I think bacterium is Latin (even though it might have started out in Greek)? That would explain it. I'm fairly sure criterion is straight from Greek.
I love the "biographies" that words carry along with them as they travel through time.
I think bacterium is Latin (even though it might have started out in Greek)? That would explain it. I'm fairly sure criterion is straight from Greek.
I love the "biographies" that words carry along with them as they travel through time.
Originally Posted by Olympia
That statement made me think for quite a while, and I still haven't figured out why quilting isn't considered a sport. It involves physical activity and dexterity. It provides entertainment to participants (All sports are supposed to be entertaining. The word "sport", derived from Old French, originally means "anything humans find amusing or entertaining" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport#Meaning_and_usage). I think the reason it does not qualify as a sport is largely due to its limited cardiovascular demand.
Last edited by skatinginbc; 04-13-2012 at 01:05 AM.
Note: Just because you gave these assessments about Chan's skating related to interpretation, doesn't mean they were true. Just because one repeatedly talking about the same thing cannot turn untrue into true.
Maybe you have trouble interpreting the music of someone who was against your favorite.
This is irrelavent.
It is not a mystery. As you said, IN is a relatively subjective category. Your interpretation on the said music was different from my interpretation on the same music. You think Chan had timing issue in most part of his program (If you think those parts before the last one minute of his program were called timing issue, then Takahashi has had timing issue on that day too as I've pointed out before). But I think he had timing issue only in the last one minute of his program and he got -1 deduction for that already, also he got -0.79 off, which means that he got only 8.21 on IN.
Chan was in the sixth place in the category of Interpretation. Lower than Takahashi, Hanyu, Amodio, Joubert, and Abbott. Wasn't that low enough already?! So what is the correct measurement? You have no right to accuse the judges' interpretation was wrong and also no right to claim that only your interpretation was right. The judges' subjective views were counted that day, but your subjective view wasn't. There is no way that you could insert your subjective views into the decision making process. So live with it regardless whether you are happy or not happy.
Last edited by Bluebonnet; 04-13-2012 at 09:26 AM. Reason: grammar and spelling, always.
That says it all. That's the true spirit of CoP. That's what CoP is designed for. And that's Fan Education 101
Seriously though, I think the time violation is simply a time violation: not finishing within the allowed time frame, Period. It has nothing to do with IN or other components or anything else.
How do you define "wrong"?
I'll delete the rambling elaboration I started to make about that question and defer to Bluebonnet, who addressed the issue more succinctly than I could.
Your evaluation of the skaters is yours. It's correct for your perceptions and your knowledge. You might be more knowledgeable about music than some of the judges and you might evaluate everything about the Performance/Execution, Choreography, and Interpretation components through your sense of the music and your sense of what you think should be most important. But it's not the correct evaluation.
In fact, you used your own version of the scoring to give more weight to what's important to you.
Timing may be Presentation 101 according to the code of skatinginbc, but not according to the official rules. It's a big part of Interpretation, even bigger for ice dancing than for freestyle. But it's not mentioned in the criteria for Performance/Execution (for which the word "presentation" could be used as a casual synonym) or Choreography at all.
If you were a judge (assuming you had the necessary technical knowledge as well), you could bring your musical expertise to the judges' stand and make timing the most important criterion in your evaluations of these components, especially Interpretation where it's actually an official part of the description. That would make you a valuable contributor to the scores for that component.
Another judge might be an orthopedist by profession with a background in ballet and kinesiology, like and understand classical music but have little feel for syncopation, and believe that carriage and body line are Presentation 101.
Another judge might be a visual artist who focuses primarily on the shapes that the body and the movement paths make in space.
Another judge might be tone deaf and have no musical education outside of skating and so give more attention to the "thematic idea" and "effortless flow" phrases of the Interpretation criteria, since those are easiest for him to understand.
And so forth.
Wrong! That's the true spirit of 6.0 too. That's the true spirit of any judged competitions - sports and/or arts - with subjective criteria involved.
How do you define "right"? Why are you so sure the claim that the current system might be wrong is not right? It all comes down to the logic, doesn't it? If one presents his opinion with logic, why do you want to object it?
Performance entails the emotional and intellectual involvement of the skater as he translates the intent of the music and choreography. When a skater chases after the music for a prolonged period, it becomes harder for the viewers to see it as an "honest" performance because feeling the music and lagging behind can hardly go together. Also, multiple visible errors (e.g., leg dropping in a spin, etc.) diminish the degree of precision in delivery.
