Mathias Basner is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. His primary research interests include the effects of sleep loss on cognition, population studies on sleep time and waking activities, the effects of noise on sleep and health, and astronaut behavioral health on long-duration space missions. Occasionally, he likes to take on odd projects like running a quantitative analysis on who was the best friend on the TV series Friends, or using 150 year-old data to investigate how sounds affect sleep.
Episode Description
Since the 1990’s people have been trying to figure out who’s the best friend. Is it Chandler because of his dry wit? Phoebe because of her unabashed enthusiasm? Joey because his loyalty? Well, leave it to statistics to give us a firm answer. Who’s the best friend from the show Friends is the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Mathias Basner
+Timestamps
How did this get started? (1:45), How is this mapped to this assessment? (3:53), Who did you do this research with? (6:10), Differences between you all? (8:41), Negative interactions (10:05), Who is the best friend? (11:48), What other data did you collect? (17:09), Another show? (20:00), Sleep research (22:19), Sleep recommendations (26:34)
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
Since the 1990s people have been trying to figure out who's the best friend? Is it Chandler because of his dry wit? Phoebe because of her unabashed enthusiasm or maybe Joey because of his loyalty? Well leave it to statistics to give us a firm answer who's the best friend from the show friends, is the focus of this episode of stats and stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and stories is a production of Miami University's departments of statistics and media journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist John Bailer, Chair of Miami Statistics department. Our guest today is Mathias Basner. Basner is a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine, his primary research interests include the effects of sleep loss on cognition, population studies on sleep time and waking activities, the effects of noise on sleep and health and astronaut behavioral health on long duration space missions. Occasionally, he likes to take on odd projects like running a quantitative analysis on who was the best friend on friends are using 150 year old data to investigate how sounds affect sleep. His work on friends was recently featured in an issue of Significance and is why he's joining us here on the podcast today. Mathias thank you so much for joining us.
Mathias Basner
Thanks for having me.
Rosemary Pennington
Your research interest broadly is really, really interesting. But I am curious how this friends project got started?
Mathias Basner
Well, I mean, obviously, while watching a Friends episode, that was when it was still on Netflix, here in the United States, and you know, family are watching. One of the episodes was the one where Rachel gives birth to her baby, and she still didn't have a name for that baby. And then Monica says, you know, I knew the name for for my babies, you know, since I was a was a child, and then Rachel wants to know it. And, you know, Monica says it's Emma. And then she allows her to use that name for her newborn daughter. And I thought, wow, this is this was really nice. Monica is really a good friend to Rachel. And then it dawned on me that, you know, these friendship deeds, they could actually be scored across all 236 episodes of the of the series. And you know, it wouldn't be easy. would take a long time. And it wouldn't be completely free of bias, of course. But you know, it could be done. And, you know, I've worked in science for more than 20 years now. And in any kind of problem. I'm always looking for a good quantitative approach, like, you know, how can you like, put this in numbers and run analysis on that. And so this was like, the moment where I said, Hey, you know, this, this is a way to actually analyze this qualitatively. And get away from all these, you know, opinion polls and pieces I've read before somebody says, Oh, you know, Phoebe's the best friend or, you know, who knows Chandler's the best friend. And oftentimes, they, they just, you know, quote, a couple of episodes. And it's all very much driven by, you know, whatever they recall, were like, good or bad things. And so I thought, you know, let's, let's put a twist on this and actually score this as a family. And that's what we did.
John Bailer
Yeah. So now I'm gonna have to think about using your scale to judge all of my friends interactions. Oh, no. Okay, rosemary, you got to work on keeping your plus twos here. I'm just telling you. So can you talk a little bit about how you how you stepped forward and went from? What does it mean to be a good friend? And then how is that mapped to this assessment of these interactions?
