Which countries are best at esports? 2026 update
Given the ease of obtaining scraped datasets with Claude Code, I thought we could update my 2019 study of mental sports with the newest data and better methods. The primary…
Penalization for small n problems: case study of Steam games
For many kinds of ranking websites, users are naturally going to be interested in the leaderboard or top list, the best of the best. This is the same thing for…
Steam game ratings don’t show recency effect
Due to a data error, some of these findings are not entirely true. See next post. Previously, I showed that IMDB movie ratings are inflated for recent movies. I speculated this…
Who makes the most highly rated movies?
Working with the IMDB data, we can also have another look at who makes the best movies. I previously examined this using the best foreign film category from the American…
The content economy on X
After Elon Musk acquired Twitter/X, he started monetizing it. There are two types of monetization schemes: 1) subscribers, which work the same way as every other platform (monthly sub, some…
Few people trust journalists
I was going to do a bunch of searchers to find polls of trust in different occupations by country. However, it turned out to be unnecessary because Ipsos has already…
Which countries make the best movies?
In a simple sense, the answer is America. But America has over 300 million people, and other countries have fewer than 10 million people. Which country makes the best movies…
Against “phobia”
There's two uses of this common word: Fear or anxiety of something. Dislike of some group, usually left-wing aligned. The first is the original as it is just the Greek…
Did the New York Times inform readers about Rotherham?
I saw this amusing exchange on Twitter some days ago: I don't think Matthew had investigated this claim, it was maybe revealed to him in a dream. But was it…
Wikipedia’s political bias demonstrated by sentiment analysis
The great David Rozado has a new study out on the politics of Wikipedia: Is Wikipedia Politically Biased?. He downloaded the English Wikipedia database, and analyzed whether the articles covering…