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...
A few weeks ago, I used an NPR story in order to create an ANOVA example for use in class. This week, I'm giving the same treatment to a different research study discussed on NPR and turning it into a correlation example. A recent research study found that individuals who use reusable grocery store bags tend to spend more on both organic food AND junk food. Here is NPR's treatment of the research . Here is a more detailed account of the research via an interview with one of the study's authors. Here is the working paper that the PIs have released for even more detail. The researchers frame their findings (folks who are "good" by using resuable bags and purchasing organic food then feel entitled to indulge in some chips and cookies) via "licensing", but I think this could also be explained by ego depletion (opening up a discussion about that topic). So, I created a little faux data set that replicates the main finding: Folks who use reusable ...