Organizations have frequently tried to shut down/manipulate data for their own ends. Big tobacco and lung cancer and addiction research . The National Football League and Chronic Traumatic Encephaly . And for the last 20 years, the National Rifle Association has successfully blocked funding for research investigating public safety and gun ownership. Essentially, the NRA has concentrated on eliminating funding at the CDC for research related to a better understanding of how guns hurt people. It started in 1996 with the Dickey Amendment and no one has been willing to fight to bring back funding. The APA wrote a piece on this in 2013 that summarizes the issue. In the wake of the shooting in Orlando, NPR did a story explaining how the American Medical Association is trying to change the rules governing gun research  and  the L.A. times published this column . I think this precedence is unfortunate from both sides of the gun debate. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania. I've...

Credit: Quoctrung Bui/NPR Bui, reporting for NPR, shares  interactive graphs that demonstrate when people in different career fields are at the office. Via drop-down menus, you can compare the standard workdays of a variety of different fields (here, "Food Preparation and Serving" versus "All Jobs"). If you scoff at pretty visualizations and want to sink your teeth into the data yourself, may I suggest the original government report entitled, " American Time Use Survey " or a related publication by Kawaguci, Lee, & Hamermesh, 2013 . Demonstrates: Biomodal data, data distribution, variability, work-life balance, different work shifts.

Hi! Here is my presentation from APS . I am posting it so that attendees and everyone else can have access to the links and examples I used. If you weren't there for the presentation, a warning: It is text-light, so there isn't much of a narrative to follow but there are plenty of links and ideas and some soon-to-be-published research ideas to explore. Shoot me an email (hartnett004@gannon.edu) if you have any questions. ALSO: In the talk I reference the U.S. Supreme Court case Hall v. Florida ( also did a blog entry about this case ). Update: The court decided in the favor of Hall/seemed to understand standard error/made it a bit harder to carry out the death penalty, as discussed here by Slate). Woot woot!

UPDATE (12/8/23): YOOOOOOOOO if you got to this post, I suggest that you check out this update for a up-to-date link to this tool. Here is the  Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager , which provides illustrations of trends in baby names, using data from the 1880s to the present. It is a good tool for demonstrating why graphs can be more engaging than tables when presenting data. When I use this in class, I compare the NameVoyager data display to more  traditionally presented data from the the Social Security Agency . Additionally, I teach in a computer lab, so my students were able to search for their own names, which makes the example more self relevant. Yup. I am one of many, many Jessicas that are around my age.