Aschwanden's "You Can’t Trust What You Read About Nutrition"

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
-Spurious correlations (and p-values!)
-Correlation does not equal causation
-Why replication is necessary

Also included is an amusing video that shows what it is like to be a participant in a nutrition study. It details the FFQ, or Food Frequency Questionnaire. And the video touches on serving sizes and portions, how how it may be difficult for many of to properly estimate (per the example) how many cups of spare ribs we consume per week.

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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