While most of my class time is dedicated to the specifics of performing and interpreting inferential tests, basic statistical literacy and thinking are equally important lessons. Here are some of the big-picture literacy ideas I want my students to think about in my stats classes: 1. How can we use data to understand patterns to make predictions? 2. How can we separate the signal from the noise?  3. How can data actually inform real life and current events? 4. How can we repurpose existing data in a world where data is everywhere? Here is an example I JUST found that addresses all of these ideas. The  Pentagon Pizza Report is an X account that monitors Google "Popular times" data in pizzerias near the Pentagon to predict military activity.  The X account asserts that unusually high, later-than-normal foot traffic at pizzerias near the Pentagon (x) may indicate that Pentagon military staff are working late and need to grab take-out for dinner(y).  Most recently, the...

  You aren't a proper stats nerd if you have not scrolled for an hour through all of  The Pudding's  content .  Thank goodness for The Pudding, which helped me spice up the discussion boards in my online stats class. For a long time, I emphasized rigor over wonder. In my stats class, I had functionally reasonable but not terribly engaging topics for class discussion. That changed last semester. I spiced up my discussion board with some of my favorite data visualizations, like this one about using a fast food app to track power outages after a natural disaster and this one that illustrates data on the efficacy of nutritional supplements in a beautiful and functional way. Here is another that lets students look at trends in art and wonder about how this may reflect on cultural shifts in courting and romantic relationships . TL;DR The Pudding recently shared a post about trends in love songs from 1958 through 2023. The whole interactive is very engaging and lets yo...

I love research that is counterintuitive. It is interesting to me and makes a strong, memorable example for the classroom. That's why I'm recommending Carroll's piece  from the NYT. It questions the conventional wisdom that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. As Carroll details, there is a long standing and strong belief in nutrition research claiming that breakfast reduces obesity and leads to numerous healthy outcomes. But most nutrition research is correlational, not causal. AND there seems to be an echo-chamber effect, such that folks are miss-citing previous nutrition research to bring it in line with the breakfast research. Reasons to use this article as a discussion piece in your statistics or research methods course: -Highlights the difference between correlation and causation -Provides an easy to understand example of publication bias ("no breakfast = obesity" is considered a fact, studies that found the opposite were less likely to...

This  link  is worth it for these pictures alone: I know, right? Perfect for teaching research methods and explaining the positivity bias in publication. These figures also sum up the reasoning behind the new journal described in this article. New Negatives in Plant Science was founded in order to combat the file drawer problem. It publishes non-significant research. It is open access. It publishes commentaries. It even plans special issues for specific controversial topics within Plant Science. Which absolutely, positively are NOT my jam. However, the creators of this journal hope that it will serve as a model for other fields. Given the recent flare up in the Replication Crisis (now Replication War?), this new journal provides a model for on-going, peer reviewed, replication and debate. I think this journal (or the idea behind this journal) could be used in a research methods class as a discussion piece. Specifically, how else could we reduce the file dra...

So, this is a story of data mining and Mechanical Turk and data privacy and political campaigns. Lots of good stuff for class discussion about data privacy, applied use of data, etc..  It won't exactly teach your students how to ANOVA, but it is a good and timely discussion piece. Short version of the story: Ted Cruz's campaign hired a consulting firm (Strategic Communications Laboratories, SCL) to gather information about potential voters. They did so by using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to recruit participants. Participants were asked to complete a survey that would give SCL access to your Facebook account. SCL would then download all visible user information from you. And then they would download the same information FROM ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS who did not consent to be involved in the study. Some mTurk users claim this was a violation of Amazon's Terms of Service. This data was then used to create psychological profiles for campaigning purposes. Discussion pieces: ...

Aschwanden (for fivethirtyeight.com) did an extensive piece that summarizes that data/p-hacking/what's wrong with statistical significance crisis in statistics. There is a focus on the social sciences, including some quotes from Brian Nosek regarding his replication work. The report also draws attention to  Retraction Watch  and Center for Open Science as well as retractions of findings (as an indicator of fraud and data misuse). The article also describes our funny bias of sticking to early, big research findings even after those research findings are disproved (example used here is the breakfast eating:weight loss relationship). The whole article could be used for a statistics or research methods class. I do think that the p-hacking interactive tool found in this report could be especially useful illustration of How to Lie with Statistics. The "Hack your way to scientific glory" interactive piece demonstrates that if you fool around enough with your operationalized...

