Duane Lundy, assistant professor of psychology, recently had his manuscript entitled “Critiquing the Critics: Statistical Analysis of Music Critics’ Rating Distributions as a Measure of Individual Refinement” selected for publication in Empirical Studies of the Arts, expected to be published in 2012. In the manuscript, Lundy evaluates rating behavior among modern music critics, using a previously compiled database that randomly sampled 352 different critics’ ratings of more than 15,000 albums. He used potential quantitative markers of rating refinement by analyzing frequency distributions of album ratings. Lundy found critics’ ratings as a group to be roughly normally distributed, but individual critics varied widely in rating behavior, as evidenced by both visual inspection of histograms and related statistics, such as skewness, kurtosis, … Continued