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Comment by bvi | Hacker News Reader

It's entirely anonymous - I know nothing about the users who are uploading the photos (apart from the email addresses they use when uploading a photo), and nothing about users who judge the photos.

The entire premise of the site is for the user to be judged by strangers. Why would age/sex/location/education of the person doing the judging matter?

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Because it's most likely skewed. Without knowing anything about where your votes come from, I'm pretty sure the WEIRD demographic is over-represented (white, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic).

Not trying to be overly critical - I like the concept and execution, but these things are really important in statistics.

Research is tricky.

Unless you're very careful with adjusting for factors (like age, location, etc) and careful with statistics you end up with garbage.

Either do something that's just purely fun, or do something properly and call it research. But don't do something wrong and call it research, because there are so many people ignorant about how science works and ignorant about numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias

The judges have IP addresses that you can map to a geographic region, such as a state or country. That would be useful data, and you'd be able to actually say with authority whether or not at least the location of the person doing the judging matters.

I think that everyone would like to see how men and women rated them as individual categories(maximizing sex appeal is a common goal), and age might also be desirable.

> Why would age/sex/location/education of the person doing the judging matter?

It can bias the results. How did your users find your site?

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