The only data set you'll ever need: Nathan's Hot Dog eating contests, 1908-2019

Physiologist Dr. James Smoliga published an article entitled "Modeling the maximal active consumption rate and its plasticity in humans - perspective storm hot dog eating competitions." While hot dog eating competitions may not seem germane to Serious Academic Discourse, the idea of stomach/gut plasticity certainly is. Spoiler alert: According to the models, the maximum capacity of a stretched-out human stomach is 84 hot dogs. And buns. 

Honestly, all of the GIFs of humans eating hotdogs were nasty, so enjoy this cutie.

However, my blog post is about something other than the researcher's findings as much as it is about Nathan's Hotdog Eating Contest spreadsheet that Smoliga created while performing his research. A spreadsheet packed with 16 variables and 430 hot dog eating participants your students can analyze in Stats class. I'm surprised that Nathan's didn't have its own database. Here is a description of how they generated the database. 

Independent t-test

Sex differences in hotdog consumption

One sample t-test

Are these competitive eaters living up to their God-given potential? Are they eating 84 hotdogs? The one-sample t-test, comparing the value of 84 to the Number of Hot Dogs variable, says they are not.

Scale of Measurement

Nominal: Sex

Ordinal: Rank

Interval: Year

Ratio: Number of hot dogs, hot dogs per minute

Transforming variables for reasons:

So, most of the hotdog eating contests were 10 minutes long. So, to figure out the number of dogs eating per minute, the people who created the database divided the total number of hot dogs by 10. Similarly, hot dogs + bun are nice, even 100 grams of food. So, to figure out the grams consumed per minute, they had to multiply the number of hot dogs + buns by 100. This isn't rocket science, but you could discuss with your students why a scientist might want to operate in grams and hot dogs/minute rather than route the number of hot dogs. 

Dividing up your data:

This data set records the year and rank per year for each competitor. This data is an excellent example of how you divide up a data set using different commands or menus in your software. Ask your students to find the mean number of hot dogs eaten yearly. Or the modal number of hot dogs eaten by the 2nd place finishers. While these are simple descriptive statistics, thinking about and dividing up your data is a pretty regular practice in data analysis but perhaps not one we teach to our students.