Wade's "After outcry, Puerto Rico’s legislature spares statistical agency"

As described here, legislatures in Puerto Rico attempted to take independent authority away from the Puetero Rican Institute of Statistics (PRIS), a governmental watch dog in charge of double checking statistics and research methods used by the government. This decision was made in order to streamline government, which is understandable. But it was also problematic because watchdogs need independence in order to have the power and safety to say unpopular things.

Anyway, the legislatures ended up NOT streamlining PRIS's and taking away its authority, in part due to an outcry from other scientific agencies.

How to use in class:

-Statistics in real life, informing decisions, informing funding, being controversial.
-Why do organizations like American Statistical Association and American Association for the Advancement of Science exist? Well, for a lot of reasons, one of which is to publicly protests moves like the one PR tried to execute.
-Statisticians and scientists aren't just sitting in front of computers all day. They serve as part of the checks and balances within our government.
-Soft sell: Look at the variety of statistics jobs out there! Collecting data, watching the data, double checking the data and research methodology associated with it.

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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