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...
Unsettling. But I bet your students won't forget this example of why mean isn't always the best measure of central tendency.
While the reddit user labeled this as example median's superiority, you could also use this as an example when mode is useful. As statisticians, we often fall back on to mode when we have categories and median when we have outliers, but sometimes either median or mode can be useful when decimal points don't make a lot of sense.
Here is the image and commentary from reddit:
And this an IG posting about the data from the same user, Mona Chalabi from fivethirtyeight. I included the Instagram because Chalabi expands a bit more upon the original data she used.
While the reddit user labeled this as example median's superiority, you could also use this as an example when mode is useful. As statisticians, we often fall back on to mode when we have categories and median when we have outliers, but sometimes either median or mode can be useful when decimal points don't make a lot of sense.
Here is the image and commentary from reddit:
And this an IG posting about the data from the same user, Mona Chalabi from fivethirtyeight. I included the Instagram because Chalabi expands a bit more upon the original data she used.
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| https://www.instagram.com/p/BIVKJrcgW51/ |