A tweet straight up solved a problem I encountered while teaching. The problem: How can I explain why the confidence interval area for a regression line is curved when the regression line is straight. This comes up when I use my favorite regression example.  It explains regression AND the power that government funding has over academic research . TL:DR- Relative to the number of Americans who die by gun violence, there is a disproportionately low amount of a) federal funding and b) research publications as to  better understand gun violence death when compared to funding and publishing about other common causes of death in America. Why? Dickey Amendment to a 1996 federal spending bill. See graph below: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2595514 The gray area here is the confidence interval region for the regression line. And I had a hard time explaining to my students why the regression line, which is straight, doesn't have a perfectly rectangula...

So, Fortnite is a super popular, first-person-shooter, massive multi-player online game. I only know this because my kid LOVES Fortnite. With the free version, called Battle Royale, a player parachutes onto an island, scour for supplies, and try to kill the other players. Like, there is way more to it than that, but this is my limited, 39-year-old mother of two explanation. And, admittedly, I don't game, so please don't rake me over the coals if I'm not using the proper Fortnite terminology to describe things! Anyway, my brain thinks in statistics examples. So I noticed that for each Battle Royale match starts with 100 players. See the screen shot: This player is parachuting on to the island at the beginning of the skirmish, and there are still 100 players left since the game is just starting and no one has been eliminated. Well, when we introduce our students to the normal curve and percentiles and z-scores and such, we tell them that the normal curve represen...

Patti Neighmond, reporting for NPR, wrote a piece on how the medical establishment's method for assessing patient pain is evolving . This is a good example of why it can be so tricky to operationalize the abstract. Here, the abstract notion in pain. And the story discusses shortcomings of the traditional numeric, Wong-Baker pain scale, as well as alternatives or complements to the pain scale. No one is vilifying the scale, but recent research suggests that what a patient reports and how a medical professional interprets that report are not necessarily the same thing. From Dr. John Markman's unpublished research: I think this could also be a good example of testing for construct validity. The researcher asked if the pain was tolerable and found out that their numerical scale was NOT detecting intolerable. This is a psychometric issue. One of the recommendations for better operationalization: Asking a patient how pain effects their ability to perform every day tas...

I'm such a sucker for beer-related statistics examples ( 1 , 2 , 3 ). Here is example 4. Now, I don't know about the rest of you psychologists who teach statistics, but I ALWAYS show the ol' Yerkes-Dodson's graph when explaining that correlation ONLY detects linear relationships but not curvilinear relationships. You know...moderate arousal leads to peak performance. See below: http://wikiofscience.wikidot.com/quasiscience:yerkes-dodson-law BUT NOW: I will be sharing research that finds claims that dementia is associated with NO drinking...and with TOO MUCH drinking...but NOT moderate drinking. So, a parabola that Pearson's correlation would not detect.  https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1024990722028650497

This is a fun question perfect for that first or second chapter of every intro stats text. The part with data distributions. And it works for either the 1) beginning of the Fall semester and, therefore, football season or 2) the beginning of the Spring semester and, therefore, the lead-up to the Superbowl. Anyway,  Ben Jones   tweeted a few bar chart distributions that illustrate different descriptive statistics for NFL players. https://twitter.com/DataRemixed/status/1022553248375304193  He, kindly, provided the answers to his quiz. How to use it in class: 1) Bar graphs! 2) Data distributions and asking your students to logic their way through the correct answers...it makes sense that the data is skewed young. Also, it might surprise students that very high earners in the NFL are outliers among their peers. 3) Distribution shapes: Bimodal because of linebackers. Skewed because NFL players run young and have short careers. Normal data for height because even...

If you are unaware, Nextdoor.com is a social network that brings together total strangers because they live in the same neighborhood. And it validates your identity and your address, so even though you don't really know these people, you know where they live, what their name is, and maybe even what they look like as you have the option to upload a photo. Needless to say, it is a train wreck. Sure, people do give away free stuff, seek out recommendations for home improvements, etc. But it is mostly complaining or non-computer-savvy people using computers. One of the things you can do is create a poll. Or, more often, totally screw up a poll. Here are some of my favorites. In the captions, I have given some ideas of how they could be used as examples in RM or psychomtrics. This is actually a pretty good scale. A lesson in human factors/ease of user interface use? Response options are lacking and open to interpretation. Sometimes, you don't need a poll at a...

As described here, legislatures in Puerto Rico attempted to take independent authority away from the Puetero Rican Institute of Statistics (PRIS), a governmental watch dog in charge of double checking statistics and research methods used by the government . This decision was made in order to streamline government, which is understandable. But it was also problematic because watchdogs need independence in order to have the power and safety to say unpopular things. Anyway, the legislatures ended up NOT streamlining PRIS's and taking away its authority, in part due to an outcry from other scientific agencies. How to use in class: -Statistics in real life, informing decisions, informing funding, being controversial. -Why do organizations like American Statistical Association and American Association for the Advancement of Science exist? Well, for a lot of reasons, one of which is t o publicly protests moves like the one PR tried to execute. -Statisticians and scientists aren...