{"id":596,"date":"2017-01-19T16:27:40","date_gmt":"2017-01-19T21:27:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/geophysics\/?p=596"},"modified":"2017-01-19T16:36:16","modified_gmt":"2017-01-19T21:36:16","slug":"evil-plots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/geophysics\/2017\/01\/19\/evil-plots\/","title":{"rendered":"Evil Plots"},"content":{"rendered":"

At part of an experimental General Education class, this past fall I taught a two-week course module to non-science majors entitled “Evil Plots” all about the ways graphs can be used to misrepresent data. The idea was to teach students graphics by bad example, and to introduce a healthy level of skepticism to their media consumption (I’m looking at you, Fox News).<\/p>\n

The module covered three ways plots can go bad:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The plots itself is faulty – such as distorted axes.<\/li>\n
  2. The data is questionable – such as non-representative samples.<\/li>\n
  3. The interpretation is suspect – such as spurious correlations.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In this post, I will focus on item three. There is a fun book on spurious correlations\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0that I recommend. But there is nothing like working with your own data to drive home the point, so I started the class by asking students to answer the following series of pseudorandom questions:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. How many hours a week do you spend on school assignments and studying?<\/li>\n
    2. How much do you love math on a scale of 1-10 (1=would rather have my teeth drilled, 10=math problems are better than ice cream and kittens)<\/li>\n
    3. What day of the month were you born?<\/li>\n
    4. What is your height in inches to the nearest inch?<\/li>\n
    5. How many days did you spend at the beach this year?<\/li>\n
    6. What is the most miles you\u2019ve driven a car in a single day, ever?<\/li>\n
    7. How many songs do you listen to in a day?<\/li>\n
    8. How many slices of pizza did you eat in the past month (best estimate).<\/li>\n
    9. How many states have you visited in your life? (Driving though or stopped in an airport count)<\/li>\n
    10. How many letters are in your first and last name combined?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      I then hunted for correlation between all the possible combinations of variables. Naturally, most were pure scatter, but sure enough, some exhibited reasonable correlation. For example:<\/p>\n

      \"fastandspurious\"<\/a><\/p>\n

      It is possible to predict your height based on the day of the month in which you were born. Who knew!?<\/p>\n

       <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      At part of an experimental General Education class, this past fall I taught a two-week course module to non-science majors entitled “Evil Plots” all about the ways graphs can be used to misrepresent data. The idea was to teach students … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":606,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/geophysics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/geophysics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/geophysics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/geophysics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/606"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/geophysics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/geophysics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/geophysics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/geophysics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/geophysics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}