"Waste of Packaging" Contest: Last Day to Vote
by Sean Fisher, Cincinnati, Ohio on 03. 3.06
We would like to thank everyone who has voted in our "Waste of Packaging" Contest. For those of you who still have not, stop procrastinating and get to it! Today is the last day to vote for the contestfinalists. Remember, the finalist who has the most votes at the end of the day will receive a $250 gift certificate from our friends at re:modern, so make sure the finalist you feel is most deserving wins! Please take a minute to review the finalists and then vote below.
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Does anyone else find it odd that the first three all have 308 votes at this moment, and the last one has 309? What's the probability of that being the case from a voting pool of around 3,300 votes?
now it's 312, 312, 312, 311. if the last one hits 312 we know the fix is in.
Well, now that you guys have said that I bet people are going to vote just to keep them that way ;P
Surprisingly, the odds are better than you think. This is a standard Gaussian distribution, aka a "normal" distribution. Our friends in the wet sciences call this the bell curve (though that term has become politically charged). If there were more choices, we'd see a more variance in the vote totals. Look at enough polling data, and pretty soon you don't bat an eye over these kinds of coincidences, particularly among small sample sizes.
For all of you voting for plastic egg cartons, please recycle them to people like me. Who would otherwise have to buy them for our chicken eggs. Very few chickens lay lots of eggs, which need lots of cartons.
Yes my chickens are free range so don't ask me about that.