Mathias Basner
Yeah, so I mean, of course, friendship can be defined in so many different ways. And you actually, in the Significance piece, we cite an author who just you know, lists all the different qualities of a friend like being trustworthy, being a good listener, having good sense of humor, and these are just three out of like, 12 properties or so. But it was basically you know, as watching these episodes, and whenever there was a situation where we said, oh, this is really not nice. You don't do that if you're a good friend. This is really a nice thing. And this is what you actually want to see in a friend. We gave, you know, friendship scores for positive and negative deeds, and we actually had a little bit of a scale. That is, you know, we were giving like plus a plus to a plus one. point for good deeds on minus one and minus two points. And you know, the overwhelming majority of those were in the in the plus one minus one category, but there were a few big ones. And also, these are things that didn't make it into the paper. I mean, overwhelmingly, there were actually, you know, a good friendship deeds, and the nasty negative ones for we're not that frequent. But yeah, it was a it was a, it was a long haul. And, you know, we also decided not to, you know, watch. Yeah, I mean, me, you know, I'm also, you know, trained in epidemiology, you know, knowing about all sorts of biases. So we didn't watch like episode 1, through 236, like in one in one go. But we, we jumped back and forth, right, we didn't want this, this, this bias of our scoring, changing across the course of you know, as watching all these these episodes, we were jumping back and forth, I kept a list of episodes we'd already watched. And I put, you know, whenever there was something, I put it into a notebook on my phone, and then had to transcribe that later to a spreadsheet and etc. And that spreadsheet is available for everybody to look at scrutinize, criticize whatever and run, run, run their own analysis,
Rosemary Pennington
Mathias, you keep saying us and we and so one of the things I found really interesting reading this was who your research partners were. So could you talk a bit about how the that partnership grew out of this project?
Mathias Basner
Yeah, so my research partners were my wife, Etiena, and my now 17 year old son, Bruno, and my 14 year old daughter, Marlene. And, you know, they were they were actually they're old enough now to watch Friends. You know, I mean, it's, it's a pretty benign serious, right, but you know, I wouldn't want to watch it with them when they were five or something. So we started watching it, and they loved it. And that's actually another poll that I quote, in the Significance piece is that actually the, among the youth in the, in the UK, it's the most popular TV show, you know, it's it's like, you know, some 20 years old or so. But you know, it's, it's kind of timeless in that sense. So, you know, they weren't bored. So, you know, we were watching together, and we were scoring together. I mean, obviously, not everyone was there all the time. So, you know, we gave those apps and T scores, a chance to look what we had scored. And, you know, everybody has seen all episodes, so many times that everybody could relate, relate right away. So Oh, yeah, I remember. And I agree, you know, this is this is the right scoring. in a statistical sense, it's not optimal, because we can't say anything about interobserver variability. You know, it would have been a guess better if we had like, four separate scorings. And then we could like, make comparisons, does everybody scored in the same way? So you know, we didn't think of that. And also, it would have been less fun, you know, just watch everything on your own.
Rosemary Pennington
My husband helped me with my, my master's thesis coding, I did a content analysis. And I was reading and prepping for this. And I looked at him, and I'm like this, I don't think we would have survived if we tried something.
Mathias Basner
Yeah, it was tough towards the end. But you know, the closer you get to the end, the more excited you are that you know, it can start analysis now. And I think that's something if you're like, a scientist, you have to have been brought up in a certain way, I think something where you can wait for gratification, right? I mean, you have an idea for a study, you plan that study, you collect the data, and then you analyze the data. And finally, you see the results. And that may be years later, right. So it there's a certain type of personality that can survive in that sort of environment. Yeah. And this was one of those things.
John Bailer
Yeah. Your description sort of describes my sense of continuing on in grad school and then going on for academic jobs. Yes, there's this, it seems like kicking the can down the road. And delayed gratification defines a lot of choices. Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious if you, if you kind of anecdotally noticed any differences between the raiders were sort of, were any of the four of you kind of consistently more positive than other viewed viewed interactions as more positive or more negative than others?
Mathias Basner
Not really. I mean, there was some discussions around you know, is, is this really worth a point? Or should shouldn't this be two points or one point, but I think it was pretty obvious whether something was a positive or a negative deed. It's more around, you know, this is this is really enough to qualify, you know, as getting a point, because there's lots of interactions where you could say, oh, you know, I mean, like teasing for example, right? That's, that's so normal, but it's not really something negative in a friendship sense, right? It happens all the time. It's just if you if you're doing something that that's really mean, which should get negative friendship scores. So now that we, you know, we were pretty pretty much on board. I don't know whether, you know, I was just being too dominant as you know, being a dad and a husband but where you would have to interview my family? This whole process?
