Green Room - Week 34 - Day 1

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

Perhaps we should start doing this in the early weeks of Idol instead of having "byes": http://www.freep.com/story/life/2015/01/20/birthday-party-show-fee/22040807/

Seriously though - sending a bill for a kid not showing up to a birthday party seems a good way of never having kids want to show up to your parties again! Unless of course, the parent is trying to stop having to organize them in the future and/or kill their child's social life in general. In which case - well played!!

***

Speaking of "Well Played", there was somethings that happened last night that you may have missed:

Results from Week 33: http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/826108.html
The new Topic: http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/826357.html
The new Quick Fire: http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/826465.html
and, of course, the new Work Room: http://therealljidol.livejournal.com/826776.html

***

Congratulations to *THE TOP 15*!

Only 5 contestants remaining until we have the Top 10. Your odds of making it to that point are good... or are they? *insert cackling here*

Comments

[kathrynrose.livejournal.com]

First.

eta - I'm in a weird "bitch about random things that are entirely unimportant" mood today.

I'm trying to keep it to myself. If you hear an explosion, you'll know what happened.

[lrig-rorrim.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, bitchin' about the unimportant stuff makes the big stuff easier to handle. Ok, I might believe that's all the time. Heh.

No kaboom. Have a cookie instead. *passes the cookies*

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

Those cookies are mine.

*takes all the cookies*

[roina-arwen.livejournal.com]

Yay cookies! Thanks!

[ryl.livejournal.com]

Quiet, you're waking the neighbors! (http://www.wlos.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/mysterious-loud-boom-wakes-residents-19371.shtml#.VL6eyS7rOBs)

;)

[lrig-rorrim.livejournal.com]

Whooo top 15! I am looking back at the amount of writing I've done just for this season and feeling intimidated by it. Heh.

Hey, Gary, are you still keeping track of how many Things have been written for Idol, total and per season?

I have some small amount of sympathy for the parent who sent the bill - I bet organizing the birthday outing was expensive and maybe there were a lot of no-shows who didn't bother to call and say "hey, won't be able to make it..." but um... that sympathy only extends so far. Sending a bill home with a kid is a pretty snotty way of resolving that kind of problem. People. Yeesh.

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

Just did an update. As of going into this week:

19,817 entries have been created as a result of LJ Idol.

[roina-arwen.livejournal.com]

183 more to make 20,000 but even with QF rounds I don't know if we will make it this season...

[lrig-rorrim.livejournal.com]

Oh MAN, that's neat. I almost think you should have a ticker somewhere on the page that you can update, to show just how much STUFF and counting people have made. :)

While I'm thinking about important things...

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

just to keep things going:

COKE OR PEPSI????

Re: While I'm thinking about important things...

[lrig-rorrim.livejournal.com]

Coke. Cherry coke, to be precise. :P

Re: While I'm thinking about important things...

[xo-kizzy-xo.livejournal.com]

Diet Coke. I'll drink Diet Pepsi if I have no other choice, though.

(psst, I'm not really a soda drinker)

Re: While I'm thinking about important things...

[anyonesghost.livejournal.com]

Coke with my rum, but just enough to make it look like soda.
Gingerale, also with rum.
Really, the answer is "rum." Or water.

Re: While I'm thinking about important things...

[xo-kizzy-xo.livejournal.com]

Ooh, you just reminded me that there's a unopened bottle of Captain Morgan up in the cabinet...

Oh crap, that means I have to go out and get the Coke...or ginger ale, maybe? That sounds intriguing!

Re: While I'm thinking about important things...

[kickthehobbit.livejournal.com]

I like both Coke and Pepsi products.

I guess if we're getting totally technical I prefer Coke as far as cola goes but Sierra Mist wins hands-down over Sprite every day in my book.

Re: While I'm thinking about important things...

[beldar.livejournal.com]

RC Cola!

[kathrynrose.livejournal.com]

Man, I took a nap and the GR got all 'splodey.

::starts a chorus of kum ba ya::

Everybody sing!

[jexia]

Haha, I was just about to comment "Go to work and the GR goes mad."

[kathrynrose.livejournal.com]

Hah. Clearly you and I are stabilizing forces and should coordinate our attendance better. :)

[anyonesghost.livejournal.com]

Uhh ... my bad. Sorry about that!

The Stat Sheet, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Numbers

[kickthehobbit.livejournal.com]

OK. I'm seeing a lot go around about my mysterious stats sheet, and so I want to go ahead and talk about it a bit. This is going to be split over a few comments, because lj is picky about comment length.

But why did you do it, or: Jenn Has No Life, and You Can Too!

I'm not sure how many people are aware of this, but I'm a graduate student in the sciences. I have a BS in Chemistry, and I minored in math in college. I like numbers. I really like doing statistical analysis—I find it super-interesting and think it's compelling. I think that data is beautiful and I like pulling out trends when I can.

I went ahead and made the spreadsheet that I did because I was curious as to whether or not there was an overall trend in how people had done in Idol—if there was a certain "cut-off point" where we could have predicted who was going to end up in the Top 50 or whatnot.

Originally I wondered if I could predict the Top Ten. I wanted to ride that out and see if it was the case.

Ultimately, though, I did it because I am a huge nerd and I really like numbers. I'm not trying to be the Nate Silver of the competition, or to "moneyball" Idol, as was suggested in a different thead by the_lettersea. I did it because this is what I do as a hobby. I find it mildly insulting, actually, to suggest that I was trying to take the human element out of Idol or reduce it to numbers—this is what I find fun.

