Robinson & Feltus, 2014 There appears to be a connection between political affiliation, likelihood to vote, and preferred adult beverage. If you lean right and drink Cabernet Savignon, you are more likely to vote than one who enjoys "any malt liquor" and leans left.  This Washington Post story summarizes data analysis performed by the  National Media Research Planning and Placement . NMRPP got their data from market research firm Scarborough . There is also a video embedded in the Washington Post story that summarizes the main findings. I think this is a good example of illustrating data as well as data mining pre-existing data sets for interesting trends. And beer.

The Travel Security Agency implemented SPOT training in order to teach air port security employees how to spot problematic and potentially dangerous individuals via behavioral cues. This intervention has cost the U.S. government $1 billion+. It doesn't seem to work. By discussing this with your class, you can discuss the importance of program evaluations as well as validity and reliability. The actual government issued report goes into great detail about how the program evaluation data was collected to demonstrate that SPOT isn't working. The findings (especially the table and figure below) do a nice job of demonstrating the lack of reliability and the lack of validity. This whole story also implicitly demonstrates that the federal government is hiring statisticians with strong research methods backgrounds to conduct program evaluations (= jobs for students). Here is a summary of the report from the Washington Post. Here is a short summary and video about the report from ...