11 comments

  1. I did enjoy the sideshow that was Charlie Brooks banging on, with no apparent sense of irony, about a witchhunt - heaven forfend that any part of the Murdoch empire would ever do anything like that, eh?

  2. Nothing to do with Rebekah Brooks but all to do with corruption in the media:

    The gruts poll currently shows:

    Dr John Sentamu (0%)
    Prof Alice Roberts (35%)
    Richard Carter, FCD (29%)
    Stense (36%)

    On the face of it a perfectly reasonable outcome, with no right thinking person wanting another of those religious nutters in the post and Stense just pipping Prof Alice Roberts to the tape. However, we also get:

    Total Voters: 17

    That is to say 5.882% per vote. So, for example, 6 votes would get you 35.294% (which would round down to 35) and 7 votes would be worth 41.177% (41). It's completely impossible to get a score of 36 from 17 voters.

    I call shenanigans!

  3. You weren't supposed to notice that.

    The clear injustice to the lovely Prof. Roberts has been bugging me for days now (even though it does favour the equally lovely Stense). I didn't write this poll script, and I haven't bothered to look into it (yet), but I suspect there is a fiddle in there somewhere to ensure that all polls' results add up to exactly 100%. I suspect the last item in every poll is given the score of 100% minus the sum of the other percentage scores. Or something like that.

    Alice and Stense are clearly level-pegging on 6 votes each.

  4. Clearly you have another problem to contend with that Murdoch need scarcely worry about; Gruts readers can count!

    I suspect the last option is designed to be "other", which would perhaps sensibly pick up any odd fractions of a vote. Personally I would rather it totalled 99 and accurately showed the votes cast than was artificially made to reach 100.

  5. There is a configuration option to show actual votes cast as well as (or instead of) percentages. I didn't like the 'as well as' option, because it looked rubbish in the constrained space of the sidebar. I didn't like the 'instead of' option, because it didn't show percentages! But two options which have identical counts should definitely have identical percentages. So I might try out counts only.

    Now, if I could just get one more vote, we would have a three-way tie!

  6. ...I've been looking into this some more. Apparently, the software used to behave exactly how we thought it should behave, but some clueless idiot complained that polls should always add up to 100%, and the programmer changed it.

    How bloody irritating!

    I have changed the settings so that the results now show votes cast, not percentages.

  7. You need to raise a new issue saying that the current arrangement is misleading! You can't have two people with the same number of votes showing different %s even if that does make Stense the winner!

  8. But surely Stense winning is a good thing, what with her being a total babe? I'm all for a subjective measure playing havoc with a mathematical imperative!

  9. Subjective Measure......
    Mathematical Imperative.....
    sounds like a couple of indie bands.
    I'm not familiar with the song Havoc though.

  10. I've just discovered an album (43 years late) by a Yorkshire lad called Mike Hart.
    It's called 'Mike Hart Bleeds'. It is wonderful!

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