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

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?