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 think that language is fascinating. Back when I taught developmental, I always liked to teach how babies learn to talk in sort of the same way all across the world. I like regional difference in American English (for example, swearing and regional colloquialisms ). So, I really like this research that investigates the rise and fall of slang in America. And I think it could be used in a statistics class. How to use in class? 1. Funny list of descriptive statistics. 2. Research methodology for using Google searches to answer a question. A good opening for discussion of archival data, data mining, and creating inclusion criteria for research methodology. 3. Using graphs to illustrate trends across time. This feature is interactive. 4. Further interactive features demonstrating how heat maps can be used to demonstrate state-by-state popularity over time. Here, "dank memes" peaked in April 2016 in Montana. 5. The author eye-balled the data can came up ...