ABSTRACT
Humans seem to be unable to avoid ranking things. Top Five/ Ten/Twenty/Hundred lists abound: Best (Worst) Dressed, Best Suburbs, Most Watched TV Shows, Movies, Videos, Best Football Teams, and so on. Rankings have very serious uses as well. Companies need to know what products consumers prefer; social and political leaders need to know what the society values; elections need to be conducted; young people need to be drafted (?); prospective students need to be assessed. Data consisting of rankings appear in Psychology, Animal Science, Educational Testing, Sociology, Economics, and Biology. In fact, for almost any situation where there are data it can be helpful to transform the data into ranks. Nonparametric statistical analysis was initially based' mainly on ranks.
