Here is an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education ( .pdf  in case you hit the pay wall) about what happens when university PR promotes research findings in a way that exaggerates or completely misrepresents the findings. Several examples of this are included (Smelling farts cures cancer? What?), including empirical study of how health related research is translated into press releases ( Sumner et al. , 2014). The Sumner et al. piece found, that among other things, that 40% of the press releases studied contained exaggerated advice based upon research findings. I think that this is an important topic to address as we teach our student not to simply perform statistical analyses, but to be savvy consumers of statistics. This may be a nice reading to couple with the traditional research methods assignment of asking students to find research stories in popular media and compare and contrast the news story with the actual research article. If you would like more di...

Rustid, a Reddit redditor, performed a research study in order to determine the proportions of peanut butter contained in different types of Reese's Peanut Butter candies. For your perusal, here is the original  reddit thread  (careful about sharing this with students, there is a lot of talk about how the scales Rustid used are popular with drug dealers), photo documentation via  Imgur , and a  Buzzfeed article  about the experiment. Rustid documented the process by which he carefully extracted and measured the peanut butter content of nine different varieties of Reese's peanut butter and chocolate candies. See below for a illustration of how he extracted the peanut butter with an Exact-o knife and used electronic scales for measurements. http://imgur.com/a/wN6PH#SUhYBPx Below is a graph of the various proportions of peanut butter contained within each version of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. http://imgur.com/a/wN6PH#SUhYBPx This example...

I love reddit . I really love the sub-reddit r/dataisbeautiful . Various redditors contribute interesting graphs and charts from all over the interwebz. I leave you to figure out how to use these data visualizations in class. If nothing else, they are highly interesting examples of a wide variety of different graphing techniques applicable to different sorts of data sets. In addition to interesting data visualizations, there are usually good discussions (yes, good discussion in the internet!) among redditors about what is pushing the presented findings. Another facet of these posts are the sources of the data. There are many examples using archival data, like this chart that used social media to estimate sports franchise popularity , Users also share interesting data from more traditional sources, like APA data on the rates of Masters/Doctorates awarded over time and user rating data generated by IMDB ( here, look at the gender/age bias in ratings of the movie Fifty Shades of Gr...