And so it begins! The 2020–2021 Science Book Club Poll

As promised, I took the seventy-nine—yes, seventy-nine, as my good friend Nick Harding pointed out, one of the fifty that I nominated on Friday was already scheduled for our June discussion so I eliminated it from the poll and the tallies. Anyway, I set up the poll Friday but didn’t want to put it out until today to make sure I had the right instructions ready.

This year, the poll is a little different again from last year, time for the annual Science Book Club poll. Last year, you got one twelfth of a point, about an 8.3% boost in your score for each meeting you attended in the last year.

This year, to simplify things, I decided to simply give a 50% bonus to anyone who attended at least four (non-fiction science) meetings in the last year, and 100% bonus if you attended all twelve. I can verify this because I require everyone to list their name on Meetup so I can correlate the records. Further, if you’ve not logged into the meetup site in the last year, you will get a 50% diminishment of voting power. Also, if you overuse the max or minimum “veto” scores (currently set to a maximum of ten), then you also suffer a 50% reduction. Finally, if you’re not even a member of the Science Book Club, I will allow you to vote but you will be biased to 10% of normal.

Thus, if you, like one member currently, attended at least four meetings but voted for more than ten books the the maximum or minimum (veto) rank, you would end up with a 75% bias, meaning your votes count for 75% as normal.

The reason I added the penalty for too many “veto” votes is because this year we have a seven point system. The seven point system goes from one to seven with the following relations. If someone doesn’t vote for a given book, it’s score is assumed neutral.

RatingMeaningPoints
1Veto-4
2Super-Dislike-2
3Dislike-1
4Neutral0
5Like+1
6Super-Like+2
7Veto-Override+4
Ranking of Votes in the 2020 Science Book Club Poll

Beyond that, pollsing is pretty much the same as last year, albeit with more choices and more options. As of this writing we have five votes but I hope to have many more by the time the poll closes on or just before 14 June.

The polls can be found at the Science Book Club 2020–2021 Poll. I hope you will join me in voting enthusiastically, my fellow sapiosexuals!

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