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Showing posts with the label publication bias

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Updated example of using baby names to illustrate bimodal distributions.

The thing about my way of teaching stats is that my cool, novel examples get old really fast. Like, pop culture is on a thirty-day cycle. Anyway, YEARS ago, 2014 to be exact, I blogged about illustrating bimodal data distributions  using baby name data from the Social Security Administration. Specifically, when an older name comes back into vogue, it has a bimodal distribution when you plot time on the X axis.  I stand by this example. However, all of the data illustrations come from 2014. When our traditionally aged college students were 6 or 7. Which makes this example feel a little stale. However, here is some data,  courtesy of Redditor  fevaah ,  showing  old names that are back in vogue through 2025 ! And Eleanor, Violet, Nora, and Hazel are here, illustrating bimodal distributions for a new generation. If you used my old baby-name data, this is a quick, easy refresh for your lectures (or a fun new addition if you didn't).  If this idea was help...

Geckoboard's "Data fallacies to avoid"

Geckoboard created a list of common statistical fallacies , including cherry picking, Simpson's paradox, gerrymandering, and many more. Each fallacy comes with a brief description of the fallacy, references, a printable card for review/display, and drawing. They are kind of gorgeous and to the point and helpful. https://www.geckoboard.com/learn/data-literacy/statistical-fallacies/sampling-bias/ Here is the downloadable card for the Regression Toward the Mean: https://www.geckoboard.com/assets/regression-toward-the-mean.pdf They even present all of their graphics as  a free, downloadable poster . My only peeve is that they use the term "Data Dredging" where I would have said "HARKing" or "Going on a fishing expedition". And that is just the tiniest of peeves, I think this is a good check list filled with images and concise descriptions that would look beautiful in a college professor's office, a stats class room, or anonymously ...

Carroll's "Sorry, There’s Nothing Magical About Breakfast"

I love research that is counterintuitive. It is interesting to me and makes a strong, memorable example for the classroom. That's why I'm recommending Carroll's piece  from the NYT. It questions the conventional wisdom that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. As Carroll details, there is a long standing and strong belief in nutrition research claiming that breakfast reduces obesity and leads to numerous healthy outcomes. But most nutrition research is correlational, not causal. AND there seems to be an echo-chamber effect, such that folks are miss-citing previous nutrition research to bring it in line with the breakfast research. Reasons to use this article as a discussion piece in your statistics or research methods course: -Highlights the difference between correlation and causation -Provides an easy to understand example of publication bias ("no breakfast = obesity" is considered a fact, studies that found the opposite were less likely to...