I love internet-based teaching ideas. They are free and current. At least they were current when I first posted them, but some of my posts are ten years old.  Such is the case for my old post about the Baby Name Voyage r and how to use it to illustrate unimodal, and bimodal distributions. Instead, please go to NameGrapher to show your students how flash-in-the-plan trendy baby names, like my own, have an unimodal distribution: As opposed to bimodal distributions, which flag a name as a more classical name that enjoyed a resurgence, like Emma: When I use this in class, I frame it between names that were trendy once and names that were trendy one hundred years ago and are again trendy. As a mom to grade-school-aged kids, I have certainly noticed this as a trend in kid names. So many Lilies and Noras!  I also make sure my students understand that this information is gathered via Social Security Administration applications from the federal government, to back up another clai...

 Hey. Most of you have never met me and only read my words on this blog, so I thought it would be fun to share a recording of a talk I gave at Murray State University in October of this year .  Not only do you get to see/hear me in action, I think this talk does a great job of summing up my approach to statistics and what I want my students to get out of my class. If you agree with my approach, may I gently suggest that you sign yourself up to get updates on  my forthcoming WW Norton Psychological Statistics textbook: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/l/710463/2023-10-26/2tp3nt

Spotify generates gobs of data about music.  Most people have seen the end-of-the-year data Spotify generates for each user about their listening patterns . Most people don't know that Spotify also generates a lot of data about individual songs. Some of it is straightforward: tempo, genre, length. However, Spotify also has its own niche way of quantifying songs: Danceability. Accousticness. Here is a whole list of their variables and descriptions from researchers at CMU:  https://www.stat.cmu.edu/capstoneresearch/315files_s23/team23.html What does this mean for a stats teacher? You have access to highly personalizable data sets, rooted in music, with gobs and gobs of variables for each song...or artist...or album...or year of release...or genre (like, so many ways to divide up your data).  For instance,  I created a data set with Spotify data for 1989 and 1989 (Taylor's Version) to teach paired  t -tests . How do Taylor's re-recordings compare to the originals?...