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...

Spotify generates gobs of data about music.  Most people have seen the end-of-the-year data Spotify generates for each user about their listening patterns . Most people don't know that Spotify also generates a lot of data about individual songs. Some of it is straightforward: tempo, genre, length. However, Spotify also has its own niche way of quantifying songs: Danceability. Accousticness. Here is a whole list of their variables and descriptions from researchers at CMU:  https://www.stat.cmu.edu/capstoneresearch/315files_s23/team23.html What does this mean for a stats teacher? You have access to highly personalizable data sets, rooted in music, with gobs and gobs of variables for each song...or artist...or album...or year of release...or genre (like, so many ways to divide up your data).  For instance,  I created a data set with Spotify data for 1989 and 1989 (Taylor's Version) to teach paired  t -tests . How do Taylor's re-recordings compare to the originals?...

This article, written by Matt Daniels  for The Pudding , allows you to play around with a whole bunch of Spotify user data in order to generate visualizations of song popularity over time. You can generate custom visualizations using the very interactive sections on this website. For instance, there is a special visualization that allows you to finally quantify the Biggie/Tupac Rivalry. So, data and pop culture are my two favorite things. I could play with these different interactive pieces all day long. But there are also some specific ways you could use this in class. 1) Generate unique descriptive data for different musicians and then ask you students to create visualizations using the software of your choosing. Below, I've queried Dixie Chicks play data. Students could enter their own favorite artist. Note: They data only runs through 2005. 2) Sampling errors: Here is a description of the methodology used for this data: Is this representative of all data...

I often share news stories that illustrate easy-to-follow, engaging research that appeals to undergraduates. For the first time, I'm also providing a mini data set that 1) mimics the original findings and 2) provides an example of ANOVA. This story by Patty Neighmond , reporting for NPR, describes a  study  investigating the role of music in pain reduction. The study used three groups of kids, all recovering from surgery. The kids either 1) listened to music, 2) listened to an audio books, or 3) sat with noise-cancelling ear phones for 30 minutes. The researchers found that kids in both the music and audio book experienced pain reduction levels comparable to over-the-counter pain medication while the control group enjoyed no such benefits. And the research used the 10-point FACES scale, allowing for a side discussion about how we collect data from humans who don't have the best vocabularies or limited communication skills. This study can also be used as a way t...

This tongue-in-cheek  regression analysis found a way to predict the "Hipster Music Index" of a given artist by plotting # of Facebook shares of said artist's Pitchfork magazine review on they y-axis and Pitchfork magazine review score on the x-axis. If an artist falls above the linear regression line, they aren't "hipster". If they fall below the line, they are. For example, Kanye West is a Pitchfork darling but also widely shared on FB, and, thus demonstrating too much popular appeal to be a hipster darling (as opposed to Sun Kill Moon (?), who is beloved by both Pitchfork but not overly shared on FB). As instructors, we typically talk about the regression line as an equation for prediction, but Priconomics uses the line in a slightly different way in order to make predictions. Also, if you go to the source article, there are tables displaying the difference between the predicted Y-value (FB Likes) for a given artist versus the actual Y-value, which coul...

a) The addition of this post means that I now have TWO Snoop Dogg blogg labels  for this blog. b) Daniels' graph allows students to see archival data (and research decisions used when deciding how to analyze the archival data as well as content analysis) in order to determine which rapper has the largest vocabulary. Here is Matthew Daniels interactive chart detailing the vocabularies of numerous, prominent rappers. Daniels sampled each musician's first 35,000 lyrics for the number of unique words present. He went with 35,000 in order to compare more established artists to more recent artists who have published fewer songs. (The appropriateness of this decision could be a source of debate in a research methods class.) Additionally, derivatives of the same word are counted uniquely (pimps, pimp, pimping, and pimpin count as four words). This decision was guided, from what I can gather, by the time of content analysis performed. Property of Matthew Daniels...note: The ori...

Lately, there have been a lot of quizzes popping up on my Facebook feed ("What breed of dog are you?", "What character from Harry Potter are you?"). As a psychologist who tinkers in statistics, I have pondered the psychometric properties of such quizzes and concluded that these quizzes where probably not properly vetted in peer-reviewed journals. Now I have a tiny bit of evidence to support that conclusion. What better way to ensure that a scale is valid than by using the standard of concurrent validity (popular in I/O psychology)? This actually happened when renowned Shirley Manson Subject Matter Expert, Shirley Manson, lead singer of the band Garbage, took the "Which Alt-rock Grrrl are you?" quiz and she didn't score as herself (as she posted on Facebook and reported by A.V. Club ). From Facebook, via A.V. Club An excellent example of an invalid test (or concurrent validity for you I/O types).