I wanted to create a new thread to talk about Scope Month. What you liked or didn't like, what we should or shouldn't do again, what you want next year, etc.
This is a chance for you all to give me & the team direct feedback as we plan for 2017! Thanks for a great ride!
-Daniel
Thanks for all the hard work organizing this!
Looking at how few techies have a Facebook account it seems obvious to me that next year's voting system should not require facebook but some other way to identify voters.
A panel of esteemed judges would be great. Professors, bloggers, YouTubers, professional engineers, etc that can judge the entries based on the merit.
For the drawing portion - it was easy to throw in all of my email addresses. Since I own a lot of domains, I kind of have unlimited access to emails. It would be more fair, if there was a registration process that would prevent mass entries that can skew the chances for others. Not sure exactly how to do that, but I am guessing you had massive numbers of entries relative to actual humans.
Rather than voting, as such, which is rather difficult to Police and check over the internet.
You could allow voting to ONLY take place, via the submission of short videos (such as youtube ones), in support of particular applicants. Stating why they are going for them.
These would be difficult to cheat, because you can see the individual(s), making each "voting" video, and their explanation(s) as to why they are voting for that video.
They may even increase the excitement of the event, which could benefit Keysight.
Also it would be nice if there were much more, low value prizes available. Such as Keysight multimeters, which cost a lot less than the higher end scopes. Then there would be far more winners, and reasons for entering.
Some people would much prefer Keysight to promise to supply the prize(s), such as scopes, inclusive of all taxes/duties (and income taxes etc). As long as the country permits this, and the charges are NOT excessive for that particular country.
E.g. Limit it to a max of 50% of the value of the scope.
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Another way of organizing the competition, would be to have a panel of judges, choosing who wins, out of the videos.
BUT allow individuals, to write comments, saying who they support and WHY. Then the judges can read through the comments, and use those to help them choose the winner(s).
Hence you would have many individuals involved with the voting process, but cheating would tend to be suppressed, because it is the judges who make the final decision.
You could create a competition, which involves complicated circuit challenges and/or questions, created by a panel of experts. The best and highest scoring answers, win a super, top of the range, Keysight Oscilloscope.
This could be separate from the other competitions and giveaways, that keysight do.
A bit like Googles/IEEE's one.
https://www.littleboxchallenge.com/But with great scopes, as the prize(s).
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Alternatively/Additionally
Could have a competition to suggest the best ideas for improving the feature(s) and/or functionality/capabilities of an ideal Keysight oscilloscope. One vote per current Keysight website subscriber/login.
The winner gets an optional free tour of Keysights facilities, and gets a day with their top designer(s), to start implementing the idea(s).
A video of the resultant visit, can then be made publicly available.
After April 20th I'll have a much clearer idea of what should have been done differently.
Of course whatever "brilliant" ideas anyone has, should probably shoot them over to Daniel directly so we don't have the RigoSiglenix of the world using them too. Not everything shoud be "open source"
This is Dimitri and I approve this message.
edit: corrected name confusion
Lets see how Dave's work
The main thing is he made a set of contestants before it started (min 10 posts). In other words they were qualified before entering.
I would like to see non-profits be the only ones qualified to enter. Like schools. My idea is for a trade school like ITT enter because they may be able to use a high cost scope and in turn they would put something together (like electronic labs) for poor schools. They could use students to assemble kits and write materials.
Seems there would be a lot of good will to encourage a lot of publicity for KS and the trade school.
In other words it would be nice if a high value item could benefit more people. I also would like to see the benefit go to school labs in third world countries.
The trade school that could put the best third world lab together would be the winner. Blog members could help. I guess it does not have to be a school. A person (unlikely) or a company could do this.
I do not like FB contests. This one turned out to be kinda sad
I hope this topic will encourage some good ideas.
Whilst high end scopes could be given to entries showing merit, I think you should still have giveaways of lesser scopes, etc, not necessarily based on merit as such, to allow non experts (hobbyists, etc) a chance to win something.
