Northwestern Mutual's "The Longevity Game"

I guess "The Longevity Game" sounds better than The Death Calculator. Which is what Northwestern Mutual has created and shared with us. Essentially, you answer questions about yourself (weight, exercise, stress management, driving habits, drug and alcohol habits, etc.) and the Game will give you an estimation for how long you should live based on the data you provide.

The Longevity Game, from Northwestern Mutual

I use this in class to demonstrate how data and statistics influence certain aspects of our lives (like whether or not an insurer is willing to provide us with insurance coverage). This can also be used to introduce multiple regression, since multiple factors are taken into account when predicting the outcome measure of life expectancy.

I also make sure to emphasize to my students that this calculator was created by an insurance company that was founded in 1857 and that this calculator isn't just some random interwebz quiz.

Warning: I wouldn't ask students to discuss their personal life expectancy (as it deals with their weight, ability to handle stress, alcohol and drug abuse, and other personal things) but I do think it is safe to ask them about which measured variable were surprising (seat belt usage is usually one that is surprising).

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.

Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations

Tyler Vigen has has created a long list of easy-to-paste-into-a-powerpoint graphs that illustrate that correlation does not equal causation. For instance, while per capita consumption of cheese and number of people who die by become tangled in their bed sheets may have a strong relationship (r = 0.947091), no one is saying that cheese consumption leads to bed sheet-related death. Although, you could pose The Third Variable question to your students for some of these relationships). Property of Tyler Vigens, http://i.imgur.com/OfQYQW8.png Vigen has also provided a menu of frequently used variables (deaths by tripping, sunlight by state) to help you look for specific examples. This portion is interactive, as you and your students can generate your own graphs. Below, I generated a graph of marriage rates in Pennsylvania and consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Generated at http://www.tylervigen.com/

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