An ode to Western Pennsylvania, in chi-square form

I've been writing this blog, statistics pedagogy articles, chapters, and a whole statistics textbook for over ten years. I'm at the point where I see silly stuff on the internet, and it automatically translates to a statistics example.

Like this recent Tweet from Sheetz about the Pirates/Philly series this weekend.

Twitter poll question: Which PA team is getting the W tonight? Response Options: Pirates, Philly, Me with curly fryz.

https://x.com/sheetz/status/1923397811778785489

This is an unapologetically Western PA tweet. I will be using it as a chi-square goodness-of-fit example with my Western PA students at Gannon University this Fall. I even created a data file that mimics the findings (Methods: n = 380, Results: p < .001. Conclusion: Sheetz followers on Twitter love some curly fry).

If you are a poor, unfortunate soul who has never enjoyed treatz from Sheetz, I feel bad for you. Look up your favorite regional brands on Twitter and translate one of their polls into a chi-square example. Or travel to your nearest Sheetz to experience some damn joy.

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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