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...
NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce (I know, I thought it would be hyphenated as well) reports on Mini-Sentinel , an effort by the government to detect adverse side effects associated with prescription drugs as quickly as possible. Specifically, instead of waiting for doctors to voluntarily report adverse effects, they are mining data from insurance companies in order to detect side effects and illnesses being experienced by people on prescription drugs. Topics covered by this story that may apply to your teaching: 1) Big data 2) Big data solving health problems 3) Data and privacy issues 4) Conflict of interest 5) An example of the federal government pouring lots of money into statistics to make the world a little safer 6) An example of a data and statistics being used in not-explicitly-statsy-data fields and occupations