Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!think!snorkelwacker!bloom-beacon!bloom-beacon!wesommer From: wesommer@athena.mit.edu (Bill Sommerfeld) Newsgroups: news.groups Subject: Re: why sigh.aquaria "voting" stunk Message-ID: Date: 25 Nov 89 23:23:42 GMT References: <10317@attctc.Dallas.TX.US> Sender: news@athena.mit.edu (News system) Organization: None. Lines: 63 In-Reply-To: floydf@attctc.Dallas.TX.US's message of 23 Nov 89 15:50:06 GMT In article <10317@attctc.Dallas.TX.US> floydf@attctc.Dallas.TX.US (Floyd Ferguson) writes: Consider the pattern on incoming votes. I suspect these will be poisson distributed, with a mean sometime between 5 and 10 days from the time the call for vote is posted. Here's some Real Data: I ran the rec.org.sca vote; it passed, roughly ~160-~20. The machine which had the collection boxes, bloom-beacon.mit.edu, is on the Internet, is well connected, and is in the UUCP maps. The call for votes was posted on a Friday; there was a large initial surge of 27 votes the first day, followed by another surge of 31 votes on the following monday; the vote then tailed off to a couple a day until I posted the first ack/second call for votes about two weeks later; this appears to have caused another "hump" of ~20 votes spread out over four days, *none of which affected the outcome of the vote* The vote went over the 100-vote margin after only seven days; had the CFV appeared on a monday, it might have occurred faster. In the following table, only votes which had a Date: line parsable by the C News "getdate" program were included, thus the counts will be a little under the real vote total. The votes were counted based on the "postmark", not the arrival time. "day" is the day of the vote; day 1=september 29. no votes arrived after the 28th day of the vote. day tot. yes yes tot. no no 1 27 27 3 3 2 44 17 5 2 3 57 13 7 2 4 88 31 9 2 5 100 12 10 1 6 108 8 11 1 7 117 9 13 2 8 119 2 14 1 9 119 0 15 1 10 120 1 15 0 11 124 4 16 1 12 125 1 16 0 13 127 2 16 0 14 127 0 16 0 15 128 1 17 1 16 133 5 17 0 17 138 5 18 1 18 148 10 19 1 19 150 2 19 0 20 151 1 19 0 21 151 0 20 1 22 153 2 20 0 23 157 4 20 0 24 158 1 22 2 25 159 1 22 0 26 160 1 22 0 27 160 0 22 0 28 161 1 22 0 -- Henry Spencer is so much of a | Bill Sommerfeld at MIT/Project Athena minimalist that I often forget | sommerfeld@mit.edu he's there - anonymous |