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Updated example of using baby names to illustrate bimodal distributions.

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...

UCLA's "What statistical analysis should I use?"

This resource from UCLA is , essentially, a decision making tree for determining what kind of statistical analysis is appropriate based upon your data (see below). Screen shot from "What statistical analysis should I use?" Now, such decision making trees are available in many statistics text book...however... what makes this special is the fact that with each test comes code/syntax as well as output for SAS, Stata, SPSS, and R. Which is helpful to our students (and, let's be honest, us instructors/researchers as well).