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...
People I love very much live in Florida. My very favorite academic conference is held in Florida. I want Florida to flatten the curve. But Florida is flattening the curve. Believe me when I say that I'm not trying to dunk on Florida, but Florida has provided me with prime material for statistics teaching. Timely material that illustrates weaponized data. Some examples are more straightforward, like median and poor data visualization. Others illustrate a theme that I cover in my own stats class, a theme that we should all be discussing in our stats class: Data must be very, very powerful if so many large organizations work so hard to discredit it, manipulate it, and fire people who won't. You should also point out to your students that organizations working so hard to discredit are typically straightforward descriptive data, not graduate-level data analysis. 1. Measures of Central Tendency As of June 23, the median age of people newly diagnosed with COVID-19 in Florida dropped ...