The Official Author's Hangout Earth Day 2013 Contest Support Thread

Welcome to the only real contest thread in the AH. Come on in and sit right down. Kick up your feet and relax. You are among friends here.

Well, entry time has passed but now the nail biting time is here. We should know the results of the real contest in about a week. Ignore anything you read about a fake contest. That is what it is, fake.
 
Good for you for finishing! I use the contests the same way. I need a deadline it's seems, or stuff doesn't get done!

Sadly I have little time to write, but I try to write something every time I do. So I end up with lots of stuff but not always the same story that I began. Some new ideas come in and old ones fade before I have the time to work on either. But I know the power of deadlines so that is why I enter the contests. And I like competition but my entries are not intended to win, I am not in it for that. I just like fitting myself to the theme, completing a story and having it at the track.
 
Good for you for finishing! I use the contests the same way. I need a deadline it's seems, or stuff doesn't get done!

I didn't get finished this time, but because of the deadline and theme I managed to add to several of my incomplete stories.

The main two that I had intended for Earth Day are now waiting for me to complete the outlined plots but they are much longer than the original plans.

One of them is specifically for Earth Day and wouldn't fit another contest. The other could be tweaked to be almost any contest. I had adapted it to fit Earth Day, but Halloween might be more appropriate.

Although I didn't get an entry in, I have managed some writing despite pressures of off-line life.

My real achievement in recent months is to produce two 3D art works for local exhibitions. Those are my first pieces of art for nearly 40 years. I have plans for the next two exhibitions as well.

One of my friends is slightly annoyed. I write far more than she does. She is a better and more competent artist than I am. But my two works have attracted more attention than her six. It might be WTF! type attention but they have got people talking. Someone who knows me better as a prominent community activist asked me in a staged aside:

"Is there anything you can't do?".

My response:

"I can't paint, nor draw, as well as any of the artists on display."

"But they are talking about your art, not the paintings."

It was true. But they are a compact group who work together. They know each others' talents and skills, possibly so well that they don't recognise the creativity. They generally get what they expect from their friends. They didn't expect anything from me and don't know what to make of it.

Some of them suspect that I'm winding them up. I'm not. I'm just enjoying another form of creating that isn't writing. I'm still telling stories but in a different medium.

But I should be writing.
 
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Nude Day is my favorite theme but I don't have a clue yet what to write. You bet I'll be waiting with baited breath for the thread! Nice job Penn, on the threads to date.

One of mine as well. My first big contest Win, and one of the few Loving Wives stories to ever win. Doubt I'll be able to beat that, but I've been working on one off and on for the last couple of months.

Did manage to sneak in under the deadline with a second story - kind of fetish, with a blowjob harem, so I'll be interested to see how it does. At least it does have a close tie to the Earth Day theme.

Good luck to all in the contest. Been too busy writing, trying to finish off a plethora of stories. Time to get some reading in.
 
Contest analysis - Earth Day Contest 2013

Good evening. The ants tell me that there are 63 stories in the competition to date, with an average score of 4.20 from an average of 322 votes. Stories had an average of 23,340 views, an average of 8 favorites, and an average of 7 comments. The average ratio of votes to views is 1.30%. The average number of pages is 2.7, with the longest story being 10 pages.

So far there have been a total of 18,387 votes, 1,470,479 views, 516 favorites and 503 comments.

The standard deviation of scores (from the average of 4.20) is 0.47 and the standard deviation of votes (from the average of 322) is 429. The median score is 4.34, the median number of votes is 132 and the median number of pages is 2. The top 25% of scores are 4.50 or above and the bottom 25% of scores are 3.96 or below.

Sweeps

Some votes have been reduced (swept) since the start of the competition. A total of 7 stories have had their votes adjusted, with 4 sweeps resulting in a new score that day which is higher than before and 2 sweeps resulting in a new score that day which is lower. There were a total of 10 votes swept, being an average of 1 per swept story. The maximum number of votes swept for a single story was 3. (Figures based on toplists, and may not be totally accurate).


