Some interesting data....

[scaharp]

Relating to some the discussion on a certain list, here's a rough count of the number of the different Orders of Peers (Pelican, Laurel, Chivalry) in the East Kingdom.

YearsPelicanLaurelChivalry1970-791120311980-894161761990-9995119602000-057872272006-11524421
I think these numbers are pretty instructive.

The number of Pelicans and Laurels made has

Comments

[fosveny]

I went and did some statistics, by year. Including weighted and running averages. scaharp, did you include peerages made elsewhere? (It's not that statistically significant as you get closer to now, but it skews things a bit in the early days)

The number of chivalry was initially higher than the other peerages by all measures. The number of chivalry created per year peaked in 1988, and has since fallen to 1970's levels, including a nice resounding two year gap in inductees centered on 1999. The East made exactly one new member of the chivalry in the three-year time period from 8/98 to 8/01, which coincided with a sharp lull in the numbers of new OTCs.

If the chivalry wanted to be keeping pace with the other two orders (they may not wish to), they should be making about 10 members of the chivalry per year. Admittedly, the other two peerages draw from a somewhat larger pool of participants - but not everyone does service or arts, either.

I stopped concentrating on fighting for many reasons, but one of them was the sheer futility of that three-year period. Why bother?

[scaharp]

By the time I realized that some names had (Kingdom) after them, I had already done a lot of counting. So I figured it probably evened out between the Orders in the end. I'd be interested in seeing your numbers - I am not so talented with numbers and statistics.

It's interesting to me to see that, comparing the 80's to the 90's, the Pels and Laurels doubled their inductions, while the Chiv dropped by some fair percentage (20%? My math skills really have faded away with my brain). And again, from the 90's to the 2000's - Pels and Laurels stayed the same, or increased, but Chiv dropped by a similar percentage.

I really don't want to appear to be trying to dictate to the Chivalry how many inductees they should have, or what their criteria should be (in my interpretation). It's just interesting to have someone accuse the Laurels of being too exclusive (or more exclusive than the Chiv) but to have at least one set of numbers indicate that isn't necessarily so.

Of course, there are other numbers (population of the East, numbers of people participating in X activity, etc.) that would help but I'm not sure we can get those.

[fosveny]

Let's look at the raw-numbers: This graph is number-of-new-elevations-per-year for the three peerages:



Kinda hard to follow, but you can see that the trend right now is generally downward - some of that is because I included 2011 in the data, and we haven't finished.

First, I did a 10% smoothing - this is the way speedometers don't jump all over the place constantly: "For the first number, use that number. For the second, take 90% of the previous smoothed value and add 10% of the new data point". It's great for finding trends, but it's not really the right kind of analysis for this data set, it's meant when the previous data doesn't change much. It's great for tracking your actual weight, if you're dieting.



Last, I did something more relevant to the effectively-independent numbers: weighted average of five points. 10% of year X-2, 20% of year X-1, 40% of this year, 20% of next year, 10% of year X+2 - obviously, only doable until two years ago. This is the kind of smoothing you use when the numbers are related, but there can be a lot of change between data - weather forecasters use this so that a single day of "no history of storms" in the middle of storm season doesn't cause a bad forecast.



Sure, maybe only 20% of the SCA fights, but that doesn't seem to have been a real problem until around 1990.

Re: not recieving awards means you'd walk away?

[fosveny]

Yup, you're definitely misunderstanding. I specifically said "for many reasons". This was just one among many, and not even the primary motivator. I was interested in being a knight, but I decided that the punishment my body was taking was not worth the apparently-totally-unreachable prize, and I had better things to do and other ways to spend my time.

I did not walk away from fighting entirely, I merely stopped spending so much time on it and focusing on it as my primary activity in the SCA.

FYI: Our local chiv amount to zero, there's never been one from the group, though others have moved in and then moved away from time to time. Our local OTCs amount to two - the last over a decade ago. One is no longer an SCA participant, the other is not active in the local group.

[fosveny]

(I accidentally responded to her original note without logging in. This comment will make much more sense when scaharp approves that response.)