Starch Madness 2020: Democratized French Fry Power Rankings via Principal Component Analysis
Mark your calendars for Starch Madness 2020, folks. I bought the domain, I made a little logo, I am working on more graphics, and today I am revealing a tentative plan for empirical, crowdsourced french fry power rankings.
French Fry journalism is at an all-time high. Perhaps it all started with Malcolm Gladwell’s coverage. NPR covered the corporate plan to develop a proprietary coating to help french fries last a few more minutes for their Grubhub deliveries. The LA Times released their power rankings earlier this year, and even the Chicago Tribune even graced us with some regional rankings.
But there’s one glaring problem with all this coverage:
French fry journalism still lacks the voice of the people. Starch Madness 2020 aims to change that.
I have been working with a team of experts since March of 2019 to develop an accessible, democratized way to evaluate french fries. In February, anyone will be able to nominate restaurants for the tournament, and in March, anyone will be able to submit their own ratings.
Based on the tournament last year, everyone will rate french fries along a likert scale (1–5) for a few different factors:
- Saltiness
- External crunchiness
- Internal fluffiness
- Potato intensity
- Flavor duration
- Sructural integrity
- Condiment absorption rate
This will give us a database of everyone’s ratings, rather than just the ratings a few elite editors. Then, we will use these crowdsourced ratings to develop a true power rankings grid via principal component analysis (PCA). In contrast to the arbitrarily chosen dimensions by the LA Times, PCA will provide an empirical answer to the question: what factors distinguish the good fries from the bad?
This is the people’s french fry tournament, so reach out! Is there another factor we should look at? An alternative statistical analysis? Let us know your ideas.
