One way of teaching about margin of error/confidence intervals is via political polling data. From  mvbarer.blogspot.com Here is a good site that has a break down of polling data taken in September 2012 for the 2012 US presidential election. I like this example because it draws on data from several well-reputed polling sites, includes their point estimates of the mean and their margin of errors. This allows for several good examples: a) the point estimates for the various polling organization all differ slightly (illustrating sampling error), b) the margin of errors  are provided, and c) it can be used to demonstrate how CIs can overlap, hence, muddying our ability to predict outcomes from point estimates of the mean. I tend to follow the previous example with this gorgeous polling data from Mullenberg College : This is how sampling is done, son! While stats teachers frequently discuss error reduction via big n , Mullenberg takes it a step further by o...

I have been using Mueller's CROW website for years. It is a favorite teaching resource among my fellow social psychologists , with TONS of well-categorized resources for teaching social psychology. This resource is also useful to statistics/research methods instructors out there as it contains a section dedicated to research design with a sub-section for statistics.

Property of xkcd.com

From discovery.com Hahahaha. Like my C-students don't already feel bad enough about themselves, evidence now suggests that babies  have a rudimentary understanding of probability (this summary is also a good example of research methods in developmental psychology).

From an actual, for realz peer-reviewed journal.

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.

At least it is in black and white? Property of xKcd.com