RECENCY BIAS IN PHISH.NET SHOW RATINGS
[we'd like to thank Prof. Paul Jakus, @paulj, for yet another thought-provoking statistical analysis of Phish.net data - ed.]
Phish.net show ratings are meant to convey Phish fans’ collective perception of how good a show was, but these ratings are subject to a number of biases. For example, .net ratings do not come from a random sample (sampling bias), and people tend to rate the shows they’ve attended quite highly (attendance bias).
Another possible bias, which the .net Cognoscenti have termed “Recency Bias”, is the tendency to rate a show during the first few days after the performance, if not immediately after the show. It is believed that ratings posted in the immediate aftermath of a concert will reflect the warm glow of that experience. People have not taken the time to reflect on the quality of that show relative to the performances immediately before or after, or within the context of an entire Phish tour. Recency bias implies that a show’s rating will decline as its warm glow dissipates.
It occurred to me that I could estimate the magnitude of recency bias using a Phish show database I’ve periodically updated since Summer 2018. We’ll look solely at the 21-show Summer 2018 tour, which started at Lake Tahoe on July 17 and ended at Dick’s on September 2. For each show, we can use snapshots of .net ratings taken on October 2, 2018, on May 5, 2019, and on April 2, 2020. Thus, we have ratings taken one month after the conclusion of tour, 8 months after tour, and 19 months after tour.
Here are the ratings time paths of three Summer 2018 shows [Gorge Night 3 (7/22/18), Bill Graham Civic Auditorium Night 2 (7/25/18), and The Forum Night 1 (7/27)]:
MYSTERY JAM MONDAY PART 413
Welcome to the 413th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the third contest of April. The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the songs and dates of both mystery clips. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Happy holidays!
PHANART AND THE PHISHSONIAN INSTITUTE TEAM UP FOR "ARCHIVING AT HOME" INITIATIVE
[This post comes from PhanArt's Pete Mason, @PhanArt on .net and Twitter, and the Phishsonian Institute's Alex Grosby, @grozphan on .net and @phishsonian on Twitter - ed.]
Last year, PhanArt and the Phishsonian Institute teamed up to present “Below The Moss Forgotten,” a pop-up museum exhibit detailing Phish’s relationship to the Pacific Northwest at the first-ever Phish Studies Conference at Oregon State University told mostly through fan-created items. The exhibit marked the first step in establishing a relationship with OSU in regards to the PhanArt archive, establishing a home for the 3000 items already documented.
MYSTERY JAM MONDAY PART 412
Welcome to the 412th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the second contest of April. The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the songs and dates of both mystery clips, which are connected by a theme. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!
MYSTERY JAM MONDAY PART 411
Welcome to the 411th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the first and easiest of April. This week's pick comes courtesy of MJM Hall of Famer @justino. The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery clip. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!
PHISHR: AN INTRODUCTION TO PHISH.NET'S API WRAPPER
[We'd like to thank Phish nerd extraordinaire, Maya Gans (@WindoraBug on .net, @mayacelium on Twitter), for writing this post and sharing the phishr library that she wrote with Sam Levin (@levisc8 on .net, @SamLevin5 on Twitter) with the community - ed.]
When I tell people I meet outside of the scene that I’m a Phish fan it’s always met with a certain look - you know the one. But this always makes me laugh because one of the reasons I love Phish so much is how they provide one of the richest data sets to adoring fans. I love when folks who say they hate math or statistics end up rattling off their most seen songs, largest song gaps they need to close, or provide feedback on graphs I put up on Twitter.
Phish fans love data, and for that reason Sam Levin and I created the R package phishr. You can request an API Key here and our packages have a handful of functions that help do the heavy lifting.
# load the libraries
library(phishr)
library(purrr)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)
MYSTERY JAM MONDAY PART 410
Welcome to the 410th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the actual final contest of March. The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the songs and dates of both mystery clips. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck, and stay safe out (in) there!
BREATHE IN, BREATHE OUT
[This post is courtesy of fan Keith Eaton, @Midcoaster, who is still processing Trey's 2 ½ hour music drop that was Ghosts of the Forest one year later. A slow processor, it takes him some time to sort these things out. He first became obsessed with music when, in 1979, he sat in a darkened theater and watched Apocalypse Now. Nothing was ever quite the same after that opening sequence.]
Last spring (2019), I had a rare moment of synergy. It came while reading Michael Pollan's book How to Change Your Mind. I had blazed through the first four and a half sections at a record clip. This is no easy feat, for me, as a busy teacher. That reading streak was interrupted, pleasantly, by a couple of weekends of traveling to shows: Mike Gordon at The Sinclair, and then Trey's Ghosts of the Forest (GOTF) at the Portland State Theater. Surprisingly, the Trey show was profoundly connected to the experiences of patients in the guided psychedelic therapy sessions that Pollan describes, it just took me a while to see it.
