I leave the country for a few days, and look what happens! The whole country is up in arms (and down in legs) about whether or not a Taylor Swift song will get enough votes to be in the Hottest100 this year.
As some of you may know, the past couple of years I’ve been running some statistics on the Hottest100. What started as an attempt to replicate the efforts of the people behind the Warmest 100 back in 2013 became something I’ve been intrigued in ever since. I ran a different method last year, and got similar results to the Warmest folks.
I’ve been looking at predictions again this year, in my Copious Free Time.
Spoilers Ahoy!
I’m still massaging the data to see if I can tease more interesting stuff out of it, but I basically re-ran a similar sampling method as what I used last year.
You can see the results in a Google Sheet here.
It would appear that T-Swizzle is definitely going to be in the Hottest100 this year – if the entry isn’t disqualified – for her song Shake It Off.
This TayTay song isn’t the worst song in the world, despite what many people appear to think, but nor is it the greatest. Lest people forget, this is a competition where the best song of all time was repeatedly Joy Division’s Never Year Us Apart. In the very first year of the new, now standard, version of the competition, Denis Leary won with Asshole. In 1998 it was The Offspring with Pretty Fly (for a White Guy).
The winner isn’t guaranteed to be an excellent song.
Haters Gonna Hate
I don’t get the hate. And because of who it annoys, I wish the song would win. But it won’t, as you’ll be able to see from the spreadsheet.
What would be much more interesting to me is if it places vastly different from what the statistics say it will, particularly if that one result is in some way anomalous to the rest of the predicted results. I know this method works ok because it’s worked pretty well the past two years, and people’s behaviour hasn’t changed that much. And the sample size is about the same as last year.
In fact, this blog by Matt Saraceni on the topic is the best I’ve seen and it comes with bonus TSgifs.
Personally, I just respect Her Swiftness for teaching people how social engineering attacks work, and appreciate her tireless work educating the world about computer security. Check our her excellent decentsecurity.com, or just follow her on Twitter as @SwiftOnSecurity.
