The Humble Nutrition Label

I am in a hotel lobby in Portland, OR. I am attended Society for the Teaching of Psychology's Annual Conference on Teaching. I did a talk with my friend Jenny Kunz on syllabus redesign. We found that incorporating graphic design principles in syllabi improve retention of syllabus information.

Anyway, that reminded me of the recent passing of Burkey Belser. Who is that? He is the graphic designer who created the the labels on each and every food item sold in America. I learned about his passing from this remembrance in NPR.

IT IS A FREQUENCY TABLE, Y'ALL. I never thought about it this way until, like, a week ago. After seeing these and using these for years and years.

Okay, first, let's just take a moment to admire one of Belser's professional head shots.

RIGHT?!

Anyway, I had never heard of Belser until I came across this remembrance on NPR:

The nutrition box hit store shelves in 1994 Creating the official food information panel was a complicated process, with input from business groups and health advocates, along with experts at the Food and Drug Administration. Pie and bar charts were ruled out; so were other illustrations and colors, as the design team worked through 35 iterations. When the finished product came out, it was hailed as a success. "I applaud the person who designed the Nutrition Facts label that's on every food package now being sold in the U.S.," the Italian designer Massimo Vignelli said in Print, the American Institute of Graphic Design's magazine, in 1996. "That is a masterpiece of information architecture, and quite a victory for social responsibility."

How to use in class:

1. Frequency table example.

2.Sometimes, I like to remind my students that the examples I have for them in class aren't necessarily the most exciting in the world, but they serve to demonstrate the ubiquity of statistics, when they are so common place that you don't even notice them, but they are there. Mandated by the government. Created with usability in mind.

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/

Search This Blog