{"id":1489,"date":"2015-12-19T07:03:28","date_gmt":"2015-12-19T07:03:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/?p=1489"},"modified":"2020-09-22T01:58:09","modified_gmt":"2020-09-22T01:58:09","slug":"wisdom-of-the-crowds-at-the-graduate-school-christmas-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wisdom-of-the-crowds-at-the-graduate-school-christmas-party\/","title":{"rendered":"Wisdom of the Crowds at the Graduate School Christmas Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1906 Francis Galton was at a country fair and there was a guess the ox competition. He took all 787 guesses and took the average. This was 1,197 pounds. The actual weight? 1.198 pounds! In effect the wisdom of the crowds gave a perfect answer. This was the start of The Wisdom of the Crowds<\/a>.\"Wisdom<\/a><\/p>\n

Our Graduate School held its Christmas Party yesterday (18th Dec 2015) and they were kind enough to invite me. When I got there, I noticed that there was a jar of sweets, inviting people to guess how many sweets were in the jar. This reminded me of the story above.<\/p>\n

When the competition ended, the person who had the closest guess would win the jar of sweets.<\/p>\n

The jar held 149 sweets. The closest guess (by Oppong Kyekyeku) was 130; nineteen away – but good enough to win the prize.<\/p>\n

When we looked at all the entries (see below), we found we had 22 entries, with an average of 152 (actually 152.409). That is just three away.<\/p>\n

To be honest, with such a small sample size, I was surprised that the wisdom of the crowds (well small gathering) had beaten every other guess and had got within four of the right answer.<\/p>\n

Francis Bacon would have been proud!<\/p>\n

(This post<\/a> also appeard on the University of Nottingham Research and Knowledge Exchange blog)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"20151218_155857\"<\/a> \"20151218_155510\"<\/a> \"20151218_155922\"<\/a>\"Graduate<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1906 Francis Galton was at a country fair and there was a guess the ox competition. He took all 787 guesses and took the average. This was 1,197 pounds. The actual weight? 1.198 pounds! In effect the wisdom of the crowds gave a perfect answer. This was the start of The Wisdom of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1492,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,15,148],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archive","category-prediction","category-unmc-rkt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1489"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1608,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489\/revisions\/1608"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/graham-kendall.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}