Wednesday, August 27, 2014

3QD blogging contest metadata

The long-lived, old-school blogging site 3 quarks daily is holding its annual science blogging contest  They have nominated eighty-five blog posts upon which one can vote to advance it into the finals round.  In theory, this means that everyone voting should read all 85 posts, and make an honest choice.  If that doesn't work, then they should at least skim each post- OK, how about simply clicking the links and glancing at them?

Having done the latter, I doubt more than a few percent of the people who actually vote will do the former.  Because, in addition to clinking the links, I have gone the extra mile micron and extracted their metadata.  And this is how I’m pretty sure not many people are going to read all 85 entries this week- they total over 128,000 words, more than a hefty novel, or two skinny ones. I will summarize it here, for potential voters who want to pretend to be voting knowledgeably, but are too lazy even to look at text summaries.

With the exception of a song (complete with ukulele chords) and a dialogue, the nominated blog posts are all expository prose.  Most of them are written in a serious tone, although there is a smattering of snark, cutsiness, and metaphor. One is written in Spanish, the rest are in English.

Figure 1.  The log of science post length, showing a high end tail.

The length distribution of the nominated blog posts is not normal.  In fact, it is not even log normal (figure 1), as there is a surplus of nominees in excess of 2000 words and/or a deficit of nominees less than 700 words (incidentally, that is the length of a standard print newspaper column). The lengths range from just over 300 words (the song) to just shy of 5000 words, with a mean of about 1200 and a median of about 1500.

  
All but seven of the entries are illustrated. Nine have imbedded video, sixteen list references, two have data tables. Seven entries feature text grabs- featuring (machine unreadable) text presented in image format.  The type of text presented this way varies widely, spanning twitter screengrabs to scanned informal handwriting to page captures of ancient books.

The relationship between the number of images and the number of words is not clear.  I have (arbitrarily) divided the posts up into two groups (figure 2). A small, highly illustrated group, in which the number of illustrations scales with the length of the post, and a main, less illustrated group, where the number of illustrations is essentially unrelated to text length. In the highly illustrated group, there is about one additional figure per 400 words, but the zero word intercept is still quite high- six.

Figure 2. Post length vs. number of imbedded images (embedded text excluded). Groupings are done via eyeball, not statistics.

Hopefully this summary will inform your choices of which articles to read and consider.  Please don’t make any voting choices solely on the metadata.  You are, after all, a human, and not a Facebook algorithm. And sure, if you want to nominate this post for the 2015 contest, I won’t stop you.

A summary table is below:

site
title
words
images
video
text grabs
references (1=present)
table
 3 Quarks Daily
 The Dictionary is not Literature
2539
1




 Action Science Theater
 How to fall and miss the ground
541
4
1



 Aeon
 Cows Might Fly
3473
1




 American Science
 The Curious History of the Paleo-Diet, and its Relationship to Science & Modernity
2194
3




 An Evolutionist's Perspective
 The Woes of Capitalism:  Kinship, Sociality and Economy
1433
0




 Ars Technica
 Could dark matter be hiding in plain sight in existing experiments?
1085
1




 Babies Learning Language
 Shifting our cultural understanding of replication
3158
0




 BBC
 The quest to save the Hollywood bison
1443
4




 Beach Chair Scientist
 Mother Nature vs  Santa Claus
711
0
1
4


 Brainwaves
 Searching For The Elephant’s Genius Inside the Largest Brain on Land
1502
1




 Charismatic Minifauna
 Bats have sparkly poop
606
4




 Chemically Cultured
 That love-hate supervisor relationship
411
0

12


 Cocktail Party Physics
 Seen and Unseen:  Could There Ever Be a “Cinema Without Cuts”?
2400
2
4

1

 Comparatively Psyched
 The Robin's Song
1302
2


1

 Curious Meerkat
 Eating Insects
1827
3
1


1
 Eat Your Brains Out
 Science and the Supernatural
3802
4

1


 Ecology & Evolution
 And to the victor the spoiled
474
1




 Ecology & Evolution
 The Heat and Light of Science Communication
1045
1


1

 Ecology & Evolution
 The Science of Scientific Whaling
1207
2




 Ecology & Evolution
 What is(n’t) palaeontology like?
884
2




 Ecology & Evolution
 What’s it like to study Zoology?
896
1




 Errant Science
 Tradition, in Science
767
2

1


 Eruptions
 So, You Think Yellowstone Is About to Erupt
1295
1




 Genotopia
 Hail Britannia! (Dorkins Reviews Wade)
1759
1




 Genotopia
 On city life, the history of science, and the genetics of race
2298
3




 Grrlscientist
 Influenza:  How the Great War helped create the greatest pandemic ever known
2088
4


1

 Hawkmoth
 On Wildness
494
9




 Huffpost
 A Few Short Rules on Being Creative
1313
1




 Illumination
 GMO Leukemia Outbreak in China
471
1

4


 Inkfish
 Scientists Ask Why There Are So Many Freaking Huge Ants
913
1




 Leaving Plato's Cave
 The Meta-lympics:  a catalyst for scientific discovery
1076
4




 Limulus
 Living Fossils
771
8

8


 Napoli Unplugged
 Procida:  Picture Perfect
881
12




 Napoli Unplugged
 Vesuvius at Night
897
4




 Nautilus
 The Math Trick Behind MP3s, JPEGs, and Homer Simpson’s Face
1599
5




 Neurobabble
 Parasitic wasps vs.  zombie cockroaches
785
1




 Neurobabble
 Technology and the adolescent brain
1112
1




 Neurobabble
 What sign languages have taught us about our brains
1198
2
2



 Nothing in Biology Makes Sense
 When the going gets tough, mutualism gets going
885
3
1

1

 Pacific Standard
 Your Genome Is a Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland
782
1




 Patrick F
 Clarkin, PhD:  Developmental Plasticity and the “Hard-Wired” Problem
4343
3


1

 Pen Sapiens
 Monkey See, Monkey Yawn
764
1


1

 Peter Pearsal
 A Desert Orogeny
995
5




 Planetizen
 The Wicked Problem of Urban Biodiversity, pt 1
897
0




 Psychology Today
 Love, Love Medulla:  The Neuroscience of Beatlemania
1181
6


1

 Preposterous Universe
 How Quantum Field Theory Becomes “Effective”
3553
5




 Preposterous Universe
 Why the Many-Worlds Formulation of Quantum Mechanics Is Probably Correct
2525
2




 Prophage
 Modest Data Reported From Oxford Nanopore's Exciting MinION Sequencing Platform
724
2


1

 Scicurious
 Addiction showcases the brain's flexibility
1086
1




 Science Explained
 Knock, Knock Who’s there?
423
4




 Science Sushi
 Did Allergies Evolve To Save Your Life?
1925
3


1

 Science Sushi
 Muscles Love Oxytocin:  So-Called “Hug Hormone” Important In Muscle Regeneration
767
1


1

 Sexual Selection and Life History Evolution
 Aesthetics, mathematics, physics and biology
1255
3




 Skulls in the Stars
 How *do* cats land on their feet when falling, anyway?
2336
14




 Slate
 Promiscuity Is Pragmatic
1054
3




 Space
 Hazard, Risk, and the Steelhead (Oso) Landslide in Washington
1099
8




 Space
 Real Atmospheric Science in Stargate:  Atlantis
1696
9




 Starts With A Bang
 22 Messages of Hope (and Science) for Creationists
1555
14




 Starts With A Bang
 How is the Universe bigger than its age?
1488
11
1



 Stuff About Space
 The Strangest Star:  A Neutron Star Inside a Red Giant
1021
2




 Synthetic Daisies
 Playing the Long Game of Human Biological Variation
1021
6


1

 Synthetic Daisies
 The game of evolution
3507
17


1
2
 The Bleeding Edge
 Butterflies
2252
1




 The Book of Science
 Photosynthesis
355
0




 The Conversation
 Despite metamorphosis, moths hold on to memories from their days as a caterpillar
988
4




 The Conversation
 The ancient Greek riddle that helps us understand modern disease threats
902
1




 The Conversation
 Why cold-blooded animals don’t need to wrap up to keep warm
608
1




 The Last Word On Nothing
 What Luis Alvarez Did
1654
2




 The Loom
 The Wisdom of (Little) Crowds
1726
1




 The Mermaid's Tale
 Are bees intelligent?
1416
2
1



 The Mermaid's Tale
 The visible colors and the falseness of human races as natural categories
2479
2




 The Mermaid's Tale
 Whooza good gurrrrrl? Whoozmai bayyyy-bee boy?
1839
10

1


 The Neurocritic
 Existential Neuroscience:  a field in search of meaning
1838
5


1

 The Neurocritic
 When Waking Up Becomes the Nightmare:  Hypnopompic Hallucinatory Pain
1161
5


1

 The New Yorker
 The Power of the Hoodie-Wearing C.E.O.
1267
1




 The Philosopher's Beard
 Love's Labours Lost:  How Robots Will Transform Human Intimacy
4822
2




 The Trenches of Discovery
 The human machine:  obsolete components
2572
4




 Things We Don't Know
 Squid Lady Parts
1350
5


1

 Too Long For Twitter
 New neuroscience on why we dream
3052
2




 Tree Town Chemistry
 How One Scientist Broke in to Professional Craft Brewing
847
1




 Unthink
 Five Things Scientists Know About Romance
913
0




 Weekend Adventure
 The Wild Inside
1298
5




 Wired
 Have We Been Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Wrong This Whole Time?
3328
5
1



 Wired
 What is brain death?
1603
1




 You've Got Some Science On You
 Infection:  It's all a matter of perspective
973
2












Total

128775
283
13
31
16
3
mean

1515
3.33
1.4
4.4
1
1.5
median

1207
2


1
1.5


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