One of the criteria for CH is Phrasing and Form (movements and parts structured to match the phrasing of the music). Phrasing has a beginning and an end like a sentence which has a capitalized first word and the end punctuation mark. When the first word is not capitalized, the sentence becomes harder to read. When the timing of a musical phrase is mismatched, the phrase loses its clarity (BTW, some pianists make inaudible or low hums for the very purpose of phrasing--to find out when the melody needs to "breathe" (the beginning and the end of the musical phrase)). The choreography component concerns what is actually performed, not what was originally designed.
And therefore we expect a greater variation among scores in this very subjective category. But strangely, all judges but one gave a narrow corridor of scores. Why is that? One possible reason is "reputation judging"--The judges might have assigned scores based on those that the skater received in a prior competition. Another reason is "halo effect". The judges' evaluations on the components might have been influenced by a global evaluation, such as GOEs and the first category of the components. We often overlook the GOE impact on PCS. Since the judges focus their attention on elements during the performance, the impression based on the GOE scores they just gave is likely to influence their holistic PCS evaluations.
I gave my reason in Post #91. Is it a crime to think outside the box? How do we find areas for improvement if we all think in the same box? This thread invites people to play the judge. Instead of criticizing my scores, why don't you come out and give your scores and rationales? It's almost like getting yelled at for making a prediction in a prediction thread.
Last edited by skatinginbc; 04-13-2012 at 07:04 AM.
I've learned two more new thing relating to English words today, thanks to Olympia and skatinginbc.
OT, but what is interesting is irregular forms on words and/or inconsistencies in grammar actually happen in every language. Because the language, as way of communication tool, comes in 'colloquial forms', then in 'literary forms' much later.
That's why some people just hate to study their mother tongue as a curriculum at school.
And if I talk about educational system in Japan, that's one of the reasons to make it more difficult for Japanese to speak English, even studying it at school for 6 years. Because we are forced to learn grammar first. Some elite business people can read, say, the Time magazine effortlessly, but when it comes to 'speak out', it takes more time for them due to all the strict and stupid rules on grammar in their head.
My husband once gave me a series of questions: "why do some people say 'hi, there!', instead of hello? I know 'hi' and 'there', of course. But why does the word 'there' have to be combined with 'hi' to express hello?? What does 'there' mean in this circumstance??? Is it replaceable with 'here'????"
"I do not know. We just say so. Some just prefer saying that, to sound more casual, maybe? No big deal, anyway." I shrugged.
Up until now, he always prefers hello, instead of hi, there. I was a bad tutor in English for him, I guess.
Anyway, good news is if I can still learn new things at the age of 852163, why not skaters?
Go gilrs and go boys! You can do it!
Last edited by deedee1; 04-13-2012 at 03:18 AM.
German "hei da" (literally "hi there") was borrowed into Middle English as "heyda" and later "heyday", which was an archaic exclamation of cheerfulness, excitement and surprise and later reanalyzed as "high day" and adopted the meaning of "prime". Still, the construction of "hei" (hi) + "da" (there) was an ancient concept, literally "Hi, (one who is over) there" with an implication of physical distance, similar to the old nautical expression "Ahoy, there".
"Hello" is quite modern actually, first recorded in the late 19th century.
For program components, and 6.0 whole placements as well as actual scores, I define "right" as any defensible score or ranking according to the rules and standards at the time. Which means there can often be more than one right answer. The official results are the consensus of the answers by that particular panel of officials on that particular day. So that consensus becomes the official right answer that supersedes all other possible right answers. (Contrary to a way of theorizing skating results that Mathman has invoked in the past, I don't think there's a platonic ideal right answer that preexists outside of the humans working within the guidelines to arrive at a consensus.)
Wrong answers would be those that are not defensible according to the rules as they are written and the standards as trained and practiced.
For program components, that would include data entry errors, judges intentionally manipulating scores to try to give higher scores to the skater they want to place higher rather than the skater they actually thought did better on that component according to the stated criteria, or that are based on outright misperceptions or misconceptions (for example, if -- and I'm not saying that is the case with Chan at Worlds -- someone judging by video marked a skater low because of being off time and then it turned out that the skater hadn't been off time at all but the audio track was off on the video; or a judge marked a skater down for failing to interpret what the judge thought was the original programmatic intent of the music when in fact the skater's and choreographer's intention with that program does match the composer's intent, or the skater and choreographer have chosen to repurpose the music in a different but coherent way).
