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...
This article from The Washington Post summarizes research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association . Both are simple, short articles that show how you can use regression to make an argument. Here, the authors use regression to demonstrate the paucity of funding and publications for research studying gun-related deaths. A regression line was generated to predict how much money was spent studying common causes of death in the US. Visually, we can see that deaths by firearms aren't receiving funding proportional to the number of deaths they cause. See the graph below. How to use in class: 1) How is funding meted out by our government to better understand the problems that plague our country? Well, it isn't being given to researchers studying gun violence because of the Dickey Amendment . I grew up in a very hunting friendly/gun-friendly part of Pennsylvania. I've been to the shooting range. And it upsets me that we can't better understand and stu...