Here is another example of why representative sampling MUST include women. For years and years, car crash test dummies for adults were all based upon the 50th percentile male. As such, even in vehicles with high safety ratings, women still have higher rates of certain injuries (head, neck, pelvis) than men. In fact, the article cites research that found that belted female car occupants in accidents have a 47% higher chance of suffering a serious injury and a 71% higher chance of suffering a moderate injury compared to men in a car. http://leevinsel.com/blog/2013/12/30/why-carmakers-always-insisted-on-male-crash-test-dummies I wrote a previous blog post about this video that outlines how using only  male rats for pharmaceutical research lead to problems with disproportionately high numbers of side effects in female humans . And this NPR story details changes to federal rules in order to correct this issue with animal testing. How to use in class: -Inappropriate sampling i...

The folks at Wall Street Journal took CDC disease data (by state, by year, courtesy of Project Tycho ) as well as information on when various vaccines were introduced to the public. And the data tells a compelling story about the importance of vaccinations. Below, the story of measles. How to use in class: -Using archival data to educate and make a point (here, vaccine efficacy) -Visualizing many data points (infections x state x year) effectively -Interactive: You can cursor over any cube to see the related data. Below, I've highlighted Pennsylvania data from 1957. -Since you can cursor over any data point to see the data, you can ask your students to pull data for use in class. -The present data were drawn from Project Tycho , a University of Pittsburgh initiative to better share public health data. This resource may be useful for your classes as well. -This data is good for Stats class, as well as Developmental, Health, Public Health, etc.

Our World in Data is an impressive, creative-commons licensed site managed by Max Roser . And it lives up to its name. The website provides all kinds of international data, divided by country, topic (population, health, food, growth & inequality, work, and life, etc.), and, when available, year. It contains its own proprietary data visualizations, which typically feature international data for a topic. You can customize these visualizations by nation. You can also DOWNLOAD THE DATA that has been visualized for use in the classroom. Much of the data can be visualized as a map and progress, year by year, through the data, like this data on international human rights. https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights/  https://ourworldindata.org/human-rights/ There are also plenty of topics of interest to psychologists who aren't teaching statistics. For example, international data on suicide: Data for psychology courses...https://ourworldindata.org/suicide/ Work...

Factorial ANOVA example ahead! With a lovely interaction. And I have a year old and a 4.5 year old and they are sickly daycare kids, so this example really spoke to me. NPR did a story about a recent publication that studied how we administer medicine to our kids and provides evidence for a few things I've suspected: Measuring cups for kid medicine are a disaster AND syringes allow for more accurate dosing, especially if the dose is small. The researchers wanted to know if parents properly dosed liquid medicine for their kids. The researchers used a 3 (dosage, 2.5, 5.0, 7.5 ml) x 3 (modality: small syringe, big syringe, medicine cup) design. They didn't use factorial ANOVA in their analysis, this example can still be used to conceptually explain factorial ANOVA. Their findings: How to use in class: -An easy-to-follow conceptual example of factorial ANOVA (again, they didn't use that analysis in the original paper, but the table above illustrates factorial ANO...

In honor of the New Year, a post about health.  A team of researchers from Harvard made a brief video that describes their recent publication. The video includes discussion about their hypothesis generation, methodology, and research findings.  Their research question: Does the game Pokemon Go actually improve the health of users? How to use this video in your class: -This is an easily understood research project to share with your RM students. It also goes into detail about the statistics used for analysis. -And the researchers, from fancy-pants Harvard, aren't afraid of being a bit silly and having fun as researchers. As demonstrated by the below images from the video: This guy. Seriously. I hope to some day love my data as much as he loves his data. And they made graphs using Pokemon balls -How do we get our research ideas? Sometimes, from observations about every day living. This research was inspired by the Pokemon Go phenomena. I try to ...

