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...

This story discusses the many levels of analysis required to get to the bottom of the hypothesis stated in the title of this story. For instance, are cigarettes or the patch better for mom? The baby? If the patch isn't great for either but still better than smoking, what sort of advice should a health care provider give to their patient who is struggling to quit smoking? What about animal model data? I think this story also opens up the conversation about how few medical interventions are tested on pregnant women (understandably so), and, as such,  researchers have to opt for more observational research studies when investigating medical interventions for protected populations.

While it isn't hypothesis driven research  data, this data was collected to see which states are the sweariest. The data collection itself is interesting and a good, teachable example. First, the article describes previous research that looked at swearing by state (typically, using publicly available data via Twitter or Facebook). Then, they describe the data collection used for the current research: " A new map, though, takes a more complicated approach. Instead of using text, it uses data gathered from ... phone calls. You know how, when you call a customer service rep for your ISP or your bank or what have you, you're informed that your call will be recorded?  Marchex Institute , the data and research arm of the ad firm Marchex,  got ahold of the data that resulted from some recordings , examining more than 600,000 phone calls from the past 12 months—calls placed by consumers to businesses across 30 different industries. It then used call mining technology to isola...