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Modern musician vocabularies: See how I extracted this data using GenAI, and how you can use it in class.

I intended for this to be a post about the singer vocabulary. It is still that, but it is also a post about using GenAI to grab data from an image. I mean, you can use Excel to do the same thing, but GenAI is a lot easier. Here we go. It starts with the Word Tips website, which helps you solve your crossword puzzles and Wordle. This website also has a blog dedicated to words. One such blog post explored which singers have the largest vocabularies, as measured by the number of  unique words in their lyrics. Their blog post compared music legends to newer talent. There are a ton of fun data visualizations on the website; go check it out. Since I teach college students, I decided to concentrate on the musicians my students listen to: In and of itself, this image serves as an example of bar graphs, good data visualization, and proper use of "buckets". However, I figured we could find a way to use the raw data in class. Create your own data visualization, create your own buckets....
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Lesson plan to teach statistical literacy to elementary school students

Today, I'm taking a break from blogging about college teaching and sharing a mini-lesson I created for elementary school-aged students. I am sharing my activity here because I bet I'm not the only college instructor who has been asked to do community outreach with kids, be it at local STEM festivals, children's museums, or elementary school career exploration days. Feel free to take this idea and run with it. I taught this lesson as part of the Wonder Time series at my local children's museum,  Erie Children's Museum  in Erie, PA. My friend, Claire, is a former stats student and former STEM teacher at my kids' school. She is the current education director at the museum. PS: I love my small town life, and the museum is just a few blocks from my workplace.  A description of the Wonder Time series  My question was, "How do number experts predict the future?" As I put together my lesson, I was inspired by all the different ways instructors are already usin...

Psychedelics research: A blog post with Beth Morling

 Now and again, I run across a news article or psychological question that is so big that it bleeds out of straight statistics and requires a thorough understanding of the research methodology that guides statistical choices. When that happens, I email my buddy and fellow W.W. Norton author, Beth Morling, and we write a joint blog post. Recently, I emailed her because research on using psychedelics to treat many different mental disorders has been in the news.  President Trump fast-tracked this research,  and the  Journal for the American Medical Association recently published a big meta-analysis  on the topic. Psychedelic research has always interested me because of psychology, but it has always amused me because of how you run a proper double-blind research study if your experimental participants KNOW that they are hallucinating and your control group participants know they are not?  This broader question offers a few great discussion options for you and ...