Veveco

RIP all fanyus in the crowd

I can only speak for myself, but for me podcasts were "attractive" when I was very new to figure skating. When you don't know much about the sport, it is an easy way to hear about it. It's not like ISU offers a user-friendly or interactive way to learn about the sport or if it is being discussed much in mainstream media. In fact, I think a lot of the interest comes from the lack of coverage from mainstream media, which makes a void that podcasts appear to fill. Reading long (and sometimes vague) rule books isn't exactly entertaining and gets quickly tedious. There are various videos on youtube about scoring, jump technique, etc., made by fans, but if you want to have a recap of recent competitions to have an idea of the current field, podcasts should (theoretically) be a good alternative to non-existent media. At least as an introduction to the sport (again, theoretically). After almost 2 years though, I found myself having my own opinion and don't feel the need to listen to podcasts anymore most of the time. Particularly if it turns into a gossip session or is pure unsupported opinion (we all have our preferences of course, but there is a line between stating our opinion and claiming it to be the ultimate truth). Now, I mostly listen when they interview someone whose perspective I'm interested in (like Tracy's interview from last season for instance).

Can Dai go to nationals without doing regionals or international competitions? Is there a criteria protecting previous medalists or smth?

Yuzu sent a video for the friendship award ceremony Edit: Translation

I also can't watch it from Canada

I spy some satellites (and our banners from ACI) on this picture

We can always count on Japanese media for great pictures

Lots of Yuzu poses here

Satomi's insta stories about the competition are hilarious

The funny thing is, I've been reading the local Kelowna newspaper, and obviously they focus on the Canadian results but... they don't need to shade anyone. And they talk of all the different Canadians in the event, not just the big names. Meanwhile NBC is still - Camden who? Never heard. Weak field.

Warning: long post and a lot of stats... Your reaction is perfectly reasonable and adequate. Allow me to re-phrase my thoughts to be sure that I am not misunderstood (and expand on it as my answer here goes far beyond your specific comment): I don't blame in any way people who are not trained in stats and might find the work difficult to understand. I also don't blame people who are wondering if the author *might* be biased because a reasonable dose of skepticism is a healthy reaction in general. It'd be fine for anyone to ask for clarifications for instance. If they did so, however, they would understand that it is purely a mathematical model that doesn't take into account the author's opinion whatsoever, so "FanYU biAS" is 100% irrelevant given how the scores were computed. In addition, I'd like to say that the burden of proof is always on the one proclaiming something, not the other way around. Shanshani has provided ample evidence to back up the claim of nationalistic bias in judging. Anyone wanting to disprove this notion needs to bring their own work, otherwise it's just baseless words. So, playing devil's advocate, there are 2 ways by which Shanshani's work could theoretically be biased and that people could test: 1) the data encoded are erroneous (by genuine mistake or voluntarily) in a way that would favor a certain outcome 2) the model itself is biased toward a certain type of outcome First option is easy to check. Anyone can download the score sheets of any competition and do the calculation themselves (Excel can do most of the work for you so you don't even need any training in stats to do this) and double-check that the data is accurate. Because I'm a bit of a nutcase, I took it upon myself to test the 2nd option, a bias in the model itself, to prove a point. Since the conclusion of the work claims that there is a nationalistic bias, changing the nationalities of either judges or skaters should completely change the results. Note that Shanshani already provided some data on this in a way by offering to switch a judge nationality for another "culturally similar" and see how it impacted the scores. I went one step further, and made a complete "shuffling" of skaters nationalities (more explanations under spoilers for detail). The goal of this is to test how the model reacts in a case where scores are completely independent of nationality. In other words, by assigning nationalities randomly to skaters, we artificially create a data set lacking any nationalistic bias, and thus we can check whether the model itself is biased or not. If the model finds a bias in judging (which we know isn't there because we made it so), there is an issue with the model. So, what results did I get? The short answer is: exactly what one would expect from an unbiased model run on a random data set. - The numbers of "statistically biased" judges dropped drastically: p < 0.05: 92 judges in the original data -> 7 judges in the re-shuffled data (out of 177 judges) p < 0.01: 74 judges in the original data -> 2 judges in the re-shuffled data (out of 177 judges) The stat-lovers will notice quickly that 5% of 177 is ~9 judges and 1% of 177 is ~2 judges so we are right in the range that we'd expect by chance. This is a first indication that the model is in fact unbiased. -Plotting the graphs to test for global & federation-level bias, you can see how different the results are from the original graphs (under spoilers): So, in conclusion, the stats & graphs shows that the model behaves absolutely as we could expect for a random data set and does not introduce any bias in itself. I did not change the identity of skaters, nor their score, showing that it doesn't matter here who judges are scoring on an individual level (in fact, studying this would require a different type of analysis). Only the nationality is important. And the best part? No one has to trust my word on it. You can play the "change the nationality" game yourself. Even doing it for a few judges is enough to understand that nationality is what drives the results and that your individual preference for a given skater doesn't even factor in. And on that note, I'll stop boring people with stats and go on with my life.

The argument of "I don't understand (or don't want to) therefore you must be wrong" is sadly a very common reaction

I just read some of the comments on the web version and.... Some trolls don't even bother reading the methodology before crying for "fanyu bias", do they? (and as such, display obvious bias themselves, ironically enough). The analysis is done for all skaters and all major competitions, and it is completely blind to the identity of the skater being judged (other than the nationality) so whoever the author likes doesn't even enter ANYWHERE in the mathematical model. It's not about the *right* score, it's about statistical trends of scoring compared to the average score. You'd get the exact same result if the analysis was done by a Nathan or Shoma fan This actually makes me really mad. You handle them with more grace than I ever could @shanshani . You have provided all the methodology, as well as the data so anybody can verify your work. (Likewise, I'm perfectly willing to share my R codes for the graphs should anybody ask for them). So unless they do the work and find a flaw somewhere (which they haven't), they have literally no ground to call for bias in the methodology here. I'd be a different story if somebody came with a different statistical model to have an actual debate. To be fair, I've also seen a lot of positive reaction online (and some being very offended at troll comments), but it still makes me mad on your behalf. So I just wanted to thank you again for your hard work and your patience

Keep in mind that it is a somewhat small sample size for some federations (10 judges minimum) but we can see some patterns emerge. I'm glad that Australia is at least showing that avoiding systematic bias is possible (yes, standards are really so low that I'm happy with even one good student...) but I'm far less impressed by my fellow European federations (other than Finland which was on the reasonable side at least). I don't know what's worse: Russia's consistent-but-somewhat-moderate bias or France/Italy/Germany's variable-but-with-nearly-50%-of-high bias ? There are so many more questions I want to ask too. Comparisons between big and small competitions, comparisons between disciplines, comparisons between scoring medal contenders vs lower ranked skaters.... But for those we need to go back to the individual scores (not the judges' averages that @shanshani took time to compile) so it'd be even more work (so not for today but I'll keep it in mind for the future)

Was this shared yet?

Right. Fun fact: in several languages (French, Italian, Spanish ...) figure skating is called "artistic skating". So, yeah... let's call it, uhum, a cultural difference of opinion.

Oh no, poor Misha

By the way, the interview was translated in English

More Javi at TCC

They recognize their kin

Well... you're in the right place for that

Obviously they need better ID to have a chance at the team event, but if they really think they can get at the level of the top teams by then... (And what about pairs, JSF ???)