The greatest diabetes-related ABBA-song-preference survey in the world

By | 9 March, 2012
Complex statistics, yesterday

Complex statistics, yesterday

Avid account holders at your soaraway Shoot Up will be aware that when you sign up you are asked to tell us what your favourite ABBA song is. Some people thing that this is a clever anti-spam mechanism, others a complex physiological test of some description. In actual fact it’s a piece of paper-thin whimsy of little or no merit which has no greater meaning whatsoever.

Despite this I thought it would be interesting (read: I had nothing better to do) to extract the preferences from the mySQL database which runs your soaraway Shoot Up and collate the data to create the single greatest diabetes-related ABBA-song-preference survey in the world.

The extract gave us about 4,000 data records, which was a great result. When we removed the spam accounts and songs that only had one vote we were left with 121 records. We get a lot of spam accounts you see.

Anyway, the Shoot Up boffins had enough data to generate us the results below. For the sake of accuracy I have expressed each song preference as a percentage to at least eight  decimal points.

Dancing Queen > 35 > 28.92561983%
Waterloo > 23 > 19.00826446%
The Winner Takes It All > 10 > 8.26446281%
Fernando > 8 > 6.611570248%
Take A Chance on Me > 8 > 6.611570248%
Super Trooper > 6 > 4.958677686%
Money Money Money > 5 > 4.132231405%
Does Your Mother Know > 4 > 3.305785124%
Mama Mia > 4 > 3.305785124%
Knowing Me, Knowing You (ah-haaaaaa) > 3 > 2.479338843%
Lay All Your Love on Me > 3 > 2.479338843%
Chiquitita > 2 > 1.652892562%
Eagle > 2 > 1.652892562%
Gimme Gimme Gimme (A Man After Midnight) > 2 > 1.652892562%
I Had A Dream > 2 > 1.652892562%
Thank You For the Music > 2 > 1.652892562%
The Day Before you Came > 2 > 1.652892562%

Sadly Dancing Queen came in as a clear winner. I don’t really like Dancing Queen; despite its title, it has a plodding, slightly dreary four/four beat, which make it a pain to dance to when it’s inevitably played at wedding discos. Waterloo – tragically relegated to second place – is in my view a far better song – dum de dum de dum de dum daa daa! Not only is it great to dance to, it also teaches you something “…the history book on the shelf / is always repeating itself”. A salutary lesson to us all.

Behind the two champions came “Winner Takes It All” – which is good, but a little depressing – and “Fernando”, which is just an odd song.  “Take A Chance On Me” (that’s all I ask of you) romped in next with “Super Trooper” – a song with utterly inexplicable lyrics – following closely behind.

So there we have it – thank you, ABBA, for the music and thank you, Shoot Up readers, for helping us to build such a world class dataset. Knowing Me, Knowing You – ah haaaaaa!

What? The? Stats?

What? The? Stats?

19 thoughts on “The greatest diabetes-related ABBA-song-preference survey in the world

  1. Alison

    It’s a tragedy that Waterloo didn’t make the top spot. Aside from that, this is a momentous day in the history of diabetes research. I can almost feel my life changing as a result of this knowledge being shared with the world. Never let it be said that ShootUp is merely a collection of badly written whimsy. 😉

    Reply
    1. Tim Post author

      I do like to think that we make a difference with quality writing like this.

      Reply
        1. Tim Post author

          Oh good! Aside from producing (or not) insulin what else do pancreases do? Do you know?

          Reply
          1. Mike

            I have know idea what a pancreas does or what it does not do in our case! Can’t help but I may make an appt. with Dr Google later!

            Reply
  2. Tim Post author

    Ooh – I have to post here now, it appears there’s a limit to number of nested comments…

    Anyway, good old Dr Google – I once had a sore knee, typed it into Google and diagnosed myself with cancer and AIDS within about five minutes.

    Reply
    1. Mike

      What does our pancreas do? http://thabet.es/zEygSe

      Quoted from said link to save you 1 mouse click.

      If you’re not sure what the pancreas does, you’re not alone. A lot of people aren’t sure why we have a pancreas! The pancreas is a special organ in our bodies, like the stomach, the kidneys, the liver, or the heart. Each of these organs does something to keep us alive and healthy. The pancreas actually has two jobs!

      First, the pancreas creates special chemicals called hormones. Different hormones do different things in our bodies. These special hormones control the amount of sugar in our blood. Our bodies use this sugar as energy! It’s a different type of sugar from the kind we eat though. Often sugary foods are more unhealthy than healthy.

      The second job of the pancreas is to make another kind of chemical, enzymes. These enzymes travel into the small intestine and help digest the food we eat! That food will become energy for us to live and grow! Now that you know what a pancreas does, aren’t you glad you have one?

      Reply
      1. Tim Post author

        Thanks for copying and pasting onto my site – so *I* get done for copyright theft 😉

        Reply
        1. Mike

          Ah no worries! That will give you something to do over the weekend? Defend yourself! 🙂

          Reply
  3. Mike

    For myself I can’t *believe* you watered down the results by ONLY expressing percentages to eight decimal places. This kind of wishy-washy statistical broad brush approach will not be tolerated by ShootUp’s readership. The risk of a flawed meta study based on your unnecessarily vaguely expressed data could have serious consequences for future clinical diabetes-Abba based decisions.

    Reply
    1. Tim Post author

      Well, isn’t that the point of meta-studies – to weed out anomalous results and poorly constructed trails? You can’t expect perfection in such a ground-breaking study can you? It’s the first of it’s kind, so you have to expect some rough edges…

      Reply
      1. Dave

        No. The point of meta-studies is to selectively include only the data which proves the theory you had started with. I therefore must conclude that through your elimination of ‘spam’ the greatest song, Knowing me, knowing you, ah-ha, was actually the clear winner but selective stats removed this fact.

        Reply
        1. Tim Post author

          A very fair point Dave – I also removed typo variants of song titles, which will have again slewed the data. I would make a rotten scientist.

          Reply

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