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...
You aren't a proper stats nerd if you have not scrolled for an hour through all of The Pudding's content . Thank goodness for The Pudding, which helped me spice up the discussion boards in my online stats class. For a long time, I emphasized rigor over wonder. In my stats class, I had topics that were functionally reasonable but not terribly engaging for class discussion. That changed last semester. I spiced up my discussion board with some of my favorite data visualizations, like this one about using a fast-food app to track power outages after a natural disaster, and this one that illustrates data on the efficacy of nutritional supplements in a beautiful, functional way. Here is another that lets students look at trends in art and wonder about how this may reflect on cultural shifts in courting and romantic relationships . TL;DR The Pudding recently shared a post about trends in love songs from 1958 through 2023. The whole inter...