Snake Oil Superfoods by InformationIsBeautiful

In my stats classes, we discuss popular claims that have been proven/disproven by research. So, learning styles. Vitamins. One claim we dig into are the wide array of claims made about the health benefits of different foods and folk beliefs about nutrition. But how to get into it? That is such a big field, looking at different foods used for different conditions. Send your students to InformationIsBeautiful's Snake Oil Super foods, which sorted through all of good studies and created an interactive data viz to summarize.

For instance, these are three foods, backed by science, for very specific issues:

BUT GET THIS: If you scroll over any of them, you get a quick summary of the findings AND a link to the research article. See below for Oats. NOICE.

The information isn't limited to slam dunks, either, it fleshes out promising foods and weak links as well.

AND...this is great...below the visualization there is all sorts of information on their methodology AND a link to their data. See below.

How to use in class:
1) Again, this can be a useful discussion prompt for evaluating scientific/click bait nutritional research.
2) I think this reminds students that research has to research very specific claims. No where in the data viz does it say "Garlic be good", instead, it looks at specific health claims and garlic. While Garlic:Cancer Treatment is in the "No Evidence" category, Garlic:Colds is in the "Inconclusive" category.
3) Plenty of links to published research, speadsheet provided to play with.

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.

Logical Fallacy Ref Meme

So, I love me some good statsy memes. They make a brief, important point that sticks in the heads of students. I've recently learned of the Logical Fallacy Ref meme. Here are a couple that apply to stats class:

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