The subreddit s/dataisbeautiful was inundated by folks creating color distributions for bags of candy. And because 1) it is Reddit and 2) stats nerds take joy in silly things, candy graphing got out of hand. See below: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/5bojxl/oc_the_data_suggests_that_certain_colors_are_not/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/5bmo3a/color_distribution_of_one_more_partysized_bag_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/5cmemr/a_pie_chart_of_mm_colors_from_a_single_500g_bag_oc/ And because it is Reddit, and, to be a fair, statistically unreliable, other posters would claim that this data WASN'T beautiful because it was a small sample size and didn't generalize. One bag of Skittles, they claimed. didn't tell you a lot about the underlying population of Skittles. Until Redditor zonination came along, bought 35 enormous bags of Skittles, and meticulously documented the color distribution in each ...

Dr. Kevin McIntryre from Trinity University has created the Open Stats Lab.  OSL provides users with research articles, data sets, and worksheets for studies that illustrate statistical tests commonly taught in Introduction to Statistics. Topics covered, illustrated beautifully by Natalie Perez All of his examples come from Open Science Framework-compliant publications from Psychological Science. McIntyre presents the OSF data (in SPSS, R, and .  CSV files are available ), the original research article, AND a worksheet to accompany each article. Layout for each article/data set/activity. This article demonstrates one-way ANOVA. I know. It can be challenging to find 1) research an UG can follow that 2) contains simple data analyses. And here, McIntryre presents it all. This project was funded by a grant from APS.

Property of  @JenSacco54 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mariah-carey-christmas_us_561f989be4b0c5a1ce621a69 A wintery example of why range is a crap measure of variability http://qz.com/859303/americas-most-common-christmas-related-injuries-in-charts/

Students love personalized, interactive stuff.  This website from Chirs Wilson over at Time allows your American students to enter their name and they recieve their British statistical doppleganger name in return. Or vice versa. And by statistical doppleganger, I mean that the author sorted through name popularity databases in the UK and America. He then used a Least Squared Error model in order to find strong linear relationships for popularity over time between names. How to use in class: Linear relationship LSE Trends over time

Fivethirtyeight provides lots of beautiful pictures of spurious correlations found by their own in-house study. At the heart of this article are the limitations of a major tool use in nutritional research, the Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ). The author does a mini-study, enlisting the help of several co-workers and fivethirtyeight.com readers. They track track their own food for a week and reflect on how difficult it is to properly estimate and recall food (perhaps a mini-experiment you could do with your own students?). And she shares the spurious correlations she found in her own mini-research: Aschwanden also discusses how much noise and lack of consensus their is in real, published nutritional research (a good argument for why we need replication!):  http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-read-about-nutrition/ How to use in class: -Short comings of survey research, especially survey research that relies on accurate memories -...