Rosemary Pennington
You mentioned sort of Rachel using the name Emma as like this, this thing that sparked it raises really beautiful moment of friendship like, Yes, I'm going to let you use this name I had been holding on to for my child. And you talked about that most of these things sort of fell in the not super bad are not super great sort of friendship category. Could you give a few more examples of maybe what was a negative interaction? And maybe what was another kind of positive interaction?
Mathias Basner
Yeah. And it doesn't even have to be an interaction. I mean, one of the positive things I'm thinking right now we list another one in the Significance piece, is when Ross bought Phoebe that bike, because you know, she, she never had a bike as a kid. And she didn't really know how to ride a bike, and he bought her a bike. And then he trained her how to write that bike. I mean, that's just great. Right? And that's like, too fat points there. For us, and you know, the opposite is like, that's, you know, I mean, I have to pick a Rachel example, because she really turned out to be the worst friend. And I'm hoping that Jennifer Aniston is not mad at me. But it's this, this whole body thing, right? I mean, you know, Ross and Rachel had had broken up. And they were at the beach house, and Ross had a new girlfriend, and she had this beautiful long hair. But at some point, you know, in her life, she actually saved her head bold. And you know, Rachel kind of encouraged her. Oh, you know, that looks so great. Why don't you do it again, obviously, having in mind that she she knows Ross so well, that he would hate it. Right? So that's a minus two right there because she was manipulating Barney into doing that. And she knew that Ross would hate it right. You know, that's just a example. In that category.
Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to Stats and Stories. And today, we're talking to Mathias Basner professor in the Department of Psychiatry, at the University of Pennsylvania, Perelman School of Medicine, so you mentioned that Rachel turns out to be the worst friend, which I think if people watch that have watched friends, that's probably not a surprise, who turns out to be the best friend?
Mathias Basner
Well, by a wide margin, actually, Joey turns out to be the best friend. And he had really a great relationship to everyone. I mean, the you know, you know, when we did this network analysis there, you know, these edges, you know, pointing away from the nodes. And, you know, it's all positive for Joey. So, and, you know, he kind of like, took over that the lead in season five, and he never lost that. What was really interesting is Phoebe, because she turned out to be the best friend until early in season five. And then the writers really drove her down. I mean, she, she barely made it to a positive score at the at the very end of Season 10. And she actually, you know, we also had this table originally, that didn't make it into the Significance article, how many seasons, somebody was the best and worst friend, and she was the worst friend in like, three, three of the of the last five seasons or so. So that really drove her down. And, you know, when I read these pieces, you know, this is why Phoebe was the best friend, I think, you know, those authors have, like, the first seasons in mind. Because, you know, she, she, she, she really changed, you know, and that was just the thing that's that surprised me that I never had thought about. But that's another great thing about you know, collecting these quantitative data, because you're all of a sudden learning things that you you know, never thought about. And that was certainly one revelation. Another one was that the female characters really didn't get along that well, we, you know, we looked at diets, which is like, you know, pairs of friends and just the interaction between the two. And, you know, all the girls ended up you know, at the very bottom of that list, so, and of course, you know, Rachel was also driving some of that. But yeah, that was really, really interesting. Actually, Ross was also a very good friend, he came in second with a pretty high score a decent score, and, you know, Chandler, Phoebe, Monica just made a positive score, like kind of all in the same ballpark. And again, Rachel is the only one that had a negative overall friendship score at the end of season 10. And, you know, she had that at the end of season one and she never lost that title. She was just, I mean, doesn't mean that she didn't have like a few good deeds in there. You know, she really has a few positive moments. And but you know, overall it just, you know.
Rosemary Pennington
Yeah, I was I was surprising to me to see that Ross came ahead is like the second best friend, because I think I feel like in the like, cultural discourse, right, that those are flipped. I feel like culturally, like people love Rachel and assume like she's this great friend, I think because people like the storylines around her and assume that Ross was like, this terrible friend did like the big cultural conversations. And then when I was looking at your table, the graphing the friendship over the seasons, I was like, wow, like I did not expect Ross to be the guy who came out second behind I thought Joey was by hands down gonna be the best friend like he was my favorite like I was yes, I see that my confirmation bias. And I'm glad that was confirmed. But I was really surprised about Ross.
Mathias Basner
Yeah. And he, I mean, this is just shows you that there are obviously limitations to our analysis, right. I mean, one is just, you know, tallying up these these good and bad deeds, you know, there's more to people and the perception of who they are than just these positive and negative deeds. So exactly what you just mentioned, and I was so flabbergasted when I saw this radio poll that was that they did here in a national public radio in the US, where Phoebe was voted the best Friends friend and, and Ross by a wide margin, the worst friend, I said, this, but this also, just being a fan of the show didn't make sense to me. I mean, he doesn't come over as a, as a bad friend, I didn't make sense to me. There's actually, you know, one funny story, because, you know, I, my poor students, you know, they knew about this project. And I talked about it constantly. And at some point, I knew that Rachel was the worst friend. And then, you know, a new postdoc started in our lab. And you know, we were, this was actually pre COVID. And, you know, we were all sitting in the, in our conference room and having lunch. And then I just asked, you know, that new postdoc, I said, Hey, are you? Have you watched, you know, the TV series Friends? She said, Yeah, happy? You said, I said, you know, who would you say, you know, was, was was the best friend, you know, out of the six? And, you know, she, she thought about a little bit. And then she, she said, Rachel, and you know, the con, the conference, everyone that was like, because at that point, they all knew that she was the worst friend, and she said, you know, what have I done? What have I done? So I just kept the show, you know, everybody, everybody has their own thoughts. And, you know, this is, again, there's so many opinion pieces out there, and everybody kind of, you know, comes up with another name. And they they list a couple of episodes. So this is why I thought it was really cool to try to do a quantitative, you know, approach to this?
John Bailer
Well, you know, you could the investigation of how things changed over time, is being that kind of purposeful, and looking at, at how those evolved, is is an insight that if you're, if you're looking at kind of recent, you know, kind of where did When did you stop really paying attention to the show, perhaps? Or when did you first start paying attention to the show and who was who was positive, then you could easily see how other other factors that might might drive responses? Because you've you know, your systematic investigation is, is quite comprehensive, whereas most people in terms of their encounters with shows or maybe not, not quite so much, you know, and so I really liked that kind of time series, investigation of kind of their, their friendship scores. I also liked the network component, can you talk a little bit about the the data that fed into your network analysis? I mean, you so you've, you've done all these ratings, but those were just transactions overall, in the show that your rating over time in the seasons? How did you have to fine tune that to start diving into these Dyads of interactions?
Mathias Basner
Yeah, I think it's actually the way we had we had scored that is actually it's just a, you know, a, a spreadsheet where every interaction is basically one line of that spreadsheet. So it lends itself perfectly for network analysis, because that's exactly the input that was needed. And it's actually a colleague of mine here at Penn, who ran that analysis for me, and he's acknowledged properly in the Significance article, and we actually picked an analysis because that's, and that's something that surprised me that network analysis, sometimes the, the sign of the contribution doesn't really matter, whether somebody something has a positive or negative influence is just, you know, a considered an influence. It's like basically taking, you know, an absolute value of that, and then looking at the network, but that, of course, you know, wouldn't have worked out very well for this. So, you know, we, we chose a network analysis where actually, the positive and negative deeds were, you know, reflected appropriately. And lo and behold, yes, this also shows that Joey is the best friend, there's like a, a variable that basically, you know, shows the overall influence of somebody on the network. So, you know, he's he has he had by far the greatest and positive value. And Rachel had, you know, the lowest negative value. It was interesting that Ross wasn't the second best influence in that network. And that was probably driven by his his relationship with Rachel, because as you can imagine, you know, after they were on a break, there was a lot of negative stuff going on between Ross and Rachel. And that was kind of like driving him a little down in the network. analysis.
Rosemary Pennington
So I was telling my husband about about your study Mathias. And the question he had that I am now going to pose to you is, are you planning on doing any follow up on a show like Seinfeld? Where it seems like all four of those friendship characters are terrible people? So I think it would be interesting to understand who is the best friend out of that bunch of people?