Mid-April, a couple of weeks after Ghosts of the Forest debuted in Maine, I returned to Pollan's final two sections of the book. Reading about the use of psilocybin to treat depression and despair, even, in end-of-life therapy, I was struck by a passage where Pollan used Bertrand Russell's words to describe what it would be like to cultivate or prepare for an acceptance of death: "the best way to overcome one's fear of death 'is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged into the universal life' " (355). Suddenly, I heard a melody.
It only took a second to recognize that I was hearing strains of Trey's GOTF composition "Wider." Following "Ruby Waves" and the instrumental "Shadows Thrown by Fire" (I'd had to look this up), I was suddenly struck by the fact that in his exercise of staring down Chris Cottrell's death, Trey's song cycle was mirroring the experiences Michael Pollan was detailing in his book. Most strikingly similar were the results of tests done with patients who had a terminal cancer diagnosis. The Venn diagram of loss, grief cycles, mystical ego death, and guided psychedelic therapy were suddenly overlaying my dawning understanding of GOTF in full.
MYSTERY JAM MONDAY PART 409
Welcome to the 409th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the final penultimate contest of March - thanks to MJM Hall of Famer @justino for crafting this puzzle! The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the songs and dates of all three mystery clips. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck, and stay safe out (in) there!
MYSTERY JAM MONDAY PART 408
Howdy everyone, it's @wforwumbo back at the helm this week. I'm happy to welcome you all to the 408th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the third contest of March. The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the songs and dates of the three mystery clips. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!
Hint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OukwGBpnuXE
Answer: Congrats to @serpent_deflector on win #6, leaving him just one short of the Hall of Fame! This week he joined the Garden Party and tracked down the three non-NYE MSG clips: 7/30/17 "Drowned," 10/22/96 "Scent of a Mule," and 12/3/09 "Down with Disease." Swing by Monday to see how clean MJM409 is.
MYSTERY JAM MONDAY PART 407
Welcome to the 407th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the second contest of March. The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the songs and dates of both mystery clips. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!
MYSTERY JAM MONDAY PART 406
Welcome to the 406th edition of Phish.Net's Mystery Jam Monday, the first and easiest of March. The winner will receive an MP3 download code courtesy of our friends at LivePhish.com / Nugs.Net. To win, be the first person to identify the song and date of the mystery clip. Each person gets one guess to start – if no one answers correctly in the first 24 hours, I'll post a hint. After the hint, everyone gets one more guess before Wednesday at 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET. Good luck!
PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUE, "PHISH AND PHILOSOPHY"
Are you a Phish fan interested in Phish and Philosophy? Are you curious about the developing field of Phish Studies and want to help in the creation of new research about your favorite band? If so, consider serving as a fan reviewer for a special issue of the Public Philosophy Journal about “Phish and Philosophy,” co-edited by Dr. Stephanie Jenkins (Oregon State University) and Charlie Dirksen (Mockingbird Foundation, Vice President and Associate Counsel).
Keeping in line with the PPJ’s mission to engage the public and community stakeholders in the research process, essays for this special issue are open for comment from the Phish community via The Current, the journal’s online submission and review system. The eleven essays currently under consideration for inclusion in the first-ever academic journal devoted to Phish are open for public comment until March 16th, 2020.
MEXICO4 RECAP: PESCADO EN FUEGO - WEVE BEEN DANCING HERE FOR DAYS
[phish.net kindly thanks you for your patience and understanding during the slight delay in getting these recaps posted. All of our recappers (and staff) are entirely volunteer; simultaneously taking on the tasks of our "normal" lives while also helping to maintain our great website and community. phish.net would like to thank user @peetasan (Instagram: @EpicFamilyFarms) for this recap. -ed]
Phish in Mexico is a singular experience. There is, literally, nothing to compare it to. Sharing the groove with the smallest crowd you’ll find, on the beach, with the Carribean Sea lapping the shoreline beside you (or around you!), in the middle of winter, in Mexico, after spending the day drinking mimosas and tequila, sunning on the beach, eating ceviche or strutting your best floaty at one of the many pool parties; it is nothing short of continually astounding that we get to do this. It’s apparent that the band feels this way as well, because they are consistently relaxed and in a fun, playful mood. The return of Fishman’s pink jacket and shorts (because how can you wear that only once??) on night 4 was an indication that the band was feeling loose and playful, with Fishman playing a rare set out of the dress.
I love this trip.
MEXICO3 RECAP: HEY MAKISEXY POLICE CRAB
[phish.net kindly thanks you for your patience and understanding during the slight delay in getting these recaps posted. All of our recappers (and staff) are entirely volunteer; simultaneously taking on the tasks of our "normal" lives while also helping to maintain our great website and community. phish.net would like to thank user @gr8phul, (Twitter: @gr8fuljonnyd) for this recap. -ed]
Sometimes it is hard to write about a Phish show, especially as good as the one played Saturday night. What do you say when you feel like everything has already been said about the band we love? Who knows, but as they say, on with the show!
Phish.net
The Mockingbird Foundation