Despite last-minute reports last week that it would not be returning to predict this year’s edition of the Triple J Hottest 100, the makers behind the Warmest 100 have announced a surprise comeback.
On Friday, Nick Drewe – one of the Brisbane IT wizards behind last year’s controversial alternate countdown – said that “unfortunately, it looks like the Warmest 100 will be a one-off” after Triple J fulfilled their promise of altering the Hotting 100 voting system.
Discussing the impact of last year’s Warmest 100 – which analysed social media sharing to eventually predict 92 of the 100 songs on the final chart, and nailed the Top 3 with 100% accuracy (as this handy graph demonstrates) – Drewe remarked that Triple J “weren’t too happy about the whole thing, and were keen on making it hard for a similar prediction to happen again.”
But in a surprise 180 today – the same day that voting closes on the Hottest 100 poll – the Warmest 100 is officially back, as a breaking report from The Vine‘s Matt Shea details.
The Warmest 100 website has been updated, complete with the Top 100 predictions of this year’s countdown that airs on Sunday 26th January (and if you want to skip straight to the spoilers, head here), completed after a brand new method to track votes in the “world’s largest music democracy” was found, with thanks to an international tip-off.
Australian David Quach, who lives in Chicago as an economist for stats trackers The Nielsen Company, tells The Vine he e-mailed Drewe about the return of the predictive list, but “he sent me a link to a Gizmodo story and I saw they weren’t doing anything, which was disappointing,” he explains. The Warmest 100 website has been updated, complete with the Top 100 predictions of this year’s countdown…
Quach, who had run a series of his own stats demonstrating the accuracy of last year’s Warmest 100 results with The Vine, attempted to keep the idea alive, taking to his own Facebook to encourage friends to help him put together a spiritual sequel: a Top 10 prediction based on friends’ votes.
But following his personal social media shout-out failing to ignite interest, Quach began doing his own manual search of votes copied, pasted, or screen-capped to Facebook, Twitter, and Triple J’s own social media accounts.
After gathering enough convincing data – around 300 votes – Quach then reached out to Drewe. “I said, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to do it again?’ I told him about what I’d found and that I was going to count the votes anyway. And he was onboard straightaway.” Using an enhanced version of the ex-pat’s visual system, Drewe farmed an enormous sample of Hottest 100 votes. “In the time I counted 400 votes, Nick had counted 16,000,” says Quach.
Using OCR (optical character recognition) software, Drewe and the Warmest 100 team (Tom Knox, Andy Thelander, and Jack Murphy), they began compiling a new Warmest 100, eventually collating 17,800 votes from 1,799 entries – approximately 1.3% of the expected total vote.
As the Warmest 100 website’s intro admits, this figure is “a smaller sample size than last year,” which analysed 35,081 votes from 3,602 entries – 2.7% of the total submitted votes – and thus is only about half as accurate, meaning there is “a higher margin for error,” but still mighty impressive given the short window of time that the Warmest 100 team nearly canned a comeback to releasing today’s new predictions.
Still, despite the smaller sample, the Warmest 100’s accuracy is “not going to go down by a huge amount, really,” Dr Michael Bulmer, a University mathematics lecturer, tells The Vine; indicating that like last year’s countdown, the Warmest 100 could become more accurate as it reaches the Top 10.
It’s yet to be seen how Triple J will respond to having their Hottest 100 results being in danger of being spoiled, for the second year running (never mind the angry bookies), but as for Drewe, he sees the Warmest 100’s return not as a slight to the radio station and its voters, but the fulfilment of a challenge.
“That’s why we’re doing it again after David [Quach]’s suggestion — just to see how accurate we can get it,” says Drewe, emphasising that the Warmest 100 website will “once again be overflowing with spoiler warnings.”
View the full Hottest 100 predictions at http://warmest100.com.au/2013/
