Property of xkcd.com Teach your students about box plots, outliers, and how rational persuasion only works with rational matters.

Calm down. This is a  satirical video from TheOnion  that goes into gory detail about a research project that suggests that stabbing may be fatal in monkeys. I show it in my statistics classes because it touches on 1) research methods, 2) replication and extension, and 3) control groups (monkeys who were merely punched). And it is comedy gold.   property of theonion.com

Words can be powerful and value-laden. This can have an impact upon survey responses, as it did for this survey about attitudes towards gays serving in the military. This survey was taken in 2010, and gays can now openly serve in the military, but I still think this example is still a powerful way of teaching the weight of words when creating surveys. property of cbs.com I tend to use this as an extra credit, asking my students to respond to two questions: