Closing out the peer review

Thanks to all of you who participated in the peer review for SoME2 over the last two weeks. Once the dust settled, over 10,000 votes were cast in total!

The next step is for us, together with a few other people I’ve pulled in from the math communication space, to give a close look and the entries which bubbled to the top so as to choose a few winners. We’ll be looking at at least the top 100, as ranked by the peer review process.

There were slightly fewer than four times as many video entries as non-video entries, so splitting those evenly would mean categorizing roughly 22 non-video entries and 78 video entries as “top 100”. I’ll probably just round those up, making it 25 and 80, and if last year is any indication, I’ll keep watching many past that point anyway.

If your entry is among those top 100 (or 105 I guess?), you’ll receive an email from us within in the next day or two to let you know. Hopefully, this goes without saying, but “top 100” should be taken with a grain of salt. The intent of the peer review is not to give an absolute ranking of the value of all entries, it’s to generate a set such that it’s exceedingly likely that the top 5 we’d choose if we looked at all of the entries exist within that set. It’s the best we can do with the tools we have, but obviously creating a crisp cutoff between who is “100th” and who is “101st” is impossible for such a subjective task.

The target date for a winner announcement video is still September 22nd, so look out for that.

This may be the last announcement you hear from us, so if you have time to share anything that you liked or disliked about how we ran things this year, please feel free to let us know in this feedback form.

Looking forward to seeing what everyone has made!
Grant