Mathias Basner
Yeah, you know, I mean, I like Seinfeld, but I've never been like a super fan. I mean, now it's on Netflix again. So yes, we could do that. But I think somebody else could take that on. I think we we've done our, you know, good deed for science. In this kind of analysis, you know, another thing I wanted to mention is, and that also didn't make it into the, into the paper, we also scored favorite episodes. You know, and what, what was astonishing to me that a lot of the later seasons still had a lot of favorite episodes. Because typically what you see, and I think that was true for Big Bang, at least for me, that in the latest seasons is the show, like, you know, it's not that great anymore, right? And that's also the reason why at some point, they just stop it because they run out of ideas. And it's not that funny anymore. But friends, you know, except for season nine, which was really bad, and there was not a single favorite episode, you know, season seven, and eight still have like, five favorite episodes, for example. And then I did this analysis, we're actually correlated, the number of favorite episodes with these positive and negative friendship deeds. And there was a huge positive correlation between the positive deeds in a season and the number of favorite episodes. Oh, that's really interesting. It actually explained like, 57% of the variance. So so so. And the negative friendship needs no correlation whatsoever with with favorite episodes. So perhaps it's I mean, it's the positivity of our family that, you know, we like these episodes that were super positive things happened and categorize them as favorite. I mean, of course, this gets into the real, it's really subjective, right? I mean, yeah, what you call but you know, like, bamboozled and that stuff, that's just great. You know, and you never forget these episodes.
John Bailer
So, you know, I am curious that, you know, I'm sure that your your research career probably extends beyond television, and in your favorite series, and exploring them. And in fact, I know that you've done a lot of work with sleep hygiene, and with investigating noise impact, and I find this all really fascinating work. I mean, we certainly could have another episode even talking about that. But But I'm just curious if you could, could take us into kind of the importance or the impact of noise on health, and some of the work that you've done there as, as changing up a little bit to give to flesh out sort of your interest beyond friends.
Mathias Basner
Yeah. So I mean, uh, well, I started in medicine, and I wanted to go into clinical medicine. But, you know, I interviewed and, you know, these interviews were not very successful in the sense that I just didn't didn't like these division heads, right? It was very hierarchical at the time in Germany. So, you know, I ended up at the German Aerospace Center. And they just started a huge study, which is still the largest study to date on the effects of aircraft noise on sleep, and they were looking for somebody who had experience with sleep. And, you know, my dissertation was in Applied Physiology, and I worked in a sleep lab. So I had that background. So I said, you know, why not, I can always go back into clinical medicine, which, which I never did. And, you know, I ran that study, and it was just, you know, one of my primary research intestinal interests and as it has never really left me so, you know, we've done several studies, not only in aircraft noise, on traffic noise on sleep in the laboratory in the field, right now, actually, I'm funded by the Federal Aviation Administration. And we are we are conducting the largest study ever investigating the effects of aircraft noise and sleep in people's homes. And that is around set around 77 major US airports. And, you know, we actually planned that pre COVID. And we're lucky now that we did, because we're sending out all the equipment with really good instructions and videos that people watch they self instrument. So we're measuring body movements and heart rate during the night and we inferring Awakening's from that and we are measuring the sounds in the bedroom and we are you know, we are identifying aircraft noises and then we are we are relating the two and you know, we just enrolled the 50th subject and we're going to enroll 350 More over the course of the next two years. And you know, the idea is to kind of inform FAA as noise policy, you know, is the policy that they have have in place? Is that still protecting enough? And if not, what what what can be done, it's it's again, you know, I mean, a lot of the the noise effects research I've been doing. And this is a very, you know, emotionally discussed area because you're if you're affected by noise in your home, it's really annoying, especially if you have no control over the noise source. And it can affect your health in the long run. So the idea is, you know, to gather data and inform noise policy, and that is very much again, the, you know, like the, like the friends piece, it's something that is otherwise in the realm of opinions, now, you put data behind it, and you give people access to the data, they can scrutinize it, they can, you know, criticizes or whatever. But it becomes a piece of informed decision making, you now have like, you know, a basis for a discussion. And you can make informed decision based on the data. And this is exactly what we're doing in that FAA study as well, trying to find some, you know, hard data that also goes beyond subjective responses, because you can imagine that sleep and subjective responses is very tough, because we're unconscious, while we're sleeping, we're not aware of ourselves in our surroundings. And you know, you may slip up, you may wake up in the morning and say, I had a wonderful night, right? And then we actually, in that, that's what happened when we looked in our laboratory study at the physiological data that we had recorded. No, no, no, it wasn't a great night, you're just not aware of all the sleep disturbance that has been going on. Right?