Categories entered (alphabetic order)

  • BDSM (2 stories)
  • Celebrities (1 story)
  • Erotic Couplings (11 stories)
  • Exhibitionist & Voyeur (3 stories)
  • Fetish (2 stories)
  • First Time (1 story)
  • Gay Male (1 story)
  • Group Sex (3 stories)
  • Humor & Satire (1 story)
  • Illustrated (1 story)
  • Incest/Taboo (10 stories)
  • Interracial Love (1 story)
  • Lesbian Sex (2 stories)
  • Loving Wives (3 stories)
  • Mature (2 stories)
  • NonConsent/Reluctance (3 stories)
  • NonHuman (4 stories)
  • Reviews & Essays (1 story)
  • Romance (6 stories)
  • Sci-Fi & Fantasy (4 stories)
  • Text With Audio (1 story)

New stories today


Authors entered so far are:

AffectionateFather, AlwaysHungry, alwayswantedto, Armphid, Ashson (2), Aunay, Beelzebub72, BrettJ, BrookMeier, Candlelight062, carlieplum, CatRun, CavyConsultant, chocolatecookie3, Cndrlla69, curlyspurs, Dark_Angel_Selkie, DG Hear, eclare (2), Euphonic, HeyAll (2), hoo_hoo_boo (2), HottieKatie, ihartekenny, JagFarlane (2), Jasmynn_Brown, JuanVato, litfan10, Lovefreely1993, memorable_event, MichaelWest, msgrant67, MSTarot, Neonurotic, OpalEssence, randibyrnes, RedHairedandFriendly (2), RjThoughts, Rutabaga72, sexnovella, silkstockingslover (2), slyc_willie (2), sr71plt, StaciRay79, Stacy469, subwryter, SusanJillParker, theravenfox, tk5555, Tx Tall Tales (2), TxRad, vencuyot, xelliebabex, YDB95

Disclaimer

Because of the way this site works these figures will not be totally up-to-date. For a given story the score shown on the category page, the author's page, and the toplists page, can all be different. Also it appears that various pages update at different times of the day, sometimes quite infrequently.

Please do not PM me asking for more detailed information. I do not wish to skew contest results by giving a target for voting manipulation.

Contest page: Earth Day Contest 2013
 
The ants tell me that there are 63 stories in the competition to date, with an average score of 4.20 from an average of 322 votes. Stories had an average of 23,340 views, an average of 8 favorites, and an average of 7 comments. The average ratio of votes to views is 1.30%. The average number of pages is 2.7, with the longest story being 10 pages.

The standard deviation of scores (from the average of 4.20) is 0.47 and the standard deviation of votes (from the average of 322) is 429. The median score is 4.34, the median number of votes is 132 and the median number of pages is 2. Sweeps

Sun, you do a fantastic job but I'm still hung up on Deviaitons and Medians. Could you explain it to an old man once again.Standard Deviation is 0.47, what is that and how is it helpful? Do we add it or subtract it from something? Defference between average and median I get confused with also. It's fun to follow but would mean more if I knew what it meant.
With respect
DG Hear
 
You two made me go back an check on some of my H's in loving wifes. I still have around 45 with red H's in that category. Probably because I have a zillion stories. :) Not really! More than half my loving wives stories do.
DG

I maintain that any author who writes in the LW category has to be incredibly brave. When I grow up, I wanna be just like you, just like them.

But I'm not there yet.

CandleLight, I was thinking about you not wanting to write in Loving Wives. Here's something you might want to try. I wrote a true Loving Wife story. A story where the husband and wife were trully in love. It went over well. Here are my stats for the story:

Blue Eyes Crying My life, a truly loving wife's story.
4.73 1249 212368 Loving Wives (English) 06/14/09 approved
Public Comments: 91 Moderate Public Comments

Maybe you would like to read it and see if you would like to try Writing a love story between Husband and wife.
Here is a link to my story, 'Blue Eyes Crying'.

http://www.literotica.com/s/blue-eyes-crying
 
Sun, you do a fantastic job but I'm still hung up on Deviaitons and Medians. Could you explain it to an old man once again.Standard Deviation is 0.47, what is that and how is it helpful? Do we add it or subtract it from something? Defference between average and median I get confused with also. It's fun to follow but would mean more if I knew what it meant.
With respect
DG Hear

I'll explain, DG. Median is the middle, mean is the average. The mean of 1, 4, and 100 is 35. The median is 4, though, because if you knock out the extremes from both end, you end up with 4 in the middle. So since there are 63 stories, the median score of 4.34 means that there are 31 stories with higher scores, and 31 stories with lower scores. Median can sometimes be more useful than mean, because it gives you an idea of what's in the middle, unbiased by extremes at either end. A story with a score of 1 or 5 will affect the mean, but not the median.

