Correlation example: Taco Bell and mortality by state...don't run for the border!

Many thanks to my colleague, Andrew Caswell, for sharing this Reddit post with me:

Scatter plot of the relationship between number of Taco Bells and mortality rate, by state.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s75sm7/oc_us_life_expectancy_vs_of_taco_bell_locations/

So, this alone is an excellent example of correlation and the third variable problem. But...more delightfully, the Redditor who created this graph also shared where he found this data (https://www.nicerx.com/fast-food-capitals/, https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/life-expectancy-by-state).

BETTER STILL: I downloaded and organized all of the fast-food data and mortality data and put it in one spreadsheet for you all. Do All The Correlations! Teach your students about Bonferroni corrections! Figure out the fast-food restaurant that correlates the most strongly with mortality!

PS: Did you know that there is an option to download data from a website in Excel?

The fast-food data was presented in an embedded, scrolly table, and that Excel option made it easy-peasy to download.

Comments

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If your students get the joke, they get statistics.

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