A rank ordering of the Taylor Swift songbook.

File under: End of the semester stress blogging about a person who brings me joy. Taylor Swift (see: sampling error with Taylor).

Here is a new, VERY accessible example of ordinal data. Rob Sheffield, writing for Rolling Stone, rank-ordered ALL of Dr. Swift's songs.

Headline from the Rolling Stone Piece, featuring photos of Taylor Swift from over the last ten years.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/taylor-swift-songs-ranked-rob-sheffield-201800/bad-blood-2014-196114/

Also, introduce your students to Methods Section 😁. This rank order is based on the variable "Taylor genius".

Quote from article: Every fan would compile a different list—that’s the beauty of it. She’s got at least 5 or 6 dozen songs that seem to belong in her Top Ten. But they’re not ranked by popularity, sales or supposed celebrity quotient — just the level of Taylor genius on display, from the perspective of a fan who generally does not give a rat’s nads who the songs are “really” about. All that matters is whether they’re about you and me. (I guarantee you are a more fascinating human than the Twilight guy, though I’m probably not.)

You could even use this as an example of anti-interrater reliability. This ranking comes from exactly one person. AND YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN KID DESERVED BETTER.

Each ranking includes the best lyric from the song as well as a brief description of the Taylor Genius on display. Is this also an example of qualitative data?

Description of #20, The Great War: One of the stellar Aaron Dessner collaborations tucked away on the Midnights 3 A.M. Edition. “The Great War” comes clean about the side of Taylor who only wants love if it’s torture, going into the question of how emotional battles happen and how to end them, especially when you realize you’re the one firing the cannons. It’s a dilemma she’s written about honestly her whole career, from her teen ballad “Cold As You” (“I start a fight because I need to feel something”) to “Afterglow.” The World War One imagery and martial drums are fitting for a song about how easy it is for two hearts to dig themselves into trenches. But “The Great War” also doubles as a tribute to the type of lover who can help rescue you from your own destructive instincts, the kind you want on your side. Best line: “My knuckles were bruised like violets/Sucker-punching walls/Cursed you as I sleep-talked.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/taylor-swift-songs-ranked-rob-sheffield-201800/the-great-war-2022-1234617639/

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations

Tyler Vigen has has created a long list of easy-to-paste-into-a-powerpoint graphs that illustrate that correlation does not equal causation. For instance, while per capita consumption of cheese and number of people who die by become tangled in their bed sheets may have a strong relationship (r = 0.947091), no one is saying that cheese consumption leads to bed sheet-related death. Although, you could pose The Third Variable question to your students for some of these relationships). Property of Tyler Vigens, http://i.imgur.com/OfQYQW8.png Vigen has also provided a menu of frequently used variables (deaths by tripping, sunlight by state) to help you look for specific examples. This portion is interactive, as you and your students can generate your own graphs. Below, I generated a graph of marriage rates in Pennsylvania and consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Generated at http://www.tylervigen.com/

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