Fire Away - Links Magazine Top 100

[Sean_A]

I know that it is fashionable in this here neighborhood to bang on Golf Digest's method of rating golf courses.  And I recognize that its list does have some outliers that I just cannot fathom, like the manifestly unworthy Rich Harvest here in greater Chicagoland, but I think there's nothing wrong with including resistance to par/difficulty in a rating for a Top 100 golf course.  Maybe that's heresy, but it seems to have as much validity as the prized-in-gca-land "walk in the park" factor of Golfweek.  If you want to talk about homogeneity of results, there's plenty of evidence of that in GW's list, too.

I agree with your post.  One question - does Golf Digest also have a category for playability.  If they are going to penalize a course for being not hard enough, they should also penalize the courses for being too hard and thus not playable for the average golfer.  IF they do, it is entirely fair.

The problem with this logic is determining what is too easy or hard and for whom.  It probably makes more sense to downgrade a course that doesn't have reasonable length variation or even better, reasonable variation in how long the holes play.  

Ciao

[Richard Choi]

P.S.  Jud,  I'm not so sure I agree with your premise about more=homogenous.

For example,

If we polled everyone in the U.S. as to what thier religion is...I'm guessing we would have a fairly homogenous result that was mostly Christianity.

But if we polled everyone in the world, which is a much bigger sample size, the result would become far more heterogeneos in that now there would be Christianity, Judeaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc, etc.

Kalen, Jud is correct. It is pretty basic statistics. More samples you have, more homogenous the result is.

You are using the example in the wrong way. If you polled 10 people in US, there is a chance that all 10 people say they are Wiccans - which would not be very representative of the overall population. More you sample, more reflective of the true representation the result will be.

In your example, polling just US for the world-wide spread of religion would result in a skewed result - because your sample was too isolated. Once you opened up the sample size to the rest of the world, more representative result was found.

[Jud_T]

Apparently a $208,000 U of M degree is still worth something besides the paper it's printed on...