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...
I've shared these on my Twitter feed, and in a previous blog post dedicated to stats funnies. However, I decided it would be useful to have a dedicated, occasionally updated blog post devoted to Twitter Statistics Comedy Gold. How to use in class? If your students get the joke, they get a stats concept. *Aside: I know I could have embedded these Tweets, but I decided to make my life easier by using screenshots. How NOT to write a response option. Real life inter-rater reliability Scale Development Alright, technically not Twitter, but I am thrilled to make an exception for this clever, clever costume: This whole thread is awesome...https://twitter.com/EmpiricalDave/status/1067941351478710272 Randomness is tricky! And not random! ...