As for standard deviation, it is, (deep breath) the square root of the average squared difference from the mean. That is, if standard deviation is represented by s, s^2=sigma (xi-mean)^2/n, where n is the total number of values, sigma means that you're summing together each value, and xi is the specific value you're looking at each time, so x1 would be the first story score, x2 the second, until you reach x63. Basically, it tells you how closely values are grouped around the mean. A small standard deviation means most values are near the mean, a large one means they're more spread out. If we had enough stories to get a normal distribution, standard deviation would become more useful, but I have no idea whether we have a good distribution. Just take standard deviation as a measure of how spread out the stories' scores are from each other.
 
So for example, the standard deviation of votes is incredibly high because there's a lot of stories with a low number, and then a few with stratospheric numbers of votes, which brings up the standard deviation a lot. The number of votes are nowhere near clustered around a central value; they're all over the place.
 
So for example, the standard deviation of votes is incredibly high because there's a lot of stories with a low number, and then a few with stratospheric numbers of votes, which brings up the standard deviation a lot. The number of votes are nowhere near clustered around a central value; they're all over the place.

Thank you very much. I'm pretty sure I get it. Not sure about all the mathmatics. LOL The higher the Deviation, the less cluster fuck we have. So the 0.47 could be added to make the higher scores which exist and subtracted to make up for the lower scores.

The median is similar to the average but not necessarily the same.
Thanks again, Matthew.
With respect
DG Hear:eek:
 
Contest analysis - Earth Day Contest 2013

Good evening. The mountebanks tell me that there are 63 stories in the competition to date, with an average score of 4.21 from an average of 311 votes. Stories had an average of 25,201 views, an average of 8 favorites, and an average of 8 comments. The average ratio of votes to views is 1.27%. The average number of pages is 2.7, with the longest story being 10 pages.

So far there have been a total of 19,602 votes, 1,587,668 views, 534 favorites and 531 comments.

The standard deviation of scores (from the average of 4.21) is 0.43 and the standard deviation of votes (from the average of 311) is 429. The median score is 4.35, the median number of votes is 133 and the median number of pages is 2. The top 25% of scores are 4.49 or above and the bottom 25% of scores are 3.93 or below.

Sweeps

Some votes have been reduced (swept) since the start of the competition. A total of 10 stories have had their votes adjusted, with 6 sweeps resulting in a new score that day which is higher than before and 2 sweeps resulting in a new score that day which is lower. There were a total of 13 votes swept, being an average of 1 per swept story. The maximum number of votes swept for a single story was 3. (Figures based on toplists, and may not be totally accurate).


Categories entered (alphabetic order)

  • BDSM (2 stories)
  • Celebrities (1 story)
  • Erotic Couplings (11 stories)
  • Exhibitionist & Voyeur (3 stories)
  • Fetish (2 stories)
  • First Time (1 story)
  • Gay Male (1 story)
  • Group Sex (3 stories)
  • Humor & Satire (1 story)
  • Illustrated (1 story)
  • Incest/Taboo (10 stories)
  • Interracial Love (1 story)
  • Lesbian Sex (2 stories)
  • Loving Wives (3 stories)
  • Mature (2 stories)
  • NonConsent/Reluctance (3 stories)
  • NonHuman (4 stories)
  • Reviews & Essays (1 story)
  • Romance (6 stories)
  • Sci-Fi & Fantasy (4 stories)
  • Text With Audio (1 story)

New stories today: None


Authors entered so far are:

AffectionateFather, AlwaysHungry, alwayswantedto, Armphid, Ashson (2), Aunay, Beelzebub72, BrettJ, BrookMeier, Candlelight062, carlieplum, CatRun, CavyConsultant, chocolatecookie3, Cndrlla69, curlyspurs, Dark_Angel_Selkie, DG Hear, eclare (2), Euphonic, HeyAll (2), hoo_hoo_boo (2), HottieKatie, ihartekenny, JagFarlane (2), Jasmynn_Brown, JuanVato, litfan10, Lovefreely1993, memorable_event, MichaelWest, msgrant67, MSTarot, Neonurotic, OpalEssence, randibyrnes, RedHairedandFriendly (2), RjThoughts, Rutabaga72, sexnovella, silkstockingslover (2), slyc_willie (2), sr71plt, StaciRay79, Stacy469, subwryter, SusanJillParker, theravenfox, tk5555, Tx Tall Tales (2), TxRad, vencuyot, xelliebabex, YDB95

Disclaimer

Because of the way this site works these figures will not be totally up-to-date. For a given story the score shown on the category page, the author's page, and the toplists page, can all be different. Also it appears that various pages update at different times of the day, sometimes quite infrequently.

