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Showing posts from March, 2013

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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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Statistics Meme I

from http://hello-jessica.tumblr.com Who knew that Zoidberg was an ad hoc reviewer?
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Happy St. Paddy's Day!

For the original, click here . Property of history.com
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Jessie Spano's Caffeine Intake

In honor of Daylight Savings Time and my own caffeine addiction. This will always be the funniest graph ever, p < .05. Property of Nathaniel James
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PHD Comics, 1/20/2010

Jorge Cham of PhD Comics quickly summarizes the problems that can occur as research is translated to the masses via the media. Funny AND touches on CI, sampling, psychometrics, etc. Property of phdcomics.com
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Brett Keller's "An incredilby detailed super statistical Hunger Games survival analysis" via io9.com

Sometimes I think I'm a big nerd. Then I read about an even bigger nerd and I feel better about myself because I'm less nerdy but then worse about myself because I'm not as hard core as I once thought I was. Especially when their nerd focus is on 1)statistics and 2) The Hunger Games.
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Newsweek's "About 40 percent of American women have had abortions: The math behind the stats"

This exercise encourages students to think critically about the statistics that they encounter in the media.  Note: This data is about abortion. When I use this exercise, I stress to my students that the exercise isn't about being pro-choice or anti-abortion, it is about being anti-bad statistics. Writer Sarah Kliff published an  article in Newsweek about de-stigmatizing abortion. In the article, she makes the claim that 40% of American women have had abortions. Some readers questioned this estimate. This is her reply to those readers. I challenge my students to find flaws or possible flaws/points of concern in the mathematics behind the 40% estimate. Some points that they come up with: a) The data doesn't include minors, b) the data doesn't include women who were alive between 1973 (Row v. Wade) and 2004 and but died/moved out of the US before the 2005 census data (which was used in her calculations), c) data estimates that about half of women having an abortion at...
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