| Sun, 8 Jan 2012
New journalsMy main journal has been mostly filling up with book reviews, which tends to hide all the other content, so I have decided to split things up a bit. All my reviews and cooking posts will now appear in separate dedicated journals, and will shortly disappear from the default view of my main journal. However, they will still be available at the old URLs if you link to any particular post or keyword, including if you link to keyword-specific RSS feeds. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Wed, 6 Jul 2011
Star ratings re-revisitedI did, very briefly, consider a completely different rating system for my reviews, instead of just awarding 0 to 5 shiny gold stars. I considered rating books out of ten on several axes - for example, entertainment, literary merit, imagination, consistency. I would then combine them by treating those scores as the co-ordinates of a point in an N-dimensional space, the overall rating being the distance of that point from the origin, or equivalently, they are components of a velocity vector in an N-dimensional space. Let me give a couple of examples: The Quantum Thief might score 8/10 for entertainment, 10/10 for literary merit, 9/10 for imagination, and 10/10 for consistency. The score, then, is sqrt(82+102+92+102) = 18.6. A perfect score on those axes would be sqrt(4*102) = 20. So to normalise to a score out of ten we divide by 2, giving 9.3/10. I actually gave it 5/5. A Mighty Fortress, on the other hand, might get 5/10 for entertainment, 2/10 for literary merit, 2/10 for imagination, and 8/10 for consistency, for a score of 9.8, which normalises to 4.9/10. I actually gave it 2/5. There are at least three obvious reasons why I didn't go with this.
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| Mon, 20 Jun 2011
Star ratings revisitedJust over a year ago I started awarding books and things that I reviewed shiny gold stars. I also retrospectively scattered stars on some of my older reviews. I thought it would be a good idea to see how many of each I'm awarding, and so how well I'm sticking to my rating system. I'm expecting a normal distribution, with the mean somewhat above 3 stars to reflect the fact that I deliberately don't read shite, and that lots of what I read is because other people have raved about it. Well, the results are in ...
I think this is good. It's roughly what I'd expect given my reviewing criteria and the small number of options available. If I had a larger scale to work with - if, say, I was awarding marks out of 20 - I'd expect a smoother drop-off, and at both ends instead of just at the bottom end. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| Sat, 10 Apr 2010
Review star ratingsBecause I know that some of you aren't clever enough to figger out from mere words whether I like something or not, I've started adding star ratings to my reviews of books, music, and films:
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