A McSweeney's Short Imagined Monologue, written from the viewpoint of correlation murdering causation.

You guys. Remember McSweeney's? Your undergraduates won't get why this Short Imagined Monologue, written by correlation, is absurd and funny, but maybe your graduate students will.

I’m Correlation—Here’s Why I Shot Causation at a Harvard Medical School Conference by Tracy Chabala I know you think I’m evil. And a copycat. But I assure you, I’ve wanted to take out Causation long before Relative Risk stabbed Absolute Risk in the back at last month’s Stanford talk on the lethality of packaged, ready-to-eat kale. Absolute Risk had it coming, shamelessly trying to downplay a ten-thousand-fold increased risk of choking to death if and when you eat the plastic bag.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/im-correlation-heres-why-i-shot-causation-at-a-harvard-medical-school-conference

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Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

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If your students get the joke, they get statistics.

Gleaned from multiple sources (FB, Pinterest, Twitter, none of these belong to me, etc.). Remember, if your students can explain why a stats funny is funny, they are demonstrating statistical knowledge. I like to ask students to explain the humor in such examples for extra credit points (see below for an example from my FA14 final exam). Using xkcd.com for bonus points/assessing if students understand that correlation =/= causation What are the numerical thresholds for probability? How does this refer to alpha? What type of error is being described, Type I or Type II? What measure of central tendency is being described? Dilbert: http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Kill%20Anyone Sampling, CLT http://foulmouthedbaker.com/2013/10/03/graphs-belong-on-cakes/ Because control vs. sample, standard deviations, normal curves. Also,"skewed" pun. If you go to the original website , the story behind this cakes has to do w...

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