~>Axel

[UPDATE]

Thanks for taking the time to reply, Axel.
I asked a couple of others who visit this group why they haven't been
writing anything, and it turned out that they all had broken fingers,
but I'm starting to wonder if the real reason is that they don't feel
comfortable with this group's format. Perhaps one of those web formats
could coax a few more to get involved?

Anyway, here's the update on the Mars in 10th observation:

Common sense tells us that if we have more "Music"- type categories in
the batch of 37,000 timed charts, then obviously we have a greater
chance of getting more of them amongst the best scores, which would
give us an undesirable bias, so I have now tagged every category with
a series of fifteen 3-character tags such as "MUS", "ART", "SPT",
"MAR", "NEP" -- for Music, Art, Sport, Mars, Neptune etc etc.

This means that when a print-out is done now, the final result - in
the form of a table, shows the Observed number of "hits" versus the
Expected number. So far it's working very well and I no longer have to
wonder if the apparent themes I see amongst the highest scores are
real or imaginary.

It seems that a lot more work needs to be done with the tagging of
categories (to find the best series of descriptors for them) and a lot
more data and categories are needed, but the preliminary results
should convince some researchers that it will be worthwhile to put a
bit of effort into it.

Ray