My friends, winter is coming. Winter in Erie, PA, is no joke, so I've been encouraging my kids to pick up inside hobbies. My youngest is all about flipbooks right now, which inspired me to create my own statsy flipbook: Which, in turn, inspired me to create a blog post about statsy crafts. Crafts that you can do over Winter break for fun or maybe use as assignments for your students? A DIY Christmas gift for your favorite statistician?  The flipbook idea is an easy one to implement, as you only need index cards, a binder clip, and a pencil. Actually, many these can be done on the cheap if you have Legos, paper and pen, a log, yarn, baking supplies around. Not free, but not too expensive, either.  Data visualization via knitting A knitting-data-visualizer tracked temperatures via a knitting project, seen below. The different colors of yarn represent different temperatures on different days. Here is a full article from Gizmodo , which includes a link where you can purchase suppl...

 I've been a fan of Chalabi's work for years (here is my favorite example of mean vs. median). She makes beautiful, hand-drawn data visualizations . She created a beautiful mural that represents New Yorkers. And when I say "represents," I mean that this image is a representative sample of New Yorkers. https://monachalabi.com/product/100-new-yorkers/ Her sample of 100 New Yorkers was not drawn (Drawn? Get it?) at random.  Below, in her own words, Chalabi describes her work and what it means: https://www.absolutart.com/us/artist/mona-chalabi/artwork/100-new-yorkers-ii/ This is a novel way to talk about sampling, and representative samples, weighing survey response options to make a sample more representative, etc. You could even get into sampling error and other problems created by non-representative samples. 

Interpreting effect sizes requires more than Rules of Thumb for interpretation. Interpretation requires deeper knowledge about the investigated topic, an idea we must convey to our students. For example, in presidential elections in the United States, the winner is usually selected by a slim margin. As such, if you can get even small numbers of voters who don't usually vote to vote, it can have a large real-world effect on an election. This is what Vote Forward is trying to do, and I'll explain how you can use their work to explain effect sizes in your stats classes.  This is Vote Foreward : Okay. So they are organizing letter-writing campaigns in advance of the 2020 General Election. NOTE: The organization is left-leaning, but many of its campaigns ask letter-writers to share non-partisan messages.  Vote Forward has tested whether or not writing letters to unlikely voters actually gets people to vote, and they shared the results of those efforts: Their findings, which aren...