Dvorsky's "Lab Mice Are Freezing Their Asses Off—and That’s Screwing Up Science"

This example can be used to explain why the smallest of details can be so important when conducting research.

This piece by Dvosrsky summarizes a recently published article that points out a (possible!) major flaw in pre-clinical cancer research using rats. Namely, lab rats aren't being kept at an ideal rat temperature. This leads to the rats behaving differently than normal to stay warm: They eat more, they burrow more, and their metabolism changes. The researchers go on to explain that there are also plenty of other seemingly innocuous factors that can vary from rat lab to rat lab, like bedding, food, exposure to light, etc. and that these factors may also effect research findings.

Why is this so important? Psychology isn't the only field dealing with a replicability crisis: Rat researchers are also experiencing difficulties. Difficulties that may be the result of all of these seemingly tiny differences in lab rats that are used during pre-clinical research.

I think this could be useful as it is an example that students can easily grasp. Rat research is used in psychology, but is used here within a medical context, thus reaching students beyond our psychology majors.

Also, it is always a good time to share this story from The Onion about lab rats...

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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