New statsy teaching post! A question for your students: Do the 37 variants of Taylor Swift's Life of a Showgirl album violate the statistical assumption of independence when charting album sales? notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/11/does...

New post: This silly example captures Goodhart's Law better than anything else I've ever seen. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/11/a-me...

I made donations to our on-campus food pantry. What are you going to do?

We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

OF COURSE I have a Google Presentation dedicated to spooky stats jokes. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2021/10/hall...

Life is hard but Brandi Carlisle just released a amazing album, so there is at least that going for you.

Monty Python understood p-hacking

That feeling when I use my own blog to teach my own classes. Specifically, I'm using this post about Mr. Beast to introduce the idea of UX testing: notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2023/10/that...

New post! Use this interactive bee swarm plot from @flowingdata.com to teach percentiles, median, the importance of government data, and discuss career aspirations with your students. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/09/perc...

Dear stats friends: I want to do a blog post about this: www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/mps-are-al... I am having trouble figuring out where the z scores came from. Like, ofc, I know what a z score is, but I'm not following where the M and SD came from for each phrase/word...any ideas?

New Blog Post: Use this cooking analogy to explain family-wise error. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com

Are you an instructor who wants to build your students’ comprehension in your psych course? Join @notawfuljess.bsky.social on Wednesday to learn how you can transition to a conceptual-first approach that builds students' skills using all the now-available resources. Register here: bit.ly/4lAsSfO

Stats matter. A lot. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

This is our first data page with this feature, and you’ll see more of these across many different topics in the coming weeks. Building this feature was truly a team effort. Let us know what you think! And give it a try here: ourworldindata.org/grapher/vacc...

Guess what? @notawfuljess.bsky.social and I did a joint blog post 😀 You can use it to teach ethics, scientific self-correction, NHST, human rights violations, & more. We both hope you find it useful. www.everydayresearchmethods.com/2025/07/repa...

Can you imagine the infantile, superficial, and profane Donald Trump talking about his faith in such an eloquent and heartfelt manner? They hate Stephen Colbert because he is an authentic version of what they pretend to be.

Check out this new blog post. YouGov measured summer activities that everyone loves, or just younguns love. This accessible example explains paired t-tests w sig and non-sig differences. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-qu...

Britons are more regular swearers than Australians or Americans, but what are their top swear words? Britons F*ck: 67% use regularly Sh*t: 65% Bloody: 54% Australians Sh*t: 61% F*ck: 56% Bullsh*t: 52% Americans Damn: 55% Sh*t: 54% F*ck: 47% 👇 more in chart below yougov.co.uk/society/arti...

New Post! Hot off the presses, a curated list of research articles that contain both a) many student authors and b) many of the statistical tests we teach in Intro Stats. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/07/rous...

New post: This one is short and timely. UFO sightings in America peak on the 4th of July. That's it. That is the whole post. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/07/ufo-...

ICYMI: This explainer does a great job of visualizing and personalizing rank choice voting.

Anyone else looking for a bit of professional development this summer? I'll see you there for this free event.

New blog post: This one hits differently during a heat wave. Explain rank choice voting to your students using ice cream flavor preference. This interactive explainer from @cnn.com was inspired by the NYC mayoral primaries. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/06/rank...

A gem from @xkcd.com

This is a vital message: one of the larger reasons BlueSky is refreshingly free of alt-right shitlords is because in the early days we made a gentleperson’s agreement to starve these fuckos out and it worked. No likes, no quotes, no engagement. They got bored and left. Please keep the Old Ways.

A top staffer to Sen. Tina Smith emailed Sen. Mike Lee’s top staffers on Monday about “how much additional pain you’ve caused on an unspeakably horrific weekend” Full emails below

New blog post: This one gets your students thinking like a statistician. How is it that we can use data to make predictions? Where does that data come from? How can we repurpose existing data? How does pizza consumption predict war? notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/06/does...

I've used this phenomena to explain the short comings of means to my intro stats students. This example is a concise and thorough example that can be used in the classroom.

Dear Pennsylvanians: This blog post is for you. It features curly fryz, @sheetz.bsky.social, and the PA baseball series this weekend. You can use it as a speedy and regional example of chi-square goodness-of-fit. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/05/an-o...

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New blog post! #3 in my series of engaging discussion prompts for statistics classes. Hartnett-tested and approved, these prompts lead students to think about how data (here, deer-related car accident data) can be used to make the world safer. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/05/full...

Do me a favor and fill out this survey!

New post! I'm not above pandering. I will argue for the importance of data by sharing a YouTuber, PWA, who built a successful channel based on funny illustrations of international data. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/05/pwa-...

Socialism is what they called public power.  Socialism is what they called social security.    Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.   Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people. —Harry Truman, 1952

New post! Bar graphs inspired this power installation art piece. It used data viz to illustrate how much we might be losing to Terms and Conditions statements. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/05/dima...

New Post! Looking for one more example for your correlation/regression class? I've just updated my spreadsheet on the age gap between Leonardo DiCaprio and his romantic partners (r = .67). notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/04/leo-...

New blog post! Freshen up your regression, correlation, and/or ANOVA lectures with this positive psychology data...https://notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/04/a-wee-bit-of-positive-psychology-data.html

How can online surveys better measure political knowledge? We tested a "certainty-in-knowledge" format, randomly including a "don’t know" option and allowing respondents to rate their confidence. This approach significantly improved data quality. business.yougov.com/content/5044...

🥳 Back by popular demand: @notawfuljess.bsky.social will show us how she teaches stats using stories and metaphors. Join us on Friday! Register here: bit.ly/3DwvH0J #teachingstats

New post! This is one is a rec for a statsy discussion board. I teach online stats. It can be tough to engage students in this topic in this format. I started using stats that make me wonder about the world, like this one about trends in love songs. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/03/full...

Hi! A bit of good news. One of my very favorite conferences, Society for the Teaching of Psychology's Annual Conference on Teaching, is now accepting submissions for the 2025 meeting in Minneapolis. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

I'm so lucky to have Beth Morling in my life. Her fresh approach to Research Methods paved the way for my fresh approach to Stats. I can't wait to chat with her (and anyone else who wants to sign up!) tomorrow about our "sister" classes: Research methods and psychological statistics.

Ask Us Anything tomorrow! Join @bmorling.bsky.social and @notawfuljess.bsky.social as they answer all your burning methods and stats questions on topics ranging from AI to engagement. us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

One way to keep people docile is to prevent researchers from collecting the data that might reveal the full scope of the harm that's being done (in this case, to pregnant and postpartum people and their infants). talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/cdc-s...

A tiny little update to my post about funny ways of illustrating the limitations of regression: notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-...

New post! While I pride myself on sharing really good examples of data and stats, we can still teach our students with crap examples of data and stats. In that spirit, let's talk about r/DataIsUgly. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2025/02/rdat...