The thing about my way of teaching stats is that my cool, novel examples get old really fast. Like, pop culture is on a thirty-day cycle. Anyway, YEARS ago, 2014 to be exact, I blogged about illustrating bimodal data distributions using baby name data from the Social Security Administration. Specifically, when an older name comes back into vogue, it has a bimodal distribution when you plot time on the X axis. I stand by this example. However, all of the data illustrations come from 2014. When our traditionally aged college students were 6 or 7. Which makes this example feel a little stale. However, here is some data, courtesy of Redditor fevaah , showing old names that are back in vogue through 2025 ! And Eleanor, Violet, Nora, and Hazel are here, illustrating bimodal distributions for a new generation. If you used my old baby-name data, this is a quick, easy refresh for your lectures (or a fun new addition if you didn't). If this idea was help...
I originally came across this story via io9.com. More information from the source is available here.
Essential, these high-end German shoes are made by a company of devoted atheists. They even have their mailing materials branded with "atheist". And they had a problem with their packages being lost in by the USPS. They ran a wee experiment in which they sent out packages that were labeled with the Atheist tape vs. not, and found that the Atheist packages went missing at a statistically higher rate than the non-denominational packages.
I think this could be used in the classroom because it is a pretty straight-forward research design, you can challenge your students to question the research design, simply challenge your students to read through the discussion of this article at the atheistberlin website, introduce your students to Milgram's "lost letter" technique and other novel research methods.
Edit: 3/9/2020
If you want to delve further into the "why" behind these findings, you can teach your students about prejudice in the form of anti-atheist sentiment that is common in North America. For a primer, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000312240607100203.
You can also use this as an example of a paired t-test. In the original study, the mailed two pairs of shoes to each American address: One pair was shipped in packaging that included "Atheist", the other was shipped in plain packaging. The boxes in Atheist packaging took longer to get to their destinations.
I created a data set that mimics these findings. NOTE: It is not the actual data, but it does replicate the real data, which found that Atheist-labeled boxes took 3 days longer to arrive.
Essential, these high-end German shoes are made by a company of devoted atheists. They even have their mailing materials branded with "atheist". And they had a problem with their packages being lost in by the USPS. They ran a wee experiment in which they sent out packages that were labeled with the Atheist tape vs. not, and found that the Atheist packages went missing at a statistically higher rate than the non-denominational packages.
I think this could be used in the classroom because it is a pretty straight-forward research design, you can challenge your students to question the research design, simply challenge your students to read through the discussion of this article at the atheistberlin website, introduce your students to Milgram's "lost letter" technique and other novel research methods.
Edit: 3/9/2020
If you want to delve further into the "why" behind these findings, you can teach your students about prejudice in the form of anti-atheist sentiment that is common in North America. For a primer, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000312240607100203.
You can also use this as an example of a paired t-test. In the original study, the mailed two pairs of shoes to each American address: One pair was shipped in packaging that included "Atheist", the other was shipped in plain packaging. The boxes in Atheist packaging took longer to get to their destinations.
I created a data set that mimics these findings. NOTE: It is not the actual data, but it does replicate the real data, which found that Atheist-labeled boxes took 3 days longer to arrive.
|
Time,
in days, for delivery
|
|
|
Plain
|
Atheist
|
|
12
|
15
|
|
13
|
15
|
|
10
|
14
|
|
15
|
18
|
|
11
|
15
|
|
10
|
16
|
|
16
|
14
|
|
14
|
15
|
|
14
|
18
|