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2012 State of the Herd Site is Live


CoderBrony

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Hey everypony!

Thanks to the power of cheap domain registrations (and not from GoDaddy, may Celestia send Bob Parsons to the moon for 1,000 years!), I have a placeholder site up for the 2012 State of the Herd Report, so that I'll have a place to stick the relatively massive PDF when it's finished. Right now, it just has a semi-frequently updated count of completed census records, I'll announce when the report is ready, sometime after the 15th!

You can find the site here: http://www.herdcensus.com/

Coder Brony

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Yeah, I can write novel about the things I realized I should have done after the fact, including having a scaler (numeric) age field... I also should have made the pony favs a slider for each pony, rather than a simple popularity vote, because then I could have done linear regressions and correlations against things like age, or so the filly of the house tells me. She has jokingly suggested you could do a Meyers-Briggs style personality index out of pony preferences. This is why you don't want to be married to someone getting a doctorate in experimental psych, pretty much all you talk about is stats and personality psychology. Thankfully I have a teenage son to watch da ponies with, and all he wants to do is make Trollestia jokes.

Live and learn, there's always next year's census!

Coder

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SEE: The Great and Powerful Coder Brony perform pivot table manipulations before YOUR VERY EYES!

LEARN: Who was best pony!

GASP: As one of the Mane 6 gets beaten out by Princess Luna!

DISCOVER: Which non-North American country has the most bronies!

GOGGLE IN AMAZEMENT: At the great Twilight vs Fluttershy shootout!

CHEER: As Coder goes off to get some sleep after a week of crunching data!

The report is available at: http://www.herdcensus.com. Spread the word, please?

Coder Brony

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I was thiiiiissssss close to missing the "My little pony: Statistics are Magic"

So far my second third favorite part is the Mississippi comment.

Edit: the letter was excellent!

Also, the only question I would have liked different was the merchandise one. At the time, the only think I had bought was iTunes episodes. I think I picked DVDs, but that was unsatisfying.

Thank you for all your great work!

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In addition to having a simple "pick your favorite" (which I'm going to continue so I can track longitudinal changes), I want to add "slider" ratings for each pony, along the lines of"

.................Dislike........Neutral...........Like

Rainbow Dash:....o....o....o....o....o....o....o....o

Fluttershy:......o....o....o....o....o....o....o....o

If I do this, I end up with numeric values, which are better suited to statistical analysis.

I'm also thinking about adding questions about political leanings (Liberal vs Conservative) and sexual preference next time, but I'm a bit wary because they are controversial (and the later may not be appropriate to ask an audience that's 1/3 under 18). What questions would you like to see on the next census?

Coder

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Ah, that makes me feel better. Good Idea.

On the topic of controversial questions, religion, race, and income would be interesting. Does liberal/moderate/conservative translate well worldwide? Perhaps you have a set of optional questions at the end?

And now a list of innocuous off-the-top-of-my-head suggestions:

*Rural/Suburban/Urban

*How did you find MLP? (allow for multiple selections)

*Why do you enjoy the show? (allow for multiple selections)

*What could the show do to improve? (allow for multiple selections)

*What other TV shows do you watch (3 pull down menus)

*MLP related teasing/discrimination

*Offline MLP events and friends

*Pegasus, Unicorn or Earth Pony ranking.

*Which character do you most relate to?

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On the topic of controversial questions, religion, race, and income would be interesting. Does liberal/moderate/conservative translate well worldwide? Perhaps you have a set of optional questions at the end?

I know in Australia the two major parties are Labor (stupid spelling) and Liberal. They are centre left and centre right respectively, go figure. Perhaps using Right/Left would be more universally understood.

YES, optional questions ftw.

The rest of your comment is great!

Loved the pictures!

okay, comments on the survey. (im doing this by figure numbers)

  1. Not much to say... Surprised that AJ ranked so low...
  2. again, no surprises there.
  3. good, but context would be nice. Perhaps also showing this against other age statistics for people online? This would show any significant age difference between our fandom and the general online population.
  4. needs a "still in high school'' section, otherwise everypony who has not finished high school (assuming almost all of <17 yr olds) needs to select less than highschool.
  5. see comments for 3
  6. your conclusion hints at a 'none' category, but it is not shown.
  7. Wow! that is much higher than I would have expected!
  8. Siblings = schoolmates. huh.
  9. good comments, unsurprising results.
  10. eyup, though 'started watching' I take to mean seriously watching? I saw a (very) small number of the earlier gens when I was younger, does that count?
  11. Sorry, wa-huh? I dont understand how to read that. Is it number per thousand? Million? I dont know!
  12. oh, the next question makes 11 clear. If you are using the same scale.
  13. not much to say here.
  14. I dont know! I dont know why Quebec doesn't like ponies!

how many siblings do you have?

Interesting over all, looking forward to actually participating in the next one!

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What questions would you like to see on the next census?

It's be interesting to have stats on what other popular fandoms bronies might be attached to.

Also, community involvement might be a good thing. Have they ever made pony art/music/fanfic/PMVs/RP/customs/etc?

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I know in Australia the two major parties are Labor (stupid spelling) and Liberal. They are centre left and centre right respectively, go figure. Perhaps using Right/Left would be more universally understood.

In the USA, "right" generally corresponds to conservative and to the Republican party, while "left" generally corresponds to liberal and to the Democratic party.

Are you saying that the Liberal party is Conservative and the Labor party is Liberal?

Also, community involvement might be a good thing. Have they ever made pony art/music/fanfic/PMVs/RP/customs/etc?

The specifics may or may not be interesting. The TIME spent would be. "About how many hours per week do you spend watching, discussing or creating fan material for MLP?"

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Here's a new and interesting chart I just did.

The chart in the report compares all US > 18 with Bronies > 18, in terms of educational attainment. This isn't really fair, because most bronies are under 30, meaning the US sample would have a lot more people over 30 that might have had time to pursue advanced degrees. Here's the same chart, but only looking at 18-30.

post-1737-0-05938700-1326309176_thumb.pn

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The chart in the report compares all US > 18 with Bronies > 18, in terms of educational attainment. This isn't really fair, because most bronies are under 30, meaning the US sample would have a lot more people over 30 that might have had time to pursue advanced degrees.

Wow. That makes a huge difference. I was confused for a bit because you switched the colors from the chart.

What about a gender gap? My guess is that it is closing but that it still exists. Comparing a group of 50:50 versus one of 86:14 might be misleading.

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The characteristics of Bronies are most meaningful in the context of the whole. Sure some of them, like gender are obvious. But I don't know what the curve looks like for age. Anything that you can get good data on is a good candidate for the next survey. I don't think all of the questions need to be positive either. Rates of depression for instance.

Maybe the industries of the professionals?

I long a form do you think you can get away with?

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