If you are bored in your maths class, you'll probably not be interseted
in what I'm about to talk about here. Since there are different numbers
of viewers from each era, there will be differing numbers of voters from
each era. Can any pattern be found with these results?
It is of course no surprise that the more recent the character appeared
on the show the more popular he or she is. It's obvious that there are
more members on a board who watched the 2004 episodes than those who
have watched the 1994 episodes. New viewers will be oblivious to
characters such as Angel, Bobby and Pippa, and to whom Jack is the
"sexy" new police officer on the block and not Sally's first boyfriend
and character that fought so hard to try and save his foster father in a
raging river.
The show has continuously evolved, characters have come and gone and so
have viewers. Thanks to clips provided by members around this site I
have been able to see all bar one character. Step forward Viv Newton.
However it is still obvious that the more recently you have appeared on
the show, the more popular you are going to be.
What I am going to investigate here is whether there is any
corrolation between time elapsed since leaving the show and points
scored; if who I believe would have been the flavour of the month at
points in history can be seen to be equal.
The characters I have chosen for the investigation are Sally (the winner
of our poll), Gypsy (probably the most popular character from the turn
of the century), Shannon, Angel (who left in 1996 and who was without
doubt one of Home and Away's biggest characters - especially when she
fell pregnant), Sophie (who is probably the best known character from
the early nineties - I have excluded her five weeks or so stint in 2002)
and also Bobby Simpson.
Firstly I will look at the linear method. Does Home and
Away lose viewers and character support linearly?
To put this in simple terms, if one person watched the show in 1988,
linear growth would be gaining an extra viewer each year.
If a character has been on the show in the past two years their points
score stays the same, if they last appeared in 2003 then their score is
multipled by 2, 2002 multiplied by 3 etc. That means Lynn Davenport
would have her score multiplied 17 times. Unfortunately for her, 17
times zero still equals zero so that's tough luck for her.
 Anyway, the results are as follows:
Bobby scores 440 points.
Shannon scores 440 points.
Sally (Winner) scores 389 points.
Gypsy scores 363 points.
Angel scores 333 points.
Sophie scores 204 points.
OK, Bobby and Shannon have raced away with it and Sophie's performance
could be classified as disappointing compared to what would have been
expected.
The other possible viewer pattern I thought about investigating was an
exponential growth curve.
https://www.xahlee.org/SpecialPlaneCurves_d...ir/exp_plot.png
Sally (Winner) scores 1057.4
Gypsy scores 2430.3
Angel scores 299814.1
OK, that's getting silly. Angel has proven to be 283 times more popular
than our current number one and well, even if Angel is the most popular
number one ever, we can probbaly safely assume that she isn't quite that
popular.
Those of you may know that e^1 is approximately 2.71. What if we choose
a number between 1 and e? Well, to avoid boring you with anymore
mathematics, no number could be found without making Bobby a runaway
leader. She was always going to cause trouble, much in common with her
characters early days as she outscored Angel and was pretty close in
points to Shannon who left four years later. Which then again does beg
another question, is Bobby really just that hugely popular.
Next, Statistically Speaking II, but don't worry, this page isn't about
mathematics, it's "interesting" tables, like one fan characters, who got
the most 5 points and which voters best represent overall public
opinion. |