The subreddit s/dataisbeautiful was inundated by folks creating color distributions for bags of candy. And because 1) it is Reddit and 2) stats nerds take joy in silly things, candy graphing got out of hand. See below: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/5bojxl/oc_the_data_suggests_that_certain_colors_are_not/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/5bmo3a/color_distribution_of_one_more_partysized_bag_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/5cmemr/a_pie_chart_of_mm_colors_from_a_single_500g_bag_oc/ And because it is Reddit, and, to be a fair, statistically unreliable, other posters would claim that this data WASN'T beautiful because it was a small sample size and didn't generalize. One bag of Skittles, they claimed. didn't tell you a lot about the underlying population of Skittles. Until Redditor zonination came along, bought 35 enormous bags of Skittles, and meticulously documented the color distribution in each ...

Dr. Kevin McIntryre from Trinity University has created the Open Stats Lab.  OSL provides users with research articles, data sets, and worksheets for studies that illustrate statistical tests commonly taught in Introduction to Statistics. Topics covered, illustrated beautifully by Natalie Perez All of his examples come from Open Science Framework-compliant publications from Psychological Science. McIntyre presents the OSF data (in SPSS, R, and .  CSV files are available ), the original research article, AND a worksheet to accompany each article. Layout for each article/data set/activity. This article demonstrates one-way ANOVA. I know. It can be challenging to find 1) research an UG can follow that 2) contains simple data analyses. And here, McIntryre presents it all. This project was funded by a grant from APS.

Property of  @JenSacco54 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mariah-carey-christmas_us_561f989be4b0c5a1ce621a69 A wintery example of why range is a crap measure of variability http://qz.com/859303/americas-most-common-christmas-related-injuries-in-charts/

Students love personalized, interactive stuff.  This website from Chirs Wilson over at Time allows your American students to enter their name and they recieve their British statistical doppleganger name in return. Or vice versa. And by statistical doppleganger, I mean that the author sorted through name popularity databases in the UK and America. He then used a Least Squared Error model in order to find strong linear relationships for popularity over time between names. How to use in class: Linear relationship LSE Trends over time

Fivethirtyeight provides lots of beautiful pictures of spurious correlations found by their own in-house study. At the heart of this article are the limitations of a major tool use in nutritional research, the Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ). The author does a mini-study, enlisting the help of several co-workers and fivethirtyeight.com readers. They track track their own food for a week and reflect on how difficult it is to properly estimate and recall food (perhaps a mini-experiment you could do with your own students?). And she shares the spurious correlations she found in her own mini-research: Aschwanden also discusses how much noise and lack of consensus their is in real, published nutritional research (a good argument for why we need replication!):  http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/you-cant-trust-what-you-read-about-nutrition/ How to use in class: -Short comings of survey research, especially survey research that relies on accurate memories -...

This blog is usually dedicated to sharing ideas for teaching statistics. And I will share some ideas for teaching. But I'm also asking you to share YOUR ideas for teaching statistics. Specifically, your ideas for teaching the new statistics: effect size, confidence intervals, etc. The following email recently came across the Society for the Teaching of Psychology listserv from Robert Calin-Jageman (rcalinjageman@dom.edu). "Is anyone out there incorporating the "New Statistics" (estimation, confidence intervals, meta-analysis) into their stats/methods sequence? I'm working with Geoff Cumming on putting together an APS 2017 symposium proposal on teaching the New Statistics.  We'd love to hear back from anyone who has already started or is about to.  Specifically, we'd love to:         * Collect resources you'd be willing to share (syllabi, assignments, etc.)         * Collect narratives of your experi...

Alright, stick with me. This article is about marijuana dosage  and it provides good examples for how researchers go about quantifying their variables in order to properly study them. The article also highlights the importance of Subject Matter Experts in the process and how one research question can have many stakeholders. As the title states, the main question raised by this article is "How much weed is in a joint?". Why is this so important? Researchers in medicine, addictions, developmental psychology, criminal justice, etc. are trying to determine how much pot a person is probably smoking when most drug use surveys measure marijuana use by the joint. How to use in a statistics class:

Bahahaha. A very funny example of conflict of interest, as this satirical study was sponsored by Red Robin.  Click through to the original content to rea d how the study replaced "I Voted" stickers with " thick Red Robin Gourmet Cheeseburger complete with pickle relish, tomatoes, onions, lettuce, mayonnaise, and their choice of cheese". http://creative.theonion.com/ads/onion-ring/article/study-giving-away-ldquoi-votedrdquo-burger-instead-of-sticker-would-increase-voter-turnout-by-80