[CauseISaidSo]

As I’ve said before, I do all that for my own enjoyment, so the fact that y’all dig it, too, is icing on the cake. Thanks everyone.

Els, I’ll be happy to submit what I can and try to make a case, but that’s also the problem with the data – it’s hard to make a solid case with it. There’s so much variance across contests and times of year and phases of the moon or whatever and we really have relatively few data points, especially of post-change contests. Maybe when we get a few more in some real trends will start to shake out. The Bacon & AvO contests show some real deviations, but I haven’t looked at all of the past contests in that level of detail to see if they’re an anomoly limited to the new voting system or if they just popup every now and then.

Cuda, I appreciate the offer and I’ll take you up on it if I run into anything. I’ve got limited experience in web coding (the presentation side, anyway), so it’s possible. Likewise, if you ever get a block of time, get bored, and feel like working on something with no monetary reward or practical applications ;), gimme a shout as there’s plenty I’d like to do on Bibliostats.

[CauseISaidSo]

OK, to address some of the previous questions, it’s math time again. Those math-averse among you may want to step out for a while… 😉

This is how voting shakes out on contests since the dual-vote:

  #  Theme                        EntryCount  BestVotes  FunnyVotes  TotalVotes  PercentFunny

---











347  B-Sides & Unreleased Tracks       88        951       130           1081       12.0

348  Desolation                       153       1923        19           1942        1.0

349  Bacon                             56        574       278            852       32.6

350  Straight Out Of Camera           182       2024       103           2127        4.8

351  Stoned                           164       1611       565           2176       26.0

352  Go Out and Get Some Strange      104       1447       578           2025       28.5

353  Apples vs. Oranges 2              66        651       322            973       33.1

You can see that on both AvO and Bacon, Funny votes are almost exactly half of Best votes. Overall voting on both of those contests is low, but so is the number of entries, and total votes has historically correlated somewhat to entry count.

You’re also not imagining things – both of these contests are quite top-heavy, meaning the top entries got a greater share of votes than in other contests. We can measure this in a few ways. First, consider average votes/entry vs median votes/entry. (If you need a math refresher, median is the number where there are as many entries above as below). In an evenly distributed contest, those values should be close to equal. (Note that from here on I’m referencing Best votes only.)

I’ve previously done detailed studies like this on a few randomly-selected contests and I know that of those I looked at, Classical Elements is one of the most evenly distributed, so let’s start there. It has an average vote of 11.48 and a median vote of 11. Not much difference.

Last week’s Strange has an average of 13.91 and a median of 13. Pretty close also.

Bacon has an average of 10.25 and a median of 7, while AvO has an average of 9.83 and a median of 8. Pretty significant difference.

We can also look at what percentage of entries got 50% of the votes. In Classical Elements, the top 31% got half of the votes; in Strange, the top 30%. In both Bacon & AvO, that figure is 21%.

And for those of you who like graphs, here is a large graph of Normalized Vote Count vs Normalized Place for a select number of contests. NVC as we’ve discussed is the vote count scaled to 1000; NP similarly is the place/# of entries scaled to 100. In a perfectly distributed contest, we’d have a straight line running through (50,500) meaning that half of the votes went to each half of the entries. So, the shallower the dip of the curve in this graph, the more evently distributed it is. You’ll see that Classical Elements is the shallowest and Bacon and AvO the most severe curves.

Hope someone enjoys that wall of text… 😕

[CauseISaidSo]

They had me until the Babylon 5 craft……

Yeah, never got into that one myself. I do likes me some Trek & Firefly. The original 3 SW’s are quite enjoyable as well, although I consider them more sci-fantasy than -fiction.

[CauseISaidSo]

U-Man, stumbled across this today while taking a little break, thought the timing was funny and that you and others might as well. Here’s the sci-fi geek’s version of Coexist:

// Really clever idea BTW. Same for fluffy’s gun fight & rav’s Alien.

[CauseISaidSo]

Look into the settings in Lightroom that control whether to use a color profile or not (I’ve never used LR so can’t help there). Make sure it’s set to NOT use a profile. It shouldn’t be that you have dual monitors (I do as well, with a different profile on each), but rather that the profile is applied by the video driver/OS and then applied again by LR.

[CauseISaidSo]

Barracuda, do you have a profile installed for your monitor(s) and if so, are you also instructing Lightroom to use a profile? I ran into that same issue when trying to figure our my color management problems. I think the profile ends up getting applied twice in that case, and if your coworker’s Lightroom doesn’t have a profile installed, that would explain the differences you’re seeing there.

