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2010 Prognostication Quiz: Post #1 (Freedom)


The 2010 Prognostication Quiz gets off to a quick start with Question 1. The Freedom House issued its annual press release today regarding the number of free countries in the world. Although the main headline reports that freedom declined this year, the number of completely "free" countries remains unchanged at 89. (It was a number of lower countries in the "partly free" category who did most of the regressing.)

This means the answer to Question 1 is C. No change. Ten of this year's 53 entrants got that answer correct (listed here in entry order):
Topher
Polly
Gloria
Ryan
Marcus
Missy
Ron
Janet
Craig
Keila

Congratulations to the top ten! Special congratulations to Janet and Ryan, who have already equaled their total score from last year! It must be a great relief to them to know that they can't do worse than last time.

On balance, our group of entrants was more optimistic than pessimistic: 25 thought the number of "free" countries would grow to only 17 who thought it would shrink.

I have many more interesting things to say about the entrants and the answers submitted, but I am out of time right now and will therefore wait until the next post!

Question 13 Update:
Miep Gies passed away yesterday. Unfortunately (for us, anyway) she passed on before the entry deadline of 11:10 p.m. That means that it doesn't count, and the NINETEEN of you who picked her will need to pick someone else. You get honorable mention for coming a few hours from earning a point:
Katie
Beth Z.
Beth K.
Kevin
Liz
Gloria
Rachel F.
Ben
Ekrem
Jan
Nad
Missy
Stephanie
Mary A.
Ron
Leanne
Janet
Valerie
Zoe

Question 11 Update:
I wrote question 11 in response to people who thought I had too many sports-related questions on the Quiz. Instead of having separate questions for baseball, hockey, and basketball, I thought I would merge them all into one question. To make sure the question was balanced, I took each state's win totals for the 2008 (baseball) or 2008-2009 (hockey and basketball) seasons and put them in a spreadsheet. Then I wanted to split them into six answer such that (1) each answer had approximately the same number of wins and (2) that each group could be put into one contiguous region separate from each other group. This was quite a puzzle and took me quite some time. I finally figured out how to make the groups so that the top and bottom groups were only 5% different from each other. By the time I finished, though, I decided that it's not such a good question since there's really no intuitive sense for which region might outperform any other region. Actually doing the calculations would be too annoying for anyone to attempt. If you did try, though, you would have discovered that as I printed the answers, F. Heartland is about 60% more likely than D. Southeast and about 30% more likely than any of the other answers. That's because Missouri was supposed to be in the Southeast rather than in the Heartland. Additionally, I omitted Maryland in the answers (but not in my original spreadsheet). Two eagle-eyed observers (Adrian and Grant) noted the latter fact, and I think Adrian figured out the former as well. Grant didn't indicate what he did or didn't notice there, but he did rather suspiciously also pick F.

I'm going to take my prerogative as game master and just change the answers. Missouri will jump from the Heartland to the Southeast (it does border Tennessee, after all) and Maryland will join the Northeast. If anyone (Adrian? Grant?) feels that this greatly disrupts their answer, please let me know soon and I will let you change.

Cover art:

The butterfly image was the first picture with no words on it that came up in a Google Image search for "Freedom." It's from an entomology site. I guess it's called "Freedom" because the poor butterflies hate being imprisoned inside those tiny little cocoons?

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