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Dramatically overestimating me, Bill from Dawn’s Early Light asked me to take a look at an interesting Economist article on biased judging in Europe’s version of American Idol.

What makes a good song? Lyrics, melody and rhythm have their place, of course, but for entrants of the Eurovision Song Contest on May 21st, geopolitics may be the decisive factor. Neil Johnson and his colleagues at Oxford University have gathered voting data from 12 years worth of Eurovision Song Contests in order to analyse the links between different countries, and their "compatibility" with each other. These data confirm what many already suspected: that the contest is not always about the quality of the songs. The research, published in arXiv, an online archive more usually devoted to papers about physics, has shown the contest also has a deeper meaning, and reveals how "European" each country is. Despite its Eurosceptic image, for instance, the data suggest that Britain is
Authentieke Schoenen Heren Nike Free Run 2 Turquoise Wit Oranje Elk Paar Schoenen u Aankoop very much in tune with the rest of Europe. Supposedly Europhile France, by contrast, is actually out of kilter with many of its European cousins.

Hmmm. "What makes a good song?" the article asks. "The contest is not always about the quality of the songs," it continues. Interesting. But anyway.

Dr Johnson and his colleagues picked the Eurovision contest for their analysis because it is largely free of economic and governmental bias, and does not depend on income, on education or (much) on language. This, they argue, makes it a good measure of compatibility between countries, capturing something of the underlying character and mood of a given country at
Acquista ora e godere del miglior servizio donne Nike Free Run 2 Stealth Grigio Bianco rosso solare Con trasporto libero 70% di sconto a given time. If all were fair and equal, and judges had similar musical tastes, any given song should receive a similar score from all countries, with terrible songs garnering few points and good songs many. In reality, though, some dreadful dirges get a few ridiculously high scores, while better ditties receive a smattering of surprisingly low ones.

When the article says it "is not always about the quality of the songs," it begs the question: what is quality? In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig has his protagonist ponder this

It wasn’t until three o’clock in the morning that he wearily confessed to himself that he didn’t have a clue as to what Quality was, picked up his briefcase and headed home.

Quality you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self contradictory. But some things
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Acheter Chaussures Femmes Authentiques Nike Roshe Run Hommes Gris solaire Rouge Avec Livraison Gratuite Sur Toutes Les Commandes others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others but what’s the "betterness"? So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?

The Economist’s article on pop idols spirals into philosophical madness!

Bet you weren’t expecting that!

Zen’s hero is a lecturer of rhetoric in a state university, and he tries something the the British economics newspaper also realized

To reinforce the idea that they already knew what Quality was he developed a routine in which he read four student papers in class and had everyone rank them in estimated order of Quality on a slip of paper. He did the same himself. He collected the slips, tallied them on the blackboard and averaged the rankings for an overall class opinion. Then he would reveal his own rankings, and this would almost always be close to, if not identical with the class average. Where
2015 Cheap 2012 Nike Free Run 5.0 V3 Nero Argento Uomini Con la massima qualità e la consegna veloce there were differences it was usually because two papers were close in quality.

If all were fair and equal, and judges had similar musical tastes, any given song should receive a similar score from all countries, with terrible songs garnering few points and good songs many

If averaging favorites works for college freshmen in Montana,
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One time trying to define quality, Zen’s hero seems to endorse
Acheter En Ligne Femmes 2012 Nike Free Run 2 Dark Blue Orange Hommes Outlet Sur Vente an American Idol like process for deciding what "quality" is

He didn’t know, but he did know that by subtracting Quality
Acheter Authentiques Chaussures De Course 2012 Nike Free Run 5.0 V3 Gris Blanc Hommes Enregistrer Big Discount from a picture of the world as we know it, he’d revealed a magnitude of importance of this term he hadn’t known was there. The world can function without it, but life would be so dull as to be hardly worth living. In fact it wouldn’t be worth living. The term worth is a Quality term. Life would just be living without any values or purpose at all.

"That’s the look. That sums it. Squareness. When you subtract quality you get squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.

But there are crueler judges than hipsters. Other teachers ask him if Quality exists objectively, in items themselves, or subjectively, in the mind of man

"This was brought about in response to Phdrus’ wild meanderings about Quality
Authentieke Running Schoenen Nike Free Run 6.0 Spiderman Ademende Grey Blue Men Voor Goedkoop Maar Real Mensen Running Schoenen when the English faculty at Bozeman, informed of their squareness, presented him with a reasonable question: "Does this undefined quality’ of yours exist in the things we observe?" they asked. "Or is it subjective, existing
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Neither option is valid the hero is on the horns of a dilemma

Because if Quality exists in the object, then you must explain just why scientific instruments are unable to detect it. You must
Acheter Chaussures De Course 2012 Nike Free Run 2 Gris Bleu Hommes 2014 New Style suggest instruments
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Acheter En Ligne Authentique Nike Free Run 2 Bleu Blanc Orange Livraison Rapide Et Bon Client Services Sont Garantis with the explanation that instruments don’t detect it because your whole Quality concept, to put it politely, is a large pile of nonsense. The Quality that he and the students had
100% Originele Kwaliteit Vrouwen Nike Free Run 2 Zwart Wit Antraciet Voor u Aan De Beste Prijs been seeing in the classroom was completely different from the qualities of color or heat or hardness observed
All’ingrosso per poco costoso donne Nike Free Run 2 Shield Lupo Grigio Nero Solar Rosso Sito Ufficiale Con il 100% di alta qualità in the laboratory. Those physical properties were all measurable with instruments. He had been thrown off
Acheter Femmes Authentiques Nike Free Run 5.0 Black Light Rouge Hommes Vente Outlet Femmes Des Hommes 2015 by an ambiguity in the term quality. He wondered why that ambiguity should exist, made a mental note to do some digging into the historic roots of the word quality, then put it
Authentiek Heren Nike Free Run 3 Sequoia Electric Green Snelle Levering En Goede Klantenservice Is Gegarandeerd aside. The horn of the dilemma was still there.

What the classical formalists meant by the objection "Quality is
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A dilemma is like a charging bull, and either horn can kill you. If a bull is aggressive, you can turn (and be gored), throw sand in his eyes (try to trick it using a logical fallacy), sing it to sleep (answer that you, unlike the questioner, are not smart enough to know), or go through the horns. The first stage is noting that quality is a larger than an individual

He noted that although normally you associate Quality with objects, feelings of Quality sometimes occur without any object at all. This is what led
Acheter Femmes 2012 Nike Free Run 2 Gris Bleu Hommes À Vendre him at first to think that maybe Quality is all subjective. But subjective pleasure wasn’t what he meant by Quality either. Quality decreases subjectivity. Quality takes you out of yourself, makes you aware of the world around you. Quality is opposed to subjectivity.

Finally, the breakthrough. What is Quality? Answer:

I don’t know how much thought passed before he arrived at this, but eventually he saw that Quality couldn’t be independently related with either the subject or the object but could be found only in the relationship of the two with each other. It is the point at which subject and object meet.

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