If you do have a profile installed, it’s my experience that Windows Photo Viewer won’t reflect the way the images look in your profile-aware image application or browsers. I’m not sure what it does wrong, but with color-matching profiles installed for my monitors, I can get my photos to look the way I want in DPP and then export the images and they look awful in Photo Viewer but look fine in IE. I also use Fast Picture Viewer Pro which is profile aware and its display matches IE’s and DPP’s but not Windows Photo Viewer. They also have a plugin for displaying RAW files in Explorer and WPV on Windows 7 64-bit machines.

[CauseISaidSo]

I guess I have a slightly different take on things. RadioShack doesn’t carry many discrete components anymore because of the overwhelming number and variety of them today. Back when the number of discrete components could be listed entirely within a set of two catalogs (analog and digital), it made sense to carry some 74xx chips and a fairly limited inventory of things most commonly used. Now, they could fill an entire wall with just the variations in uP from one manufacturer (look at how many PIC variations there are, for example). And when you’ve got sales staff, rent, and utilities overhead, you’ve gotta concentrate on things that will move in volume. So, everyone gets their components online and RS doesn’t carry many for the same reason that Borders was driven out of business by Amazon & the like – inventory selection and pricing.

Does that mean there are fewer people interested in developing these and other skills? I don’t think so. Look at the proliferation of DIY shows on TV, of Make and similar magazines, Makers Faire’s, Instructables, hackedgadgets.com, hackaday.com and similar forums, the success of SparkFun, etsy and all the other crafts sites, etc. With the online knowledge store accessible to all now, I think we’re seeing more of it.

Where we’re failing as a society is illustrated by fluffy and Farktographer’s statements – there’s too much catering to the least common denominator. There’s too much effort put into trying to remove the natural guides to learning; i.e. consequences of ones actions – pain (whether physical, mental, or monetary) when you screw up and reward when you succeed. Used to be if a guy bought a screwdriver, poked himself in the eye and then tried to sue the manufacturer for warning him not to do so, he’d get laughed out of court; now it seems as likely that the manufacturer would be told they should expect idiots to use their product and warn them of potential dangers.

Same thing with the recent housing crisis on both sides. This “too big to fail” crap is just that. What lesson was learned there? Oh yeah – if we’re big enough, we can do whatever we want with no real thought to consequences. And on the other side, we have the lesson that people just can’t be expected to be smart enough to know that a 50-year mortgage or buying a $500K house with an interest-only loan while making $25K a year are bad ideas and so we need to help them out of those poor choices.

[CauseISaidSo]

And what’s up with a credit check for internet service?

Would you sell crack to someone you knew couldn’t pay for their habit? 😉

If you find you need an OBO tomorrow, just PM me the details and I’ll get ’em posted for you.

[CauseISaidSo]

LOL. Love the text-over, too: “Or if you replace your car, we’ll be happy to set it on fire again so you can take another crack at getting that shot.” True friends, indeed.

[CauseISaidSo]

Thanks, fluffy. That’s my favorite movie. Well, that or Casablanca, depending on what mood I’m in when asked. 😉

[CauseISaidSo]

I didn’t have time, again, to participate in a fun & creative contest like this one (got another delivery due by EOD tomorrow), but that didn’t stop me from thinking about what I’d like to have tried if I had time. So, picture this: A green apple with googly eyes & streaks of black face paint floating half-submerged in a tub of ink-blank water with steam rising off it, starkly lit, captioned with “The horror… The horror…” (this scene from Apocalypse Now).

[CauseISaidSo]

LOL! I saw that earlier this week, but I like your version better, orionid. The version I saw had the “dork” as the Canon user (probably why their bubble tails are crossed in yours). Then again, I have a severe dislike for the “Mac” guy too, so really, I’m torn. 🙂

[CauseISaidSo]

Thanks for the info, ennui. If it holds true, that’s about perfect for my timeline. We’ve got a trip in July for our 25th anniversary, so that was pretty much my “if you’re gonna do it, do it by then” date.

[CauseISaidSo]

Where I was coming from is that I’ve about got myself talked into a 5D. Got the Mrs onboard for it, so it’s really just a matter of wrapping up my current project so that I’d actually have time to use it. And I’d hate to drop that kinda coin on it only to find out that a new improved version is coming out shortly thereafter.

[CauseISaidSo]

Last news I heard from Canon concerning this was a joint filing with Kodak for bankruptcy.

Why you, if you weren’t across the pond I’d come over there and apply a thorough beating with my cane (assuming you’d hold still long enough; I don’t want to overexert myself). 😈

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