Assessing an intervention: A quick exercise for your classes, specialized to your own university.

Here is a quick RM review I created for my Psych Stats students.

We were preparing for the first exam, which covered the very basics of research methodology, including IVs and DVs. We also talk about data visualizations and how they can be used to quickly convey information.

California is dealing with an energy crisis and a heatwave.

California tried a relatively inexpensive intervention to reduce the likelihood of overwhelming the energy grid: Sending out text messages during extremely high energy usage. See:

A screenshot of a smart phone. The text message on the screen is from the electric utility company in California. It is asking the people of California to reduce their energy usage due to an immediate emergency.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-07/a-text-alert-may-have-saved-california-from-power-blackouts

And what happened? People reduced their electric usage.

A line graph from Bloomberg. It illustrates how electricity usage in CA declined after the text message was sent.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-07/a-text-alert-may-have-saved-california-from-power-blackouts

For the class review, I asked my students to think of the emergency alerts they receive from their university via our campus safety app. I challenged them to think of a campus concern or problem that has the potential to be alleviated by text message alerts. They needed to list the IV (campus issue) and DV (whatever outcome they could measure), as well as their experimental and control groups.

The students were able to generate a wide range of ideas, including reminders not to open the doors to residence halls to strangers, reminders to report suspicious behavior, and add/drop dates for classes, among others.

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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