I would say that that is true only of viewers for whom "honesty" in connection to the music is more important than all the other criteria for those three components.Performance entails the emotional and intellectual involvement of the skater as he translates the intent of the music and choreography. When a skater chases after the music for a prolonged period, it becomes harder for the viewers to see it as an "honest" performance because feeling the music and lagging behind can hardly go together.
It's your interpretation of those criteria that, for example, relation to the music is more important than relation to the space. Which makes you right according to your perception and your priorities, as just one person giving his/her own evaluation. It doesn't give you the authority to say that if the individuals on the panels or the guidelines they were taught give equal or greater weight to other criteria that those individuals and those guidelines are wrong.
Oh, are we going to go there? If we look for every tiny flaw and weakness in every moment of the program, I'm not sure that Takahashi would fare so well, let alone Hanyu or Joubert.Also, multiple visible errors (e.g., leg dropping in a spin, etc.) diminish the degree of precision in delivery.
But ultimately, it's easier to forgive momentary weaknesses in skaters we generally have a positive affect towards, whereas they seem magnified in skaters we already have negative feelings for. Also, completely apart from the feelings about specific skaters, we might each have different pet peeves or kinds of flaws that we notice most and that bother us most. One judge might be irritated by lack of stretch or alignment; another might be more irritated by scratchiness on the blades. That doesn't make one more right than the other.
So if you say "I saw x, y, z little errors in Skater L's performance. They bothered me and so I marked him down," you're correct for you. You saw them. They bothered you.
Another judge says "I saw q, r, s little errors in Skater M's performance. They bothered me and so I marked them down." You didn't notice those little errors, or they didn't bother you so you forgot about them.
You gave L higher scores than M, and this other judge gave M higher scores than L. You're both right if you each judged according to what you saw. All I object to is your saying that the other judge is wrong, as if your perceptions are the only correct truth.
This is undoubtedly true, to the extent that it's part of the nature of human perceptions. But you're not immune from it either. Judges who were present in the arena and judging according to years of evaluating skating will have their presentation scores influenced by their perceptions of the skating as a whole.And therefore we expect a greater variation among scores in this very subjective category. But strangely, all judges but one gave a narrow corridor of scores. Why is that? One possible reason is "reputation judging"--The judges assigned scores based on those that the skater received in a prior competition. Another reason is "halo effect". The judges' evaluations on the components were influenced by a global evaluation, such as GOEs and the first category (i.e., skating skills) of the components. We often overlook the GOE impact on PCS. Since the judges pay their attention on individual elements during the performance, the impression based on the GOE scores they just gave is likely to influence their holistic PCS evaluations.
It seems that you are having your evaluation of all the other presentation criteria influenced by your perception of the musical phrasing, which is fine as far as it goes as long as you acknowledge that your perceptions and the ways they're influenced by the criteria that are most important to you are specific to you and not universal truths that everyone who disagrees is ignoring.
Or if you are actively ignoring all the other presentation criteria, well, then that starts to get less defensible.
No. What I'm objecting to is characterizing those who think within the box as being wrong.I gave my reason in #91. Is it a crime to think outside the box?
I won't use the word "wrong," but I will say I don't like the fact that you combined all the presentation components into one and then severely dinged Chan for his musical failures in your perception, so that his strengths in areas like patterning over the ice, especially compared to Joubert, or in carriage and clarity, especially compared to Hanyu.
That's your prerogative, but I think you're discounting some of the reasons why the official judges did score him more highly in those areas (although I can't read the judges' minds and they're not posting their reasonings here), that higher scores than you would give to those components individually and as a whole are not incorrect scores by definition.
Which is why I also think it's useful to separate those components instead of giving one global score for presentation. In some ways, it would almost be useful if those components could be divided even further. Just not feasible for the same judges to score in more detail while also scoring GOEs and skating skills and transitions.
I do think that in general the judging would benefit from judges being more educated about principles of visual and performing arts and from
I explained early on in this thread why I don't feel comfortable (don't feel honest) assigning scores after the fact.How do we find areas for improvement if we all think in the same box? This thread invites people to play the judge. Instead of criticizing my scores, why don't you come out and give your scores and rationales? It's almost like getting yelled at for making a prediction in a prediction thread.
I also have a tendency to play devil's advocate. So I could take any of the top 4 skaters and make a case for why he should have had the highest (or lowest of those four) total score for P/E, CH, and IN combined, by being selective in the criteria I emphasize for each of the skaters.
