As the year winds down, it’s always a good time to take a look back at the year and see what’s happened and what the hopes are for 2018. My capstone class has finished up and been graded, and in a few days I’ll get the official piece of paper that says I’ve finished my studies. While I’m not planning on leaving my current job at the moment, I have some consulting work lined up and want to spend some time pulling together some of my writing from over the years. I’ll keep myself busy, don’t you worry.

While I’m working on that, I figured I’d continue my tradition of reviewing my most popular posts of the year. It’s always fun to see what was popular at the time I wrote it and what continued in Google popularity after it went up. While some of my most popular posts continue to be old ones (Correlation/Causation Confusion, Bimodal Distributions and Immigration, Poverty and Gumballs are Perennial Favorites), this list is only posts that were written in 2017:

1. Calling BS Read-Along This series that followed along with the syllabus for the Calling Bullshit class and the University of Washington was far and away my most popular of the year, helped out quite a bit by the professors Tweeting out links to my posts. Definitely one of my more fun blogging experiences.
2. The Real Dunning-Kruger Graph At first I was sort of surprised to see this one this high on the list, but I realized that it’s popularity has been boosted by a steady stream of Google traffic. It appears that quite a few people had the same question I did, and hopefully my post helped them out.
3. Immigration, Poverty and Gumballs Part 2: The Amazing World of Gumball  After my original Immigration, Poverty and Gumballs post went mini-viral, I put together this post to address some of the responses. Not quite as popular, but still gets some traffic.
4. 10 Gifs for Stats/Data People In my perfect world, this would be my most popular post. In this one, stats and data gifs are still pretty niche.
5. Using Data to Fight Fraud: the Carlisle Method Doing a follow up to this post is definitely on my 2018 to do list.
6. 5 Things You Should Know About Orchestras and Blind Auditions I am glad to know that there are people in this world who were as interested in the study behind the anecdote as I was.
7. A Loss for so Many A post I wish I never had to write, but one I was happy got shared.
8. 5 Things You Should Know About the Backfire Effect With political polarization all around us,
   this post may be one of the more important ones I did this year….how to actually convince people of facts when they don’t agree with you.
9. How You Ask the Question: NFL Edition More examples of how asking questions differently can generate different responses. This one produced some debate on other blogs about whether or not this was really an example of “the same question” or whether it was an example of slight wording changes changing the question entirely, but regardless I think it’s a good example of how little word choices make a difference.
10. Perfect Metric Fallacy This post probably was one of my most gratifying, as it got passed around an office that was going through this exact issue. Hearing people’s reactions made me laugh.

Here’s to 2018!