Rank choice voting, explained by CNN using ice cream

This one is for all of my psychometric instructors.

CNN created an engaging, interactive website to explain rank choice voting using ice cream flavor preference. It was created due to the 2025 NYC mayoral primaries, but uses ice cream instead of humans to make for a good explainer that may have a home in your classroom.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2025/06/politics/ranked-choice-voting-explained-dg/

First, you rank order your top five favorite ice cream flavors out of a field of ten.

Then, you can view all users' ranking data, and see how the distribution changes when the least popular flavor, Rocky Road, is eliminated and the rocky road voters' votes are redistributed.

The vote relocation goes on and on...

Finally, you get to see the winner, chocolate.

Rank-choice voting is one of those concepts that is easier to explain with a bit of animation and a very simple premise. I couldn't capture it in my screenshots, but the flavor elimination and redistribution are animated. It's a small detail, but it really helps clarify the concept.

If you like this example, check out my W.W. Norton & Co. textbook, Psychological Statistics for Everyone.

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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