Thursday, July 9, 2020

How do I rate? What’s my score?







































On July 6, 2020 Randall Munroe posted a very amusing xkcd web cartoon (shown above) titled Universal Rating Scale. It combines a lot of different scales used for rating various things.







































One obvious scale instead could run upwards from zero to ten, as is shown above (with 11 added for comic effect, as seen in a clip from the movie Spinal Tap).



























































































































What else is on Randall’s universal scale? As shown above, there are EF ratings on the Enhanced Fujita Scale for Tornadoes, a bipolar Likert Scale, IUCN Rankings of Threatened Species, star ratings (like those by Amazon), and Starbucks Drink Sizes. There also are coin grades (G for Good, VG for Very Good and UNC for Uncirculated), credit ratings (A, AA, AAA), Emojis for Faces (happy, sad and neutral), and Film Ratings from the MPAA (G for General, PG for Parental Guidance, PG-13 for Parents strongly cautioned [about children under 13], and NC-17 [no one under 17]).










































































What is missing? As shown above, 7-Eleven has Drink Sizes (cold) that start off where Starbucks stops. There also is the Harvard spectral classification for stars (by color).




































































 





For this blog about public speaking there are two five-point scales from Toastmasters International, which I previously discussed on April 3, 2018 in a blog post titled Speech evaluation rubrics: how many levels should be on the scale, and which way should it point?

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