As the Rev. Ivan Stang once said about the Subgenius, "Take the church seriously, but don't take the seriously seriously." If someone can derive idle amusement from finding (or generating) online polls, I can certainly derive idle amusement from casually analyzing a couple. I trust nobody's going to replace the Keirsey Temperament Sorter with "What Classic Video Game Character Are You?" But effectively, these online polls are aspiring amateur personality tests, and I've watched several of them inspire a lot of conversation. It's interesting to me to see what's under their hoods.
I invite you to write a program that generates Javascript for web pages that also randomly picks among equal choices.
Well, the idea isn't to be random, after all--it's to be unweighted, so the test isn't mathematically biased. :) An algorithm for ranking a list of n possibilities in an unweighted fashion with a series of questions exists (in a non-computer form) in the job-hunting book What Color is Your Parachute. Using it as the basis for a questionnaire system like this wouldn't be difficult, although you would end up with dozens of "choose A or B" questions rather than one or two dozen multiple choices. A variant on the logic in it could be used for "agree, disagree, no preference" questions, I suspect.
As Prickvixen pointed out, though, the choice of the questions also influences results. The Parachute approach would (I think) help minimize that problem, but I doubt it could be eliminated.
Like I said (or at least implied), I enjoy this stuff. I have no formal statistics training, but both my jobs at Intermedia involved data analysis, and I've become the sort of person who puts my current employers' SEC filings into spreadsheets so I can do my own calculations of burn rate, cash flow and financial life expectancy. (My own projections have always said we stay six months ahead of collapse, while the filings cheerfully say 12-24. We just switched auditing companies, though, and darned if the most recent filings don't agree almost perfectly with my projection--which is, essentially, death in July without a significant capital infusion or massive layoffs.)
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momijizukamori
no subject
Date: 2002-02-20 06:27 (UTC)I invite you to write a program that generates Javascript for web pages that also randomly picks among equal choices.
Well, the idea isn't to be random, after all--it's to be unweighted, so the test isn't mathematically biased. :) An algorithm for ranking a list of n possibilities in an unweighted fashion with a series of questions exists (in a non-computer form) in the job-hunting book What Color is Your Parachute. Using it as the basis for a questionnaire system like this wouldn't be difficult, although you would end up with dozens of "choose A or B" questions rather than one or two dozen multiple choices. A variant on the logic in it could be used for "agree, disagree, no preference" questions, I suspect.
As Prickvixen pointed out, though, the choice of the questions also influences results. The Parachute approach would (I think) help minimize that problem, but I doubt it could be eliminated.
Like I said (or at least implied), I enjoy this stuff. I have no formal statistics training, but both my jobs at Intermedia involved data analysis, and I've become the sort of person who puts my current employers' SEC filings into spreadsheets so I can do my own calculations of burn rate, cash flow and financial life expectancy. (My own projections have always said we stay six months ahead of collapse, while the filings cheerfully say 12-24. We just switched auditing companies, though, and darned if the most recent filings don't agree almost perfectly with my projection--which is, essentially, death in July without a significant capital infusion or massive layoffs.)