I found this Tweet, which leads to a brief report on BBC. A recent report from the World Obesity Federation shows COVID death rates are higher in countries where more than half the population is overweight. Cause and effect, or bad statistics? @TimHarford and @d_spiegel explore - with some maths from me. You can listen on @BBCSounds https://t.co/hevepmz8RC — stuart mcdonald (@ActuaryByDay) March 14, 2021 The BBC has a show called "More or Less," and they explained a recent research finding connecting obesity to COVID 19 deaths.  Here is the original research study . Here is a pop treatment of the original study . For more stats news, you can follow  "More or Less" on Twitter . And they cram, like, a half dozen lessons in this story. It is amazing. I've tried to highlight some of the topics touched upon in this story. How can you use it in class? I think it would be a good final exam question. You could have your students listen to the story, and highlight ...

As described here, legislatures in Puerto Rico attempted to take independent authority away from the Puetero Rican Institute of Statistics (PRIS), a governmental watch dog in charge of double checking statistics and research methods used by the government . This decision was made in order to streamline government, which is understandable. But it was also problematic because watchdogs need independence in order to have the power and safety to say unpopular things. Anyway, the legislatures ended up NOT streamlining PRIS's and taking away its authority, in part due to an outcry from other scientific agencies. How to use in class: -Statistics in real life, informing decisions, informing funding, being controversial. -Why do organizations like American Statistical Association and American Association for the Advancement of Science exist? Well, for a lot of reasons, one of which is t o publicly protests moves like the one PR tried to execute. -Statisticians and scientists aren...

This story is pretty easy to follow. Life expectancy varies by income level . The story becomes a good example for a statistics class because in the interview, the researcher describes a multivariate model. One in which multiple different independent variables (drug use, medical insurance, smoking, income, etc.) could be used to explain the disparity the exists in lifespan between people with different incomes. As such, this story could be used as an example of multivariate regression. And The Third Variable Problem. And why correlation isn't enough. In particular, this part of the interview (between interviewer Ari Shapiro and researcher Gary Burtless) refers to the underlying data as well as the Third Variable Problem as well as the amount to variability that can be assigned to the independent variables he lists). SHAPIRO: Why is this gap growing so quickly between life expectancy of rich and poor people? BURTLESS: We don't know. More affluent Americans tend to engage...

Here is Think Progress' story about a U.S. Supreme Court case that hinges on statistics. The case centers around death row inmate Freddy Lee Hall. He was sentenced to death in Florida for the murder of Karol Hurst in 1978. This isn't in dispute. What is in dispute is whether or not Hall qualifies as mentally retarded and, thus, should be exempt from the death penalty per Virginia vs. Atkins . So, this is an example relevant to any number of psychology classes (developmental, ethics, psychology and the law, etc.). It is relevant to a statistics class because the main thrust of the argument has to do with the margin of error associated with the IQ test that designated Hall as having an IQ of 71. In order to qualify as mentally retarded in Florida, an individual has to have an IQ of 70 or lower. So, at first blush, Hall is out of luck. Until his lawyers bring up the fact that the margin of error on this test is +/- 5 points. This is a good example of confidence intervals/marg...

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 ...

I like the following examples because they are accessible, potentially life-saving, and demonstrate statistics that disprove convention (and saves lives!), and provide a good argument for program evaluation. For decades, prevailing wisdom stated that we should put babies to sleep on their stomachs so that they wouldn't choke on their own spit-up in their sleep. Then, lo-and-behold, data suggested that putting babies to sleep on their back reduced deaths due to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). BY HALF. Data disproved convention AND improved public health dramatically and cheaply as the American Academy of Pediatrics rolled out the Back To Sleep campaign to inform parents about this research and best practices for bedtime. Now, the law of unintended consequences: Wee little babies are developing flat heads! My own son did (he is the cutie in the helmet), and required a helmet and physical therapy to correct the condition. More on the flat head (technical name: plagioenc...

Best. Awful. Headline. Ever. T his headline makes it sound like many young women support the sexting, bad-decision-making, former NY representative Anthony Weiner. However, if one takes a moment to read the article, one will learn that the "young women" sampled were recruited from SeekingArrangement.com. A website for women looking for sugar daddies. If you want your brain to further explode, read through the comments section for the article. Everyone is reacting to the headline. Very few people actually read through the article themselves...which provides further anecdotal evidence that most folks can't tell good data from bad (and that part of our job as statistics instructors, in my opinion, is to ameliorate this problem).

Bloomberg LP makes a lot of money by compiling financial data and making it available to clients who pay $20K a year to access the data via special terminals. Bloomberg also has a news branch. And reporters from the news branch have been collecting data from Bloomberg clients about how they are using/analyzing/etc. the Bloomberg data. Which has the clients up in arms as it could reveal business practices, propriety information, etc. When this story first made the news, the stock market plummeted. Currently, Bloomberg is l aunching its own investigation into the data abuse. Here  is one of the earlier news stories detailing the case as well as an NPR story about Bloomberg's reactions. While this doesn't teach statistics, per se, it does provide you with an example to share with your students about real life application of statistics, the value of statistics, data mining, and how our current legal system is facing challenges in regards to regulating data.