Stats in the News: Bloomberg Data Privacy Breach

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 launching 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.

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Logical Fallacy Ref Meme

So, I love me some good statsy memes. They make a brief, important point that sticks in the heads of students. I've recently learned of the Logical Fallacy Ref meme. Here are a couple that apply to stats class:

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