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