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...
Modern musician vocabularies: See how I extracted this data using GenAI, and how you can use it in class.
I intended for this to be a post about the singer vocabulary. It is still that, but it is also a post about using GenAI to grab data from an image. I mean, you can use Excel to do the same thing, but GenAI is a lot easier. Here we go. It starts with the Word Tips website, which helps you solve your crossword puzzles and Wordle. This website also has a blog dedicated to words. One such blog post explored which singers have the largest vocabularies, as measured by the number of unique words in their lyrics. Their blog post compared music legends to newer talent. There are a ton of fun data visualizations on the website; go check it out. Since I teach college students, I decided to concentrate on the musicians my students listen to: In and of itself, this image serves as an example of bar graphs, good data visualization, and proper use of "buckets". However, I figured we could find a way to use the raw data in class. Create your own data visualization, create your own buckets....