Recently, a Facebook craze asked users to list three things you are thankful for for five days. Data scientis ts Winter Mason, Funda Kivran-Swaine,  Moira Burke, and Lada Adamic  at Fa cebook have analyzed this dat a to better understand the patterns of gratitude publically shared by Facebook users. The data analysts broke down data by most frequently listed gratitude topic: Most frequently "liked" gratitude posts: (lots of support for our friends in recovery, which is nice to see). Gender differences in gratitude...here is data for women. The wine gratitude finding for women was not present in the data for men. Ha. Idiosyncratic data by state. I would say that Pennsylvania's fondness for country music rings true for me. How to use in class: This example provides several interesting, easy to read graphs, and the graphs show how researchers can break down a single data set in a variety of interesting ways (by gender, by age, by state). Add...

This Scientific American podcast by Diane Fine Maron describes how the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) used Twitter data to shut down restaurants with health code violations. Essentially, the CDPH monitored Tweets in Chicago, searching for the words "food poisoning". When such a tweet was identified, an official at CDPH messaged the Twitterer in question with a link to an official complain form website. The results of this program? "During a 10-month stretch last year, staff members at the health agency responded to 270 tweets about “food poisoning.” Based on those tweets, 193 complaints were filed and 133 restaurants in the city were inspected. Twenty-one were closed down and another 33 were forced to fix health violations. That’s according to a study in the journal  Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.  [Jenine K. Harris et al,  Health Department Use of Social Media to Identify Foodborne Illness — Chicago, Illinois, 2013–2014 ]" I think this is ...

  OpenStax  CNX  " is a dynamic non-profit digital ecosystem serving millions of users per month in the delivery of educational content to improve learning outcomes. " So, free text books that can be easily downloaded. Including nearly 7,000 free statistics text books as well as over 1,500  research  methods texts . How OpenStax works (viahttp://cnx.org/about) I like this format because it is free but also because it is flexible enough that you can pick and choose chapters from different text books to use in a class. Additionally, if you are feeling generous, you can upload your own content to share.

Geoff Cumming Geoff Cumming gave a talk at APS 2014 about the " new statistics " (reduced emphasis on p-value, greater emphasis on confidence intervals and effect sizes, for starters). This workshop is now available, online and free, from APS . The three hour talk has been divided into five sections, and each sections comes with a "Table of Contents" to help you quickly navigate all of the information contained in the talk. While some of this talk is too advanced for undergraduates, I think that there are portions, like his explanation of why p-values are so popular, p-hacking, confidence intervals can be nice additions to an Introduction to Statistics class.

Make pretty Venn diagrams via this archived version of the Google Doodle that celebrated John Venn's 180th birthday. A good example of a Venn diagram as well as a way to (approximately) illustrate shared variance. The overlap between vegetation and things that can fly

NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce (I know, I thought it would be hyphenated as well) reports on Mini-Sentinel , an effort by the government to detect adverse side effects associated with prescription drugs as quickly as possible. Specifically, instead of waiting for doctors to voluntarily report adverse effects, they are mining data from insurance companies in order to detect side effects and illnesses being experienced by people on prescription drugs. Topics covered by this story that may apply to your teaching: 1) Big data 2) Big data solving health problems 3) Data and privacy issues 4) Conflict of interest 5) An example of the federal government pouring lots of money into statistics to make the world a little safer 6) An example of a data and statistics being used in not-explicitly-statsy-data fields and occupations

Here are two free, Flash tutorials about APA style directly from APA . The first tutorial is provides an introduction to APA style, while the second provides a list of changes in the 6th edition. And here is a free quiz on reference alphabetization, also from the APA Style Blog (you can also download the quiz in PDF format for in-class use). Also, don't forget on these resources ( 1 , 2 ) for help crafting results sections in APA style.

Credit: Quoctrung Bui/NPR Bui, reporting for NPR, shares  interactive graphs that demonstrate when people in different career fields are at the office. Via drop-down menus, you can compare the standard workdays of a variety of different fields (here, "Food Preparation and Serving" versus "All Jobs"). If you scoff at pretty visualizations and want to sink your teeth into the data yourself, may I suggest the original government report entitled, " American Time Use Survey " or a related publication by Kawaguci, Lee, & Hamermesh, 2013 . Demonstrates: Biomodal data, data distribution, variability, work-life balance, different work shifts.

Attend CAUSE Web's free Journal of Statistics Education webinar  on 10/21/14 to learn about 1) a classroom example  of Simpson's Paradox as well as 2) ways to incorporate Bayesian logic into undergraduate statistics courses. More information on past JSE webinars available here .

This radio story  by Mara Liasson (reporting for NPR) discusses the surprising primary loss of former Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. It was surprising because internal polling conducted by Cantor's team gave him an easy win, but he lost out to a Tea Party favorite, David Brat. The story goes on to describe why it is becoming increasingly difficult to conduct accurate voter polling via telephone and the internet. Some specific points from this story that teach students about sampling techniques: 1) Sample versus population: One limitation of polling data is the fact that many telephone call-based sampling techniques include landlines and ignore the growing population of people who only have cell phones. 2) Response rates for political polling are on a decline, making the validity of the available sample shrink. 3) Robocalls, while less expensive, have no way of validating that an actual registered voter is responding to the questions. Additionally, restrictio...

Holy smokes. This e-book  (distributed for free via Open Stax ) contains sample result sections for multiple statistical tests, which is helpful but not particularly unique. There are other resources for creating APA results sections ( love U. Washington's resources ) but I feel that this book is particularly useful in that: 1) It addresses how to include effect sizes in tests (most of the result section examples I have been able to find neglect this increasingly important aspect of data analysis). 2) The writers translate SPSS output into results sections. 3) The writers aren't psychologist but they are APA compliant (and even point out instances when their figures and tables aren't APA compliant). 4) It is gloriously free. The only shortcoming is that they don't provide examples for more types of data analyses. The book does, however, cover chi-square, correlation, t -test, and ANOVA, so most of what is covered in introductory statistics courses. I think th...

Kristoffer Magnusson is a psychology graduate student with a background in web design and he is using his talents to create succinct, beautiful visualizations of statistical concepts. Below is a screenshot of his interactive tool for a better understanding of correlation and how it relates to shared variance (users can change the n -size and r and watch the corresponding changes in shared variance and the scatter plot). Follow Magnussen's work and statistical visualizations via  @rpsychologist . Special thanks to Randy McCarthy for recommending this resource! Using the "Slide me" bar at the top, you can adjust the correlation in order to visualize the scatter plot, slope, and shared variance.