In honor of the New Year, a post about health.  A team of researchers from Harvard made a brief video that describes their recent publication. The video includes discussion about their hypothesis generation, methodology, and research findings.  Their research question: Does the game Pokemon Go actually improve the health of users? How to use this video in your class: -This is an easily understood research project to share with your RM students. It also goes into detail about the statistics used for analysis. -And the researchers, from fancy-pants Harvard, aren't afraid of being a bit silly and having fun as researchers. As demonstrated by the below images from the video: This guy. Seriously. I hope to some day love my data as much as he loves his data. And they made graphs using Pokemon balls -How do we get our research ideas? Sometimes, from observations about every day living. This research was inspired by the Pokemon Go phenomena. I try to ...

This example is a little out of my wheel house, but I'm putting it up here for those of you who teach more advanced UG stats or grad stats. I have never taught Principle Component Analysis. But Anh Le, PhD candidate at Duke, provides a detailed description of PCA in R AND does so using data that your advanced undergraduate/graduate students will enjoy: Pokemon.  So, Le downloaded data for each of the 151 Pokemon (individual stats for the strengths and weakness of each Pokemon, and provided a link so that you can download the data as well). He even included the code he used to create his PCA via R AND he does a nice job talking the reader through his process and what the findings mean. At 37, I didn't realize how much my traditionally-aged college students love Pokemon. Pokemon came up in my undergraduate I/O class three years ago, and I was shocked by how much nostalgia my then-20 year old students felt for the franchise. I think that it is certainly experiencing a rev...