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Showing posts from October, 2023

Blatant self-promotion: My textbook publisher is now accepting requests for exam copies of my textbook!!

Holy smokes. I am almost done with my textbook, Statistics for Everyone. It is a Psych. Stats. textbook. Like, the project started in 2019. It really started when I started my blog in 2012, but my awesome, supportive team at Norton and I started working on this textbook in 2019. I have been supported every step of the way by my editorial team. Norton understood my vision: An engaging, supportive, joyful stats textbook. It is filled with science silliness, and pop culture. Something that prepares students to become statisticians AND citizens in an increasingly data-driven world. Something I created out of my experiences teaching smart, hardworking, sometimes hesitant statistics students at Gannon University since 2009.  I am so excited to share it with you all. It is going to be something special. I want to help you teach your statistics class, and I want to help your students understand statistics.  If you would like to pre-register for an exam copy of the book, please go to t...

The Taylor Swift Effect: Does Tay-tay's presence influence Travis Kelce's performance?

In what is a common occurance for this blog, it all started with a Tweet. A very punny Tweet https://twitter.com/ESPNFantasy/status/1716216331752624509 It begs the question: How are various indicators of Kelce's performance influenced by the presence or absence of one Taylor Swift? What she is steadily attending games this fall, we'll have to wait and see if her international tour, starting 11/7, changes that. Regardless, I'll update THIS SPREADSHEET over the season so you can run all of the independent t-tests you want with your students.  AND SOMEDAY I WILL UPDATE THIS SPREADSHEET TO INCLUDE WHETHER OR NOT THEIR CHILDREN ATTEND I SWEAR IT IS COMING.

That time Mr. Beast did a paired t-test

1. I assure you, your traditional college-aged students know who Mr. Beast is. 2. If you don't know who he is, just Google him. 3. His real name is Jimmy so that's what I'll call him for the remainder of the post because while I respect his work and can't handle writing/referring to an adult human who isn't a wrestler as Mr. Beast again. Anyway, Jimmy shared, via Twitter (it is still Twitter) that he had done some A/B testing on his clips. A story in two Tweets.  https://twitter.com/MrBeast/status/1699460698726613343 https://x.com/MrBeast/status/1699460698726613343?s=20 This story made the rounds because Mr. Beast is such a famous YouTuber . How can you use this example in class? 1. Introduce A/B testing, and how some of the techniques used by professional statisticians are actually pretty straightforward application of basic statistics tests (here, paired t -test). 2. Conduct a paired t -test: I made up some pretend data that imitates these findings . 3. Review the...

Why do post-partum women see faces everywhere?

Y'all. This is a statsy example featuring sensation and perception, developmental, and neuroscience.  The study found that post-partum, but not pregnant, women, saw faces where there were no faces (pareidolia illusion) . It is attributed to the endogenous oxytocin bump women experience after they have babies. Here is a link to Newsweek's treatment of the study and the actual study . Here are some examples of the photos used in the experiment. They are so dear because I see faces. I think my favorite is the clothes washer. Anyway, the researchers used pregnant women, post-partum women, and a control group and measured how often they saw faces. How to use 1. There is a good ol' Mann-Whitney U in this study. Making this the first ever Mann-Whitney U featured on the blog. 2. The researchers used OSF, and the data is available . 3. I like the growing trend of pairing newer and older data visualizations. Here, bar graphs and jitter plots are used to illustrate the same data, and...

The Humble Nutrition Label

I am in a hotel lobby in Portland, OR. I am attended Society for the Teaching of Psychology's Annual Conference on Teaching. I did a talk with my friend Jenny Kunz on syllabus redesign. We found that incorporating graphic design principles in syllabi improve retention of syllabus information.   Anyway, that reminded me of the recent passing of Burkey Belser. Who is that? He is the graphic designer who created the the labels on each and every food item sold in America. I learned about his passing from this remembrance in NPR. IT IS A FREQUENCY TABLE, Y'ALL. I never thought about it this way until, like, a week ago. After seeing these and using these for years and years. Okay, first, let's just take a moment to admire one of Belser's professional head shots. RIGHT?! Anyway, I had never heard of  Belser until I came across this remembrance on NPR: How to use in class: 1. Frequency table example. 2.Sometimes, I like to remind my students that the examples I have for them in...