Annual snow fall moderates the relationship between daily snow fall and the likelihood of canceling school

Moderation isn't one of those things that we typically teach in Intro Stats.

But it is a statistical tool your advanced undergraduates will likely encounter in an upper-level course.

I'm not going to teach you how to teach your students how to do one. I am, however, going to share a example of what mediation is doing, inspired by living in the city in the US that has received the most snow this season (Erie, PA, with 93.9 inches for the season as of 1.30.25).

About a year ago, CNN shared data on how much snow it takes to cancel school in various parts of the country.

I assure you, Erie and the rest of Northwest PA (see red outline) gets hella snow but no snow days.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/12/us/how-much-snow-kids-school-snow-day-across-us-dg/index.html

However, our lack of snow days isn't due to lack of snow. The annual amount of snow moderates the likelihood to cancel school, such that if you are used to a lot of snow (and have the infrastructure to handle it) you don't cancel due to snow. And as much as people in snowy regions like to dismiss concerns about snowy roads and safety, the fact is that it isn't a mindset that leads to these choices, it is the preparedness to deal with snow. And I bet the amount of snow a region experiences correlates with the State and Local DOT funding for plows. This is illustrated nicely below. For further reference, I live about an hour west of Chautauqua, NY.

To make this simple, and use the oft-imitated visual representation of moderation:

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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