May Forecast Contest, Temperatures

[hudsonvalley21]

The rankings on the right are for all five months.

Thanks for your continuing efforts.

[yhbrooklyn]

The rankings on the right are for all five months.

Do you have monthly rankings?

[Roger Smith]

I think the tables are fine. By the way, it's not a random presentation, the order is determined by the number of points in total for the month. (YH, your question is answered by this -- the rank for May determines the order of contestants in the table, see the third last column for proof).

Actually the points race is fairly tight near the top, given that you can score a max of 300 in any month, and the lead (Ellinwood) is now 57. Another way of looking at it is average score for city, assuming the contest leaders have entered all months, the leading score has averaged 76 and the second highest score (dabeaches) has averaged 73. (Divide your score by 15 if you want to compare, unless you have missed any months, then you would divide by 3n for each of n months you entered).

If somebody in the trailing pack happens to pick off a month where consensus is way off, they could make a large move on the field.

[LakeEffectKing]

I think the tables are fine. By the way, it's not a random presentation, the order is determined by the number of points in total for the month. (YH, your question is answered by this -- the rank for May determines the order of contestants in the table, see the third last column for proof).

Actually the points race is fairly tight near the top, given that you can score a max of 300 in any month, and the lead (Ellinwood) is now 57. Another way of looking at it is average score for city, assuming the contest leaders have entered all months, the leading score has averaged 76 and the second highest score (dabeaches) has averaged 73. (Divide your score by 15 if you want to compare, unless you have missed any months, then you would divide by 3n for each of n months you entered).

If somebody in the trailing pack happens to pick off a month where consensus is way off, they could make a large move on the field.

I did that last month, but subsequently slid back with a very poor DCA forecast....and sub par forecast for NYC. Tends to happen when you gamble just a bit too much.

[Mallow]

I like the way its setup now, but you need to rank folks for each row from 1st to last, rather than having some random distribution. This should be pretty easy to do on excel.

I see what you're saying, and that should be easy enough. I can do that from now on!

Basically, the same as I'm doing it now, but sort each category (DCA, NYC, BOS, and Total) individually by the scores for the month.

[Scotty Lightning]

I totally forgot to make picks for May, but I'm overall ranked in the Top 20?

[skierinvermont]

Mallow, I think some people who are just glancing at your charts are confused by the "Rank" column and don't understand that is the "Rank" for that location overall across all the months so far.

Two ideas:

1) Make the list for each city go by rank instead of the rank for all three cities combined. So the scores go 100, 97, 93, 91 instead of 100 93 97 91. (I think this is what you already said you were going to change). Obviously the higher scores currently tend towards the top of the list because they are sorted by the combined monthly scores, so they are not "random" as another poster suggested, but this would be clearer I think.

and

2) Either change the title of the column "Rank" to "Cumulative rank" or "Cumulative rank for city X" or simply don't provide total or rank scores for the individual cities. I think what most people care about is their score for the month and their cumulative score, so the information on "Total" and "Rank" for each city is extraneous and/or confusing to a lot of people. I mean I like it, but it seems to be confusing to some people.