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Physicists Uncover TV Show Biases
Tsalg writes "Interesting to see what scientists can uncover from watching one of the silliest TV shows in Europe, where singers represent countries in a contest, and then countries vote for.. for what exactly? Well it was reported in a Nature article where the show was used as a barometer of European nations' feelings about their neighbours, that
Britain is in harmony with Europe, Nordic countries fancy each others' stars, and France is out on a limb."
Watch the UK broadcast of it if you can get hold of it. The "host" has been doing it for years, he always comments on it and points it out every time people vote for "friends". It's been that way for years and always will be.
Hell it's the best reason to watch for us in the UK. The back handed comments rock.
I like muppets.
But eventually, all other countries adopt the principles put forth by France.
The article was published on the 20th, which was one day before the yearly contest, making it a whole year out of date; the results were hardly surprising, though.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
This looks way more interesting than "American Idle," which isn't nearly as good as the original, "Eric Idle."
David Letterman, though, does acknowledge that his very popular "Will It Float" segment is based on the original British "Is It Buoyant."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The Eurovision Song Contest is an annual contest where the countries of Europe (or, more accurately, members of the European Broadcasting Union, which includes Israel) come together, each put forward a song and performer, and have a contest.
.. then all the people in Europe call in and vote while a dire interlude performance is shown (this is how Riverdance became famous). After that, each country is contacted and a representative reads out the votes that country's viewers gave.. which vary between 1 and 12 points.
Generally twenty four countries make it through to the final (which is all most people watch).. four of those are automatic placements from the main contributors (UK, France, Germany, Spain) and the rest survived the semi-final.
Then they all perform a song, most of which are hideously awful, and sometimes ham up national stereotypes in the most hysterical of manners (this year, Moldova had a crazy celtic style thrash rock song with some 90 year old woman banging a drum)
Inevitably, national biases always come out. Greece and Cyprus often give each other 12 points, all the Nordic countries vote for each other, and, nowadays, all the Baltic states vote for each other too. Until recently, Greece and Turkey would never give each other any points.
The whole contest is really an opportunity to laugh at our fellow Europeans, see some hideous songs which will never make it anywhere, and listen to some great commentary which pokes fun at the whole charade.
...on grinding up the contestants and firing them in a particle accelerator. I might suggest we do this with American Idol contestants.
Look, the reason you vote for culturally similar countries, is that you share taste in music with them. Obviously these former russian nations actually think they're sending something good. I for one think it's crap and I think the contributions from my neighboring countries are superior. Not because I somehow "like" these people, the music is just closer to my preferred style. There are some exceptions though, like the year Turkey won for example.
TV executives discover elusive Higgs boson!
"The last time I saw a pair of legs like that, they were standing in a nest."
(If you were a physicist) you'd probably also have nothing better to do on a Saturday night than stay home alone watching the Eurovision song contest ;-)
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Just look at the statistics and you'd see the same thing:
:-)
Scoreboard, final
Scoreboard, semi-final
In this case, statistics don't lie. Or at least they agree with this report, so in that case it'd lie too.
For example, you'll see that Sweden got their two highest scores from Denmark and Finland and zero points from most others.
This is also commonly happening in eastern europe, and yet an example of it can be seen with Croatia and Serbia & Montenegro.
Voting on your neighbors has happened for a long time in the ESC so it's not news, and it's usually part as just a friendly gesture from the televoters and part because the countries have similar taste in music. Any watcher of this show would've noticed this fairly easily too.
Personally I think most music there suck horribly, and don't take the competition too seriously, although it's a bit annoying when friend voting go overboard and their top scores is given to a country that has some obviously extremely poor song. But then again, maybe it's just me having a culture collision and they honestly found it was good. Europe is so diverse in cultures that it's entirely possible.
It's kind of funny though; at least this time neither France or Germany seemed to get *any* friendship votes from their neighbors.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
David Letterman, though, does acknowledge that his very popular "Will It Float" segment is based on the original British "Is It Buoyant."
Only because the majority of American's don't know what the word "buoyant" means.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
... still no cure for cancer.
A more graphic description of the voting patterns can be found here It clearly show that us Brits (and Irish) vote for the better songs while those Southern (and Eastern) Europeans can't be trusted.
Yes, there is a good deal of "friendly" voting going on. The reason may at least partly be taste, though. Neighbouring countries tend to be very close, culturally and lingustically, people tend to meve between them a lot and can usually see each others television and radio broadcasts. So they will tend to have more similar taste in music than countries far apart. I would not be surprised if that is one part (not all, obviously) of the "bloc voting".
:)
As for your second point, why would the amount of money contributed to the EU correlate in any way with the popularity of the songs? Looking above, you'd expect the opposite, actually. A country is a large contributor because it's, well, a large country. And a large country tend (other things being equal) to be more insular and less influenced by the cultures around it. The songs will tend not to appeal as widely among its neighbours or other european countries as the smaller, more exposed, countries.
And yes, musically it's rather like a slow-motion trainwreck, but that's part of the appeal
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Last year I computed a distance-weighted adjustment of the Eurovision scores, on the basis that if you voted for a country far away from you, you must have really liked the song since its cultural attachments to you are weaker than a song from your neighbour. So if you like faraway songs they must be really good, and hence worthy of more marks.
I got a map of Europe, used the locations of the capital cities as surrogate coordinates, computed the distance matrix, and reweighted the score from the Eurovision website to adjust for this.
Here's the top 5 from my adjusted list (left) and the original list (right):
cyprus 280 ukraine 280
ukraine 273 serbiamontenegro 263
greece 263 greece 252
turkey 245 turkey 195
serbiamontenegro 199 cyprus 170
So Cyprus jumped four places by my system into first place!
I should have cranked this system up again for this year, offered it to the TV companies, profit!!
The big irony is that I had a proper scientific paper (on malaria prevalence) REJECTED by Nature this year, and then they produce this fluff! Gah!
Baz
The article is devoid of data. The text of the study can be found here though: http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/?0505071
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor