UPDATE (12/8/23): YOOOOOOOOO if you got to this post, I suggest that you check out this update for a up-to-date link to this tool. Here is the  Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager , which provides illustrations of trends in baby names, using data from the 1880s to the present. It is a good tool for demonstrating why graphs can be more engaging than tables when presenting data. When I use this in class, I compare the NameVoyager data display to more  traditionally presented data from the the Social Security Agency . Additionally, I teach in a computer lab, so my students were able to search for their own names, which makes the example more self relevant. Yup. I am one of many, many Jessicas that are around my age.

This story details the application of American election polling techniques to Afghanistan's fledgling democracy. Essentially, international groups are attempting to poll Afghans prior to their April 2014 presidential elections as to combat voter fraud and raise awareness about the election. However, how do researchers go about collecting data in a country where few people have telephones, many people are illiterate, and just about everyone is weary about strangers approaching them and asking them sensitive questions about their political opinions? The story also touches on issues of social desirability as well as the decisions  a researcher makes regarding the kinds of response options to use in survey research. I think that this would be a good story to share with a cranky undergraduate research methods class that thinks that collecting data from the undergraduate convenience sample is really, really hard. Less snarkily, this may be useful when teaching multiculturalism or ...

Lately, there have been a lot of quizzes popping up on my Facebook feed ("What breed of dog are you?", "What character from Harry Potter are you?"). As a psychologist who tinkers in statistics, I have pondered the psychometric properties of such quizzes and concluded that these quizzes where probably not properly vetted in peer-reviewed journals. Now I have a tiny bit of evidence to support that conclusion. What better way to ensure that a scale is valid than by using the standard of concurrent validity (popular in I/O psychology)? This actually happened when renowned Shirley Manson Subject Matter Expert, Shirley Manson, lead singer of the band Garbage, took the "Which Alt-rock Grrrl are you?" quiz and she didn't score as herself (as she posted on Facebook and reported by A.V. Club ). From Facebook, via A.V. Club An excellent example of an invalid test (or concurrent validity for you I/O types).

Variations upon a theme...good for spicing up a powerpoint...inspired by living in the #1 snowiest city (population > 100K, 2014) in the United States. property of xkcd.com https://thenib.com/can-t-stand-the-heat-4d5650fd671b

This scale , created by Haidt and Wilson, predicts your political leanings based upon seemingly unrelated questions. Screen grab from time.com You can use this in a classroom to 1) demonstrate interactive, Likert-type scales, 2) face validity (or lack there of). I think this would be 3) useful for a psychometrics class to discuss scale building. Finally, the update at the end of the article mentions 4) both the n-size and the correlation coefficient for their reliability study, allowing you discuss those concepts with students. For more about this research, try yourmorals.org

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.

Here is a link to a recent co-authored publication that used Second Life to teach students about virtual data collection as well as the broader trend in psychology to study how virtual environments influence interpersonal interactions. Specifically, students replicated evolutionary psychology findings using Second Life avatars. We also discuss best practices for using Second Life in the class room as well as our partial replication of previously established evolutionary psychology findings (Clark & Hatfield, 1989, Buss, Larson, Weston, & Semmelroth, 1992).