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...
Hausmann et al.'s Using Smartphone Crowdsourcing to Redefine Normal and Febrile Temperatures in Adults: Results from the Feverprints Study
As described in Wired's pop piece, the average body temperature for healthy adults isn't 98.6℉. Instead, data suggests that it is 97.7℉. Here is a link to the original study by Hausmann, Berna, Ggujral, Ayubi, Howekins, Brownstein, & Dedeoglu . 1. This is an excellent theoretical example for explaining a situation where a one-sample t-test could answer your research question. 2. I created fake data that jive with the results, so you can conduct the test with your students. This data set mimicked the original findings for healthy adults (M = 97.7, SD = .72) and was generated with Andy Luttrell's Data Generator for Teaching Statistics . 97.39 97.45 97.96 97.35 96.74 99.66 98.21 99.02 96.78 97.70 96.90 97.29 97.99 97.73 98.18 97.78 97.17 97.34 97.56 98.13 97.77 97.07 97.13 9...