I have written about the NFL's response to concussion data as a case study of how to obfuscate data. This has been covered in many places, including in The Atlantic and on PBS . In my experience, concussions are a prime source of conversation for traditionally college-aged students. Many of them were high school athletes. Fewer are college athletes. Most college students have personally experienced a concussion or loves someone who has. Now, the University of Pittsburgh is opening the National Sports Brain Bank . This is for athletes, not just football players. Two former Steelers have promised their brains, as have two scientists who played contact sports.  Here is a press release from the University of Pittsburgh . Here is a news report  featuring the two Steelers who have promised to donate their brains. However, as described by Aschwander, we still don't know how many football players have CTE (please read this piece, it is such good stats literacy from Aschwander...

Reddit user jonjiv conducted a case study in human language development. He carefully monitored his son's speaking ability, and here is what he found: https://imgur.com/gallery/KwZ6C#qLwsn9S...go to this link for a clearer picture of the chart! How to use in class: 1) Good for Developmental Psychology. Look at that naming explosion! 2) Good to demonstrate how nerdy data collection can happen in our own lives. 3) Within versus between subject design. Instead of sampling separate 10, 11, 12, etc. month old children, we have real-time data collected from one child. AND this isn't retrospective data, either. 4) Jonjiv even briefly describes his "research methodology" in the original post. The word had to be used in a contextually appropriate manner AND observed by both him and his wife (inter-rater reliability!). He also stored his data in a Google sheet because of convenience/ease of tracking via cell phone.

This interactive tool from Pew research illustrates left and right skew as well as median and longitudinal data. The x-axis indicates how politically consistent (as determined by a survey of political issues) self-identified republicans and democrats are across time. Press the button and you can animate data, or cut up the data so you only see one party or only the most politically active Americans. http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/section-1-growing-ideological-consistency/#interactive The data for both political part goes from being normally distributed in 1994 to skewed by 2014. And you can watch what happens to the median as the political winds change (and perhaps remind your students as to why mean would be the less desirable measure of central tendency for this example). I think it is interesting to see the relative unity in political thought (as demonstrated by more Republicans and Democrats indicating mixed political opinions) in the wake of 9/11 but more politicall...

In addition to being an astronaut, Scott Kelly is one-half of a pair of twins and a lab rat for NASA researchers studying space travel's effects on the human body. This NPR story details how NASA has been using twin research to learn more about the side-effects of prolonged time in space as the agency prepares to go to Mars. Scott and his twin, Mark (also an astronaut!), have been providing all manner of biodata to researchers. In particular, researchers are interested in the effects of weightlessness and exposure to space radiation on aging. This story provides a good example in class, as you can discuss twin AND longitudinal research. I think you could also use this example to introduce the concept of paired t -tests. UPDATE 2/9/2017: Preliminary research is available if you want to flesh out this example.  MOAR UPDATES 3/3/21: CHECK OUT this PBS documentary featuring the twins! ESPECIALLY useful for a brief class period: This 2-minute clip that describes the twin ...

My favorite data is data that is both counter-intuitive and tests the efficacy of commonly held beliefs. Emily Oster's (writing for 538) presents such  data in her investigation of vitamin efficacy . The short version of this article: Data that associates vitamins with health gains are based on crap observational research. More recent and better research throws lots of shade on vitamin usage. Specific highlights that could make for good class discussion: -This article explains the flaws in observational research as well as an example of how to do good observational research well (via The Physician's Health Study , with large samples of demographically similar individuals as described in the portion of the article featuring the Vitamin E study). This point provides an example of why controlled, double-blind lab research is the king of all the research. -This is an accessible example as most of your students took their Flintstones. -The article also demonstrates The Thir...