right? However, two million people are diagnosed with malaria every year. If science could help 30% of two million, the relatively small effect of 30% is a big deal. Hell, a 10% reduction would be wonderful. So, a small practical effect, like "just" 30%, is actually a big deal, given the issue's scale. How to use this news story: a) Interpreting effect sizes beyond Cohen's numeric recommendations. b) A primer on large-scale medical trials and their ridiculously large n-sizes and tra...