What I could do honestly, is to analyze and write up each of the areas of strength and weakness that I perceive in each performance. Not assigning numbers, but giving the reasons behind whatever numbers I would have come up with. But it would take a lot of time which I don't have right now. Too bad we can't just sit down and watch together and comment out loud, so I could point out easily in real time what what I'm seeing, and you could as well.
I do learn from reading yours and Bluebonnet's and others' analysis of the timing. But I'm not seeing the big problem in Chan's timing that you do. Maybe that's because you're more musically attuned than I am. Maybe not.
I'm just saying:
Maybe musical timing colors your perception of all the other criteria so significantly that you experience a halo effect enhancing your perception of everything else about the presentation of a skater who does that well and negatively impacts your perception of everything else about a skater for whom you perceive major problems in that area.
That's right for your perception and it would be right to try to generalize in the training for a musical-expression-on-ice contest. (Which, arguably, is what ice dancing is supposed to be.)
But if other judges' appreciation of blade-to-ice skill colors their perception of allthe other criteria so significantly that they experience a halo effect enhancing their perception of everything else about the presentation of a skater who does that well -- that's not wrong.
Since this is, after all, a skating contest, it's probably more right for skating ability to spill over into other components than for musical timing to spill over into other components.
There is, after all, still that "effortless flow over the ice surface" phrase in the Interpretation criteria.
An interesting datum. In fact, all of these data are interesting.
Two entirely new pieces of information for me! Thanks, BC.
At least that term has an explanation. There are so many idiomatic phrases that seem to have no relationship whatever with their actual meaning. I'm sure every language has such idioms. They can really trip you up.
I learned French by grammar first, too. It got so much easier to communicate when I got to college, and the class was conducted in the language. At first, we all sat there in fear, but eventually we got used to opening our mouths.
Last edited by Olympia; 04-13-2012 at 08:26 AM.
No, no, a thousand times no. I believe the exact opposite.
That is why I feel that the CoP is completely the wrong way to go about figure skating judging. When we assign numbers to something there is an implicit assumption that these numbers mean something. In fact, they don't. Their only meaning is, these are the numbers we assigned. Obviously, then, these numbers are "right" by default. I do not subscribe to this view.
Ordinal placements, on the other hand, do mean something. They mean that judge number three thought that skater A was better than skater B. To me, there is an honesty about that statement that, try as it might, the CoP cannot veil or obscure.
This is a judged sport. It is the CoP that pretends otherwise, referring silently to the Platonic ideal of a perfectly performed element or a perfectly composed program, and then tries to match up numbers as to how closely the actual performance measures up.
My main (and really my only) beef is this. I like figure skating. But I love numbers. I hate like anything to see them abused. I hate to see them forced into unwilling service by taskmasters who do not respect what they are.
That having been said, as a practical matter I am not against the CoP. It works as well as anything else in determining a winner to a skating competition, so pragmatically speaking I say, whatever. But I do not accept the argument that I can't complain about the judging system because one of the rules of the judging system is that I can't complain about the judging system.
I said you had invoked it, not that you supported it.
Except, I think that it's more subject to unconscious psychological effects and more variable in each judge emphasizing whatever qualities are most important to that judge.That is why I feel that the CoP is completely the wrong way to go about figure skating judging. When we assign numbers to something there is an implicit assumption that these numbers mean something. In fact, they don't. Their only meaning is, these are the numbers we assigned. Obviously, then, these numbers are "right" by default. I do not subscribe to this view.
Ordinal placements, on the other hand, do mean something. They mean that judge number three thought that skater A was better than skater B. To me, there is an honesty about that statement that, try as it might, the CoP cannot veil or obscure.
No system is perfect.
Ha!But I do not accept the argument that I can't complain about the judging system because one of the rules of the judging system is that I can't complain about the judging system.
Complain all you like. And where applicable, I'll respond that I actually like something that you don't like, or I'll agree I don't like it in principle but I understand why it's more practicable to do things that way.
Here is an example of what I am talking about. Skatinginbc has proposed a system in which the difficulty score and the the execution score are multiplied. Before we rush in, I think there are two questions that have to be addressed.
(1) What would be the practical effect of such a system, and would it be beneficial?
But I am more interested in
(2) Why multiply? What is the rationale for viewing these numbers in a multiplicative context? Yes, we have two numbers and we know how to multiply. It does not necessarily follow that the product captures the qauntity that we are trying to measure, or even that it has a natural mathematical interpretation.
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