Please do not PM me asking for more detailed information. I do not wish to skew contest results by giving a target for voting manipulation.

Contest page: Earth Day Contest 2013
 
Median, mean, etc.

The higher the Deviation, the less cluster fuck we have. So the 0.47 could be added to make the higher scores which exist and subtracted to make up for the lower scores.
The median is similar to the average but not necessarily the same.

Yep, I think Matthew explained it very well.

I'm not convinced the stories follow a normal distribution so the standard deviation may not be all that useful, but it is a guide, as he said, as to how tightly the story scores are centered around the average. If you can picture a "bell" shape a smaller standard deviation would mean the bell is taller and thinner.

As for the median and the average, imagine for a moment these scores:

Code:
1, 1, 1, 1, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5

The average is 2.7 (add them up and divide by 9). The median is simply 3. That is, the score in the middle. There are four scores lower than 3, and four scores higher, so the median is the middle one.

Similarly the "top 25%" of scores are both 5, because they are the two right-most ones (in the top 25%). The "bottom 25%" of scores are both 1, because they are the two left-most ones.

So if you have the median score, you know on the leader board that half the authors have done "better" than you and half "worse". If you are in the top 25% then most (75%) authors have a lower score than you (whatever that score is).
 
Yep, I think Matthew explained it very well.

I'm not convinced the stories follow a normal distribution so the standard deviation may not be all that useful, but it is a guide, as he said, as to how tightly the story scores are centered around the average. If you can picture a "bell" shape a smaller standard deviation would mean the bell is taller and thinner.

As for the median and the average, imagine for a moment these scores:

Code:
1, 1, 1, 1, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5

The average is 2.7 (add them up and divide by 9). The median is simply 3. That is, the score in the middle. There are four scores lower than 3, and four scores higher, so the median is the middle one.

Similarly the "top 25%" of scores are both 5, because they are the two right-most ones (in the top 25%). The "bottom 25%" of scores are both 1, because they are the two left-most ones.

So if you have the median score, you know on the leader board that half the authors have done "better" than you and half "worse". If you are in the top 25% then most (75%) authors have a lower score than you (whatever that score is).

Thank you Sky, you explained it well. You did it for me last year too, I think.:eek: Just getting old and forgetful but I'm sure it helped others (like me understand it better also.:)
With Respect, Thank you
DG
 
Thank you Sky, you explained it well. You did it for me last year too, I think.:eek: Just getting old and forgetful but I'm sure it helped others (like me understand it better also.:)
With Respect, Thank you
DG

If I hadn't recently taken a statistics course, I would have needed an explanation too. :p
 
As I am afflicted with mathrheumatics, even with an excellent explanation, it means little to me.
 
As I am afflicted with mathrheumatics, even with an excellent explanation, it means little to me.

Well I have number dyslexia ( in addition to the regular type, fun and joy) I can't remember number unless they get into long term memory.

to get them into long term memory I have to sit down and write them out about six seven hundred times.

It's funny I can remeber my aunts phone number from when I was 12 but not my own current number.


Oh well grabs tread and punt it back to the top.
 
I have seen at least two sweeps go through since the entries were closed, significant ones in the case of my story.
 
I've seen two also. Not much change but a little.

I may be wrong, but I think one of my stories had more than just 1 to 3 votes clipped off (referring to SSS's calculations). Both have gone up marginally in score, though.
 
Mine went down three votes in one sweep and seven votes in another (which now makes it barely qualifying). It had been reduced one vote at least early in the contest too, which SSS apparently didn't catch.
 
I've seen two also. Not much change but a little.

Me, too. Two sweeps that actually brought up my score both times and removed only a handful of votes. That won't stop the 1-bombers from coming in, though. :(
 
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