Lies, Damned Lies, Beautiful Lies

https://visualisingadvocacy.org/blog/disinformation-visualization-how-lie-datavis

I am in love with this article. Obviously data visualization can be just as persuasive as data provided in different ways (raw data vs. percentage vs. percent increase, etc.), but I like how this article specifically calls out the visual persuasion tactics.

When are Babies Born?

Are births evenly distributed across time of day, day of the week, and time of year?

http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Fulltext/2004/04000/Timing_of_Birth_After_Spontaneous_Onset_of_Labor.8.aspx

The raw data is in the tables. I think kids would be interested in this question, and the results are kind of surprising.

What Are the Odds of Twins Born in Different Years?

The best thing about teaching probability and statistics, in my opinion, is that it's so much easier (and fun!) to find interesting contexts for problems. I feel like I don't have a good sense of what data is actually interesting to kids, but this question seems like it would capture some imaginations:

http://freakonomics.com/2014/02/05/what-are-the-odds-of-twins-born-in-different-years/

This also feels like a Fermi problem in some ways.

Rather than having kids actually answer this question, I think it would be more interesting for them to try to make sense of the methodology described in the post, the comments, etc. Analyzing someone else's process is a big part of evaluating is reasonableness. Oh, hey SMP #3...

Population Density Redistribution

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/01/30/what-the-u-s-map-would-look-like-if-population-matched-state-size/

I wonder what else you could have kids redistribute.