TL:DR: Sugary drinks might up your risk for oral cavity cancer (so says relative risk) but probably won't be the thing that kills you (so says absolute risk).  In depth: I love teaching applied statistics, including showing my students how to identify and properly attention-grabbing examples of relative risk ( 1 , 2 ). HOWEVER, relative and absolute risk aren't lying. But they can scare people, so I think it is important to share both calmly.  This example from JAMA Otolaryngology is a good example of how to responsibly share relative and absolute risk. It has a very calm, non-click bait article title:  https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaotolaryngology/fullarticle/2831121 Cool. Also, thanks for using female research participants. Next, the results are described in a non-salacious manner, with the absolute risk in red and relative risk in blue. How could you use this in class? Sharing relative risk isn't in and of itself unethical. Using it to scare people is questi...

I came across this article on social media: https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/mps-are-almost-certainly-using-chatgpt This got my attention, because I'm sick of people ragging on college students using AI. EVERYONE is using AI. That doesn't mean it is always OK or evil, but let's stop ragging on the kids. Anyway, the author used data to make their claims via z scores: https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/mps-are-almost-certainly-using-chatgpt Ways to use in class: 1. I like to talk to students about data as evidence. In science, it can be evidence to reject or not reject a hypothesis. In real life, it can track trends, both innocuous and suspicious. 2. This is another way of talking about z scores, a crucial but less exciting aspect of basics statistics. As best as I can tell, this was the z score formula used:  frequency z score = (number of times phrase was used in a year - mean times the phrase was used in all years)/standard deviation of number of times the phrase was...

 There are so many ways to use this tool: Nathan Yau's Flowing Data is one of those websites I check every few days for statistical inspiration. He shares  the work of others and his own, including this  interactive bee swarm plot that illustrates salaries  for various  jobs. The bee plot, with the cursor of Psychology Teachers. https://flowingdata.com/2025/09/09/salary-and-occupation-2024/ There are many ways to use this in stats class: 1. At some point, you should talk about career exploration with your students.   2. Statistics students should be learning about modern data visualizations like this jitter plot, aka bee swarm plot.  3. If you cursor over any dot, you can see the 25th and 75th percentile scores and n size for that occupation's salary. 4. The size of each circle corresponds to the n size. Which I love because jitter plots do a great job of illustrating variability in a data set. However, each data point here represents an average...

I maintain that relative versus absolute risk is a concept that we absolutely must teach in intro stats. I have given some examples of this before ( murder ! COVID !) but here is another one that hits home for my fellow Great Lakers. In particular, this one is for my friends in Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, and Buffalo  Up here in Erie, a common point of discussion is how frozen Lake Erie is. Because once it freezes, the lake's moisture no longer feeds Dread Lake Effect Snow.   I like this example because you can easily perform the math in front of your class, demonstrating that 26.14% is 103.45% of 12.85%. At the same time, you have the visual to demonstrate that the vast majority of the lake was still unfrozen even with a 103.45% increase. 

My students struggle with sleeping and are distracted by electronics. This interactive activity allows them to think about their sleep relative to norms regarding age and sex. It also dives deeply into how sleep changes over a person's lifespan, which is a topic suitable for non-static classes like Health or Developmental.   https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2024/sleep-data-survey-americans/ *You need a WaPo subscription or paywall buster to get to this interactive. Like this one! https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/interactive/2024/sleep-data-survey-americans/ Here is a quick interactive that a) lets your students see how well they sleep, in comparison to their demographic and b) think about median data and percentile data.  1. Repursped, gently used data is really everywhere. This interactive uses data from the Census Bureau. Which is a way to measure sleep, but not the only way. 2. Median and percentil...