The Washington Post, telling the story of the opioid crisis via data

I love dragging on bad science reporting as much as anyone, but I must give All Of The Credit to the Washington Post and its excellent, data-centered reporting on the opioid epidemic. It is a thing of beauty.

How to use in class:

1) Broadly, this is a fine example of using data to better understand applied problems, medical problems, drug problems, etc.

2) Specifically, this data can be personalized to your locale via WaPo's beautiful, functional website.

3) After you pull up you localized data, descriptive data abound...# of pills, who provided them, who wrote the scripts (y'all...Frontier Pharmacy is like two miles from my house)...

4) Everyone teaches about frequency tables, right? Here is a good example:

5) In addition to localizing this research via the WaPo website, you can also personalize your class by looking for local reporting that uses this data. For instance, the Erie newspaper reporter David Bruce reported on our local problem (.pdf of the report here).

You can also use the big map to find more localized data.

6) You know something is important and damning if wealthy stakeholders try to keep you away from it: The government didn't just offer up this data. The press had to fight for it. This is another good example of large organizations trying to hide unflattering data or influence data (See: Puerto Rico, NFL, Greece, fossil fuel industry, etc.).f

7) Here is an NPR summary of the fight for this data.

**Most of this is behind paywalls. Because reporters have to eat, too. And WaPo has a bunch of lawyers to pay. There are educator discounts available for WaPo and several free views of news stories as well.

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.

Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations

Tyler Vigen has has created a long list of easy-to-paste-into-a-powerpoint graphs that illustrate that correlation does not equal causation. For instance, while per capita consumption of cheese and number of people who die by become tangled in their bed sheets may have a strong relationship (r = 0.947091), no one is saying that cheese consumption leads to bed sheet-related death. Although, you could pose The Third Variable question to your students for some of these relationships). Property of Tyler Vigens, http://i.imgur.com/OfQYQW8.png Vigen has also provided a menu of frequently used variables (deaths by tripping, sunlight by state) to help you look for specific examples. This portion is interactive, as you and your students can generate your own graphs. Below, I generated a graph of marriage rates in Pennsylvania and consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Generated at http://www.tylervigen.com/

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