Bad credit scores as a predictor of dementia

NPR aired this story by Sarah Boden about the relationship between risky financial behavior and dementia. It consists of Boden interviewing people caring for individuals with dementia and dementia researchers. Before the NPR story, Boden published a related piece to a Pittsburgh NPR station. The Pittsburgh piece is a more formal report with many links to helpful information.

Among the research Boden describes is this study by Nicholas et al. (2020), which finds that people exhibit poor financial decision-making up to six years before a dementia diagnosis. Here is a press release about the study, in case you want to give more advanced students a primer or earlier UG students a sheet for understanding the research.

The audio version of this story is very compelling. It includes interviews with several people who have been left heavily in debt because of poor decisions made by family members before their diagnosis. It also offers some solutions that could be implemented by financial companies.

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/30/1152448758/an-older-persons-money-management-errors-may-be-a-sign-of-some-sort-of-dementia

This story and research would be a great addition to MANY different psychology classes...developmental, neuro, aging...but also RM/stats. Specifically, you could use this study to:

1) Discuss how we operationalize a variable.

Sure, there are plenty of scales for measuring impulse control. But the behavioral measure via credit score can look at risky behaviors that lower a person's credit score.

https://www.npr.org/2023/01/30/1152448758/an-older-persons-money-management-errors-may-be-a-sign-of-some-sort-of-dementia

2) The third variable problem.

The third variable is the underlying brain degradation that causes dementia and increased risk behaviors.

3) Good science reporting

Noteworthy because of all of the bad science reporting. Boden's work and the press release from Johns Hopkins are good examples of how to share science with the masses.

4) Prediction

Have a discussion with your students about how credit scores and financial behaviors could eventually be used to predict dementia.

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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