DASL Updated. Mostly improved.

Data from DASL, graph from CODAP. LUNG is lung cancer deaths per 100,000. CIG is number of cigarettes sold (hundreds per person). Data from 1960.

The Data and Story Library, originally hosted at Carnegie-Mellon, was a great resource for data for many years. But it was unsupported, and was getting a bit long in the tooth. The good people at Data Desk have refurbished it and made it available again.

Here is the link. If you teach stats, make a bookmark: http://dasl.datadesk.com/

The site includes scores of data sets organized by content topic (e.g., sports, the environment) and by statistical technique (e.g., linear regression, ANOVA). It also includes famous data sets such as Hubble’s data on the radial velocity of distant galaxies.

One small hitch for Fathom users:

In the old days of DASL, you would simply drag the URL mini-icon from the browser’s address field into the Fathom document and amaze your friends with how Fathom parsed the page and converted the table of data on the web page into a table in Fathom. Ah, progress! The snazzy new and more sophisticated format for DASL puts the data inside a scrollable field — and as a result, the drag gesture no longer works in DASL.

Fear not, though: @gasstationwithoutpumps (comment below) realized you could drag the download button directly into Fathom. Here is a picture of a button on a typical DASL “datafile” page. Just drag it over your Fathom document and drop:

In addition, here are two workarounds:

Plan A:

• Place your cursor in that scrollable box. Select All. Copy.
• Switch to Fathom. Create a new, empty collection by dragging the collection icon off the shelf.
• With that empty collection selected, Paste. Done!

Plan B:

• Use their Download button to download the .txt file.
• Drag that file into your Fathom document.

Note: Plan B works for CODAP as well.