NPR did a series of stories exposing research that the U.S. government conducted during WWII. This research exposed American soldiers to mustard gas for research purposes. In some instances, the government targeted soldiers of color, believing that they had tougher/different skin that would make them more resistant to this form of chemical warfare. Here is the  whole series of stories  (from the  original research, exposed via Freedom of Information Act , to  NPR working to find the effected veterans ). None of the soldiers ever received any special dispensation or medical care due to their involvement. Participants were not given the choice to discontinue participation without prejudice, as recalled below by one of the surviving veterans: "We weren't told what it was," says Charlie Cavell, who was 19 when he volunteered for the program in exchange for two weeks' vacation. "Until we actually got into the process of being in that room and realized, wait a m...

I think that it is so, so important to introduce statistics students to the big picture of how data is used in their every day lives. Even with all of the material that we are charged with covering in introduction to statistics, I think it is still important to touch on topics like Big Data and Data Mining in order to emphasize to our students how ubiquitous statistics are in our lives.  In my honors section, I assign multiple readings (news stories, TED talks, NPR stories) prior to a day of discussion devoted to this topic. In my non-honors sections of statistics and my online sections, I've used electronic discussion boards to introduce the topic via news stories. I also have a manuscript in press that describes a way to introduce very basic data mining techniques in the Introduction to Statistics classroom. That's why I think this NPR news story is worth sharing. Shahani describes and provides data (from Pew) to argue that Americans are worried about the security of...

Pew recently revisited the question of how survey modality can influence survey responses.  In particular, this survey used both web and telephone based surveys to ask participants about their attitudes towards politicians, perceptions of discrimination, and their satisfaction with life. As summarized in the article, the big differences are: "1)  People expressed more negative views of politicians in Web surveys than in phone surveys."  "2)  People who took phone surveys were more likely than those who took Web surveys to say that certain groups of people – such as gays and lesbians, Hispanics, and blacks – faced “a lot” of discrimination ."  "3)  People were more likely to say they are happy with their family and social life when asked by a person over the phone than when answering questions on the Web ."     The social psychologist in me likes this as an example of the Social Desirability Bias. When spea...

http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800 This story demonstrates how easy it is to do crap science, get it published in a pay-to-play journal, and market your research (to a global audience). Within this story, there are some good examples of Type I error, p -hacking, sensationalist science reporting, and, frankly, our obsession with weight and fitness and easy fixes—also, chocolate. Here is the original story, as told to io9.com by the perpetrator of this very conscientious fraud, John Bohannon . Bohannon ran this con to expose just how open to corruption and manipulation the whole research publication process can be ( BioMed Central scandal , for another example), especially when it just the kind of research that is bound to get a lot of media attention ( LaCour scandal , for another example). Bohannon set out to "demonstrate" that dark chocolate can contribute to weight loss. He ran an actual study ( n = 26). He went on a ...

How do we count the number of poor people in America? How do we operationalize "poor"? That is the psychometric topic of this opinion piece from the New York Times  ( .pdf of same here ). This article outlines several ways of defining poor in America, including: 1)"Jencks’s methodology is simple. He starts with the official 2013 United States poverty rate of 14.5 percent. In 2013, the government determined that 45.3 million people in the United States were living in poverty, or 14.5 percent of the population.Jencks makes three subtractions from the official level to account for expanded food and housing benefits (3 percentage points); the refundable earned-income tax credit and child tax credit (3 points); and the use of the Personal Consumption Expenditures index instead of the Consumer Price Index to measure inflation (3.7 percentage points)." 2)  " Other credible ways to define poverty  paint a different picture. One is to count all those living ...

Scott Janish loves beer, statistics, and blogging (a man after my own heart). His blog discusses home brewing as well as data related to beer. One of his statsy blog posts  looked at the relationship between average alcohol by volume for a beer style (below, on the x-axis) and the average rating (from beeradvocate.com , y-axis). He found, perhaps intuitively, a positive correlation between the average Beer Style review for a type of beer and the moderate alcohol content for that type of beer. Scott was kind enough to provide us with his data set, turning this into a most teachable moment. http://scottjanish.com/relationship-of-abv-to-beer-scores/ How to use it in class: 1) Scott provides his data. The r is .418, which isn't mighty impressive. However, you could teach your students about influential observations/outliers in regression/correlation by asking them to return to the original data, eliminate the 9 data points inconsistent with the larger pattern, and reanalyze th...