John Bailer
So do you have recommendations for what, for noise and sleep quality? We'll let you know, as a as a parting shot for the episode. What kind of guidance can you give us in terms of kind of better sleep and an impact of noise?
Mathias Basner
Well, I mean, you know, the, the obvious thing is, you know, try to avoid noise in your bedroom. And that's tough. For many people, it's also, you know, a, an inequity thing, right? Because the, the noisiest areas are often you know, the cheapest to live in. But if you, if you have a choice, let's say you, you can choose between two apartments, I would always say choose the one that is less noisy, because the noise is going to be there, and it's going to be there forever. And not forever, but you know, it's got to be with you, it's got to live with you at that location. And there's really no way of evading it properly. So really, you know, that, that the, the noise that you're exposed to, in your home should be a major reason for for, for picking or not picking a home. Now, with a better bedroom, there are a few things you can do, obviously, you know, if you have you know, proper, you know, double triple pane window, that helps a lot. But then you also have to keep those windows closed, we actually had in our aircraft noise study back in Germany, when we went into the field, you know, people had like sound insulation provided by the airport, but they kept the window open, and at that point, all of the sound insulation is gone. Right. Another thing is, if road traffic noise is your problem, you can potentially, you know, move your back back bedroom, to the back of your house where it's, you know, not exposed to the street, and that that can lower noise levels substantially, there have been studies showing that, you know, blood pressure is lower in people who have actually the bedroom on the on the other side of the, of the the less noisy facade. And, you know, we're actually we, we were just funded for another study, that's looking at white noise and sleep. Because, you know, me as somebody who has been investigating the effects of noise on sleep, and in a negative way, I was always flabbergasted why people would introduce a noise source into their bedroom, right. And so you know, a couple of theories why that might work and actually improve your sleep. One is, of course, the masking properties of the noise. So you may not hear the aircraft noise any longer because of that constant background noise level that you're introducing. It could also be just, you know, that they are asleep promoting properties of those noises. I mean, some people use ocean sounds or rain, you know, dropping on your window. And then there may actually be something that's, you know, we call stimulus control, it's just, you know, you're you're turning on that machine as a sign for your body, you know, it's it's time to go to bed. And it's like, kind of asleep ritual. But, you know, I was wondering, is there really evidence behind this? So we did a systematic review of the literature, and lo and behold, there is no good evidence, either for or against it. And that is like kind of in contrast to the millions of people who are using the sound machines are they even putting them into the bedroom of their of their of their newborns and toddlers, and you know, it may actually be detrimental to sleep, you know, because of that introducing a noise source into your bedroom, and it may actually be off also detrimental to your auditory health. Because very much like the brain this, you know, it's kind of like very recent research that has shown that we have a lymphatic system in the brain and while we're sleeping, this lymphatic system opens up and cerebral spinal fluid is flushed through the brain and all the metabolites that have accumulated during the week period are being flushed out. So it's really a waste management function that, that sleep is having. And I believe that the same is true for the auditory system, because, you know, hearing something is a very active process, there's like outer inner hair cells, and they consume energy, when they're translating, you know, whatever we're hearing into action potentials that are then you know, transferred to the brain. And I believe that you know, there ought to be a period for you know, those metabolic byproducts that that are accumulating in the auditory system also to be to be cleaned right. So introducing this noise source into the bedroom, whether the our auditory system is constantly perceiving these these noises may actually be detrimental in the long run to our auditory health. So, you know, this is these are things that we will be investigating, you know, we started with a laboratory study, very controlled and at some point, you may be taking it into the field.
John Bailer: Very nice.
Rosemary Pennington
Well that’s all the time we have for this episode thank you again Mathias for being here.
Mathias Basner
Thank your or having me.
Rosemary Pennington Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.