More Good Music

Sucre, "When We Were Young." Sucre is a side project with Stacy DuPree-King of Eisley, her husband Darren King of MuteMath, and Jeremy Larson. Just lovely.



Wolf Gang, "The King and All Of His Men"



The Temper Trap, "Sweet Disposition"



Death Cab for Cutie, "Meet Me On the Equinox"



Taylor Swift and the Civil Wars, "Safe and Sound"



Brandon Flowers, "Crossfire"

A Useful Quote for Social Scientists

A less profound application of the less-is-more principle is to our habits of reporting numerical results. There are computer programs that report by default four, five, or even more decimal places for all numerical results. Their authors might well be excused because, for all the programmer knows, they maybe used by atomic scientists. 

But we social scientists should know better than to report our results to so many places. What, pray, does an r = .12345 mean? or, for an IQ distribution, a mean of 105.6345? For N = 100, the standard error of the r is about .1 and the standard error of the IQ mean about 1.5. Thus, the 345 part of r = .12345 is only 3% of its standard error, and the 345 part of the IQ mean of 105.6345 is only 2% of its standard error. These superfluous decimal places are no better than random numbers. Theyare actually worse than useless because the clutter they create, particularly in tables, serves to distract the eye and mind from the necessary comparisons among the meaningful leading digits. Less is indeed more here.

Jacob Cohen, Things I Have Learned (So Far), American Psychologist 45 no. 12 (1990): 1304-12.

New Music

Keane's forthcoming album seems very promising, from the sound of the new video (below), which returns to the melodic piano-based pop sound of their first two albums. Tom's voice sounds stronger than ever.

 

 Nick Pitera, whose day job is animation with Pixar, has an amazingly versatile voice, as shown by his performance of selections from Phantom of the Opera (and no, he's not lip-syncing the female voice):
 

Switchfoot, which I've liked since 2000's "Learning to Breathe, has a new album, and they're even playing here locally in a couple of weeks. May have to catch that one.

 

 Other new stuff I've liked:

 Animal Kingdom, "Strange Attractor":
 

 The Shins, "Simple Song":
 

 Young the Giant, "Apartment":

 

 Pentatonix, "Somebody That I Used to Know" (remake of Gotye/Kimbra):