As a holiday breather, it is time for some fun, educational music! I hereby present the Predictive Analytics Rap and Pointers Rap.


I’ll own it if I predict it
I need some analytic
Statistics
To help me run my business.


A young, talented Leron Gray visited the Predictive Analytics World and Prediction Impact websites, and came back to me saying, “After visiting that website you linked me to and after visiting the website to your company I couldn’t help but write a song! Rhyming words wouldn’t stop flowing into my head.”

Here is the MP3 of the Predictive Analytics Rap

And here are the full lyrics of the Predictive Analytics Rap

I met Leron because, as a high school student, he made a cover of a rap I wrote in my previous life as a Columbia University professor. The rap is about pointers (data that is the address of, i.e., a “pointer” to, other data). Here is the Really professional cover and, Even better, check out the same cover behind a YouTube video!.

Yes, folks, a rap video about data pointers.

Leron is an Electronics Technician in the Navy.

When teaching the introduction to programming for computer science majors, I wrote several educational computer science songs, including a rock ballad, a patter, a rhapsody, a couple raps, and a number that sounds like it’s right out of a Disney musical.

In fact, I published a 1999 paper, Why do fools fall into infinite loops: singing to your computer science class, at the ACM special interest group on computer science education. When I presented at the conference in Cracow, Poland, I sang to the other educators. The paper states, “Empirical and anecdotal results demonstrate that the songs help students learn, and help them enjoy learning.” Oh look, Google Scholar shows it’s been cited by 10 other publications – cool!