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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...
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The Knot's Real Wedding Study 2017

The Knot, a wedding planning website, collected data on the amount of money that brides and grooms spend on items for their weddings. They shared this information, as well as the average cost of a wedding in 2017. See the infographic below: BUT WAIT! If you dig into this data and the methodology, you'll find out that they only collected price points from couples who ACTUALLY PAID FOR THOSE ITEMS. https://xogroupinc.com/press-releases/the-knot-2017-real-weddings-study-wedding-spend/ Problems with this data to discuss with your students: 1) No one who got stuff for free/traded for stuff would have their $0 counted towards the average. For example, one of my cousins is a tattoo artist and he traded tattoos for use of a drone for photos of their outdoor wedding. 2) AND...if you didn't USE a service, your $0 wasn't added to their ol' mean value. For example, we had our wedding and reception at the same location, so we spent $0 on a ceremony site. 3) As poi...
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My favorite real world stats examples: The ones that mislead with real data.

This is a remix of a bunch of posts. I brought them together because they fit a common theme: Examples that use actual data that researchers collected but still manage to lie or mislead with real data. So, lying with facts. These examples hit upon a number of themes in my stats classes: 1) Statistics in the wild 2) Teaching our students to sniff out bad statistics 3) Vivid examples are easier to remember than boring examples. Here we go: Making Graphs Fox News using accurate data and inaccurate charts to make unemployment look worse than it is. Misleading with Central Tendency The mean cost of a wedding in 2004 might have been $28K...if you assume that all couples used all possible services, and paid for all of the services. Also, maybe the median would have been the more appropriate measure to report. Don't like the MPG for the vehicles you are manufacturing? Try testing your cars under ideal, non-real world conditions to fix that. Then get fined by the EPA. Mis...
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UPDATE: The Knot's Infographic: The National Average Cost of a Wedding is $28,427

UPDATE: The average cost of a wedding is now $33,391, as of 2017 . Here is the most up to date infographic: Otherwise, my main points from the original version of this survey are still the same: 1) To-be-weds surveyed for this data come were users of a website used to plan/discuss/squee about pending nuptials. So, this isn't a random survey. 2) If you look at the fine print for the survey, the average cost points quoted come from people who paid for a given service. So, if you didn't have a reception band ($0 spent) your data wasn't used to create the average. Which probably leads to inflation of all of these numbers. _________________________________________ Original Post: This infographic describes the costs associated with an "average" wedding. It is a good example non-representative sampling and bending the truth via lies of omission. For the social psychologists in the crowd, this may also provide a good example of persuasion by establishing ...
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