51% of the babies born in the US are male. Why? For a long time, people just assumed that the skew started at conception. Then Steven Orzack decided to test this assumption. He (and colleagues) collected sex data from abortions, miscarriages, live births (30 million records!), fertility clinics (140,00 embryos!), and different fetal screening tests (90,000 medical records!) to really get at the root of the sex skew/conception assumption. And the assumption didn't hold up: The sex ratio is pretty close to 50:50 at conception. Further analysis of the data found that female fetuses are more likely to be lost during pregnancy. Original research article here . Richard Harris' (reporting for NPR) radio story and interview with Orzack here . Use this story in class as a discussion piece about long held (but never empirically supported) assumptions in the sciences and why we need to conduct research in order to test such assumptions. For example: 1) Discuss the weaknesses of previo...

Here is an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education ( .pdf  in case you hit the pay wall) about what happens when university PR promotes research findings in a way that exaggerates or completely misrepresents the findings. Several examples of this are included (Smelling farts cures cancer? What?), including empirical study of how health related research is translated into press releases ( Sumner et al. , 2014). The Sumner et al. piece found, that among other things, that 40% of the press releases studied contained exaggerated advice based upon research findings. I think that this is an important topic to address as we teach our student not to simply perform statistical analyses, but to be savvy consumers of statistics. This may be a nice reading to couple with the traditional research methods assignment of asking students to find research stories in popular media and compare and contrast the news story with the actual research article. If you would like more di...

One way to engage students in the classroom is by bringing in debates and real world examples. Sometimes, such debates take place largely over social media. A Facebook question du jour: Is "free-range" (letting your kids go out side, walk to the store, etc. without supervision) a good way to build independence or child neglect? Anecdotes abound, but how safe is your kid when they are out on their own? What kind of data could help us answer this question objectively? http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/opinion/the-case-for-free- range-parenting.html The first piece of information comes from an opinion piece by Clemens Wergin from the New York Times ( .pdf in case of pay wall). Wergin describes how free range parenting is the norm in Germany and contrasts American attitudes to German attitudes, providing a quick example of multicultralism (and why we should never assume that the American attitude towards something is the only opinion). He then  provides data that explain...

Taylor, writing for Mashable , describes what happens when carefully conducted public health research (published in the  Journal of the American Medical Association ) becomes attention grabbing and poorly represented click bait. Data published in JAMA (Case, Burwick, Volpp, & Patel, 2015) tested the step-counting reliability of various wearable fitness tracking devices and smart phone apps (see the data below). In addition to checking the reliability of various devices, the article makes an argument that, from a public health perspective, lots of people have smart phones but not nearly as many people have fitness trackers. So, a way to encourage wellness may be to encourage people to use the the fitness capacities within their smart phone (easier and cheaper than buying a fitness tracker). The authors never argue that fitness trackers are bad, just that 1) some are more reliable than others and 2) the easiest way to get people to engage in more mindful walking...

UPDATE: The average cost of a wedding is now $33,391, as of 2017 . Here is the most up to date infographic: Otherwise, my main points from the original version of this survey are still the same: 1) To-be-weds surveyed for this data come were users of a website used to plan/discuss/squee about pending nuptials. So, this isn't a random survey. 2) If you look at the fine print for the survey, the average cost points quoted come from people who paid for a given service. So, if you didn't have a reception band ($0 spent) your data wasn't used to create the average. Which probably leads to inflation of all of these numbers. _________________________________________ Original Post: This infographic describes the costs associated with an "average" wedding. It is a good example non-representative sampling and bending the truth via lies of omission. For the social psychologists in the crowd, this may also provide a good example of persuasion by establishing ...

This story details the application of American election polling techniques to Afghanistan's fledgling democracy. Essentially, international groups are attempting to poll Afghans prior to their April 2014 presidential elections as to combat voter fraud and raise awareness about the election. However, how do researchers go about collecting data in a country where few people have telephones, many people are illiterate, and just about everyone is weary about strangers approaching them and asking them sensitive questions about their political opinions? The story also touches on issues of social desirability as well as the decisions  a researcher makes regarding the kinds of response options to use in survey research. I think that this would be a good story to share with a cranky undergraduate research methods class that thinks that collecting data from the undergraduate convenience sample is really, really hard. Less snarkily, this may be useful when teaching multiculturalism or ...