Maybe that means I'm less than human, or that in a contest that is so thoroughly about words, I don't fit in. Okay, whatever. Not the first time I've heard point one, and I have been told, both in Season 8 and Season 9, that I don't belong in Idol. As far as the former—I hope to God you don't hang around a lot of STEM graduate students—we're all pretty weird.

...as to the latter? I've been an outcast most of my life. Being an outcast in Idol is nothing new. I find it a little sad that it would be insinuated (or said directly!) that I don't belong—but there's little enough I can do about that. I write my heart out every week, just like the rest of the folks in this contest. If that's not enough to belong in Idol, I don't know what is.

But how did you do it, Jenn?

I think the thing that irks me the most about this whole debacle is the idea that I have this giant list of information I'm sitting on that is somehow only available to me, and that I'm not sharing because I like cackling evilly and reading comments despairing of the fact that I made it to start with.

I used information that was available to all of us. I took data from the polls, starting in Week 1, and calculated from there what everyone's averages were. I didn't have to do any particular amount of math to arrive at this—I just had to go ahead and take the vote percentages that lj reports and plug them into an Excel spreadsheet.

If I was half the evil genius it's been implied I am, I would have had some kind of scraper or other method to make it go faster, but I took everything from the polls by hand. Byes were entered as BYE; if someone was in Tribe Redemption, I gave them a weighted average (as I discussed in the Green Room comment yesterday about this sheet). LCI was also entered differently, because they were different polls.

Everyhing was done by hand. If you want to ask about the method, go ahead and PM me. It's totally possible for someone else to do what I did—it doesn't require any special know-how, just a lot of patience.

Re: The Stat Sheet, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Numbers

[kickthehobbit.livejournal.com]

And what did you find?

Ultimately, I found out what I told everyone yesterday: THERE IS NO OVERARCHING TREND.

I can't say "oh yeah, you're for sure not going to make it into the Top 10" or "YOU! YOU WILL WIN IDOL!"

The one thing I really pulled out of the sheet as I made it was that it really hinges on what you write—as it should. More often than not, the people that were voted out had an off-week and that's why we lost them. Your vote percentage can be dead-center, but have an off-week and you're gone. That's happened to at least one of the contestants that I included in the original iteration of the sheet.

I don't have an ordered list. The sheet itself is in alphabetical order, but that's for easy of picking out poll data. Otherwise? No. No order. For one thing, the really high standard deviations make it difficult to pin that down. I can't say, with absolute certainty, that someone will or will not be in the Top Ten. I can't say, with absolute certainty, who we're going to lose from week to week. Think about it: my spreadsheet certainly did not predict that we'd be losing alexpgp—he sacrificed! It also didn't predict last night's other loss, swirlsofblue.

I posted the range that I did yesterday with the standard deviation so that people could have an idea of what numbers were like before they messaged me. I didn't want to make anyone feel guilty, and I certainly didn't want anyone to feel that they're at the "bottom of the heap", so to speak, because they're not the top number I pulled.

I explained to the people who did message me roughly what those statistics meant and what their standard deviation reflected. Everyone who messaged me had a relatively high STDEV—higher than the average—and I was pretty careful in explaining what that meant and how difficult it was to say, "this is your average and THIS is what it means".

So what's all this about, then?

In essence? I'm a huge dork. I wanted to know what my overall "standing" had been, from week to week, and what my best and worst weeks had been, in terms of percentage of the vote. I wanted to know this because I'm a dork.

I didn't do this to upset people. I'm not sitting on a giant pile of knowledge that I refuse to share with anyone. I am not posting numbers to the names, mostly because I don't want anyone to feel awkward or uncomfortable, and I know there are probably people that prefer not to know. That is the only reason I have withheld data.

I used to be a teacher, and I know, from that, that there are some students who would really prefer that I didn't post the entire list of scores—because they don't want to compare themselves to their peers, and they don't want to know until they've got a midterm progress report or have a final grade waiting to be submitted. They can look at their homework and test scores and determine from that where they stand and how they can expect to do. In my classroom, that meant that I never posted scores, even with a student ID or other semi-anonymous identifier. I applied the same logic to Idol.

I'm...pretty surprised by the discussion I see going on about this, but that's that. If you have questions, feel free to comment here or PM me. I don't bite. I am, after all, just a gigantic dork, doing what makes my furry little heart sing.

Re: The Stat Sheet, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Numbers

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

Spreadsheets have had their fans and detractors from their first days in Season 3.

The things you *can* do the data, the things you *can't* do with data. People love talking about it!

Re: The Stat Sheet, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Numbers

[clauderainsrm.livejournal.com]

'Not the first time I've heard point one, and I have been told, both in Season 8 and Season 9, that I don't belong in Idol. "

Contrary to popular belief, there's only one person who can decide who "belongs" or "doesn't belong" in Idol.

That's me. I say you do.

Re: The Stat Sheet, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Numbers

[swirlsofblue.livejournal.com]

*Hugs*

Anyone saying you don't belong in Idol is a massive poophead!

I too am a fellow nerd. *NERD POWER*

(Though I tried to avoid as many stats classes as I could. They made us do some, freakin maths degree.)

Also, I was going to not ask, but after all this discussion I'm curious, can you send me my averages and best/worst week stats please?