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...
A database codebook is the documentation of all of the data entry rules and coding schemes used in a given database. And code books usually contain examples of every kind of variable and level of measurement you need to teach your students during the first two weeks of Intro Stats. You can use any code book from any database relevant to your own scholarship as an example in class. Or perhaps you can find a code book particularly relevant to the students or majors you are teaching. Here, I will describe how to use Global Terrorism Database ’s code book for this purpose. The Global Terrorism Database is housed at the University of Maryland and has been tracking national and international terrorism since 1970 and has collected information on over 170, 000 attacks. So, the database in and of itself could be useful in class. But, I will focus on just the code book for now, as I think this example cuts across disciplines and interests as all of our students are aware of terroris...