This would build a clent following for Keysight from future, up and coming professionals, experts or keen hobbyists.
Being able to enter would be a good start, blacklisting so many countries is just crazy.
Australia has enough problems with lack of R&D funding, government support etc, this is just another slap in the face.
I know international contests and regulations aren't easy, but please consult with people besides lawyers (who just so no if they are unsure of anything).
Perhaps you could have two options when people enter:
a) A high end scope.
b) A set of hobby level test gear, scope, bench PSU, function generator etc.
People chose A or B, and each is a separate draw.
Perhaps the cheaper set of equipment has multiple prizes, so more chance of winning something.
Would put and end to the Hot Water heater wars etc.
Being able to enter would be a good start, blacklisting so many countries is just crazy.
I am not sure Keysight decides that as much as the nature of the local regs in your country. If it is illegal, exceedingly difficult, or expensive for whatever reason - they have to draw the line somewhere. There are individual states in the USA that are not eligible.
Being able to enter would be a good start, blacklisting so many countries is just crazy.
Australia has enough problems with lack of R&D funding, government support etc, this is just another slap in the face.
I know international contests and regulations aren't easy, but please consult with people besides lawyers (who just so no if they are unsure of anything).
Perhaps you could have two options when people enter:
a) A high end scope.
b) A set of hobby level test gear, scope, bench PSU, function generator etc.
People chose A or B, and each is a separate draw.
Perhaps the cheaper set of equipment has multiple prizes, so more chance of winning something.
Would put and end to the Hot Water heater wars etc.
I agree. KS can have a high value item for publicity and less value items in fine print (as an exchange). But anyway for US residents, giving the prize at the end of Apr, gives people a year to come up with the tax. It would have been a killer if the prize was awarded in March.
Being able to enter would be a good start, blacklisting so many countries is just crazy.
That's not really being fair to Keysight. There's only so much you can expect them to do.
This is why:
I am not sure Keysight decides that as much as the nature of the local regs in your country. If it is illegal, exceedingly difficult, or expensive for whatever reason - they have to draw the line somewhere. There are individual states in the USA that are not eligible.
... although I would encourage them to push a little harder.
Being able to enter would be a good start, blacklisting so many countries is just crazy.
I am not sure Keysight decides that as much as the nature of the local regs in your country. If it is illegal, exceedingly difficult, or expensive for whatever reason - they have to draw the line somewhere. There are individual states in the USA that are not eligible.
It's not illegal to run contests in Australia, you just need to register them officially (at the most) and document the draw. It's an anti fraud protection, stops people running contests and giving the prizes to themselves.
But as the rules are state based (though fairly consistent), I can see US based companies not bothering.
I suspect most of the blacklisted countries are simply due to this, or companies not checking to see if the rules even apply to overseas contests.
Definitely more, lower-value prizes - few people really need a high-end scope - with lower end scopes you will benefit more people and potentially get more publicity. e.g. "we're giving away 500 scopes" or " a scope an hour" is probably a better headline than "scope month" which doesn't really say much about the promotion.
You also clearly need to deal with the whole import duty thing by supplying tax-paid via local distribution channels.
Final Charting.
The Total Votes chart is the same as you have seen before:
The Voting Rate chart is a new approach. I have divided the sample periods into slots of 6 hour width, apportioning votes across the boundaries as before and ChunkyPastaSauce's data has been included. With the smaller sample size, you will get a rough indication of voting activity through the day - but the accuracy will depend on there being adequate data points. As a result, this will be more accurate in the second half of the chart (from April 8 on):
I understand that Keysight most likely won't disqualify Nilu even with the basically statistical proof of cheating in the rate chart above. I don't mean this as a jab. The contest was a marketing exercise, and it would really backfire and make keysight look like total assholes if they came out and said no, even though this sweet little girl with a water heater on a high school science team won, she doesn't get a scope.
Of course everyone in this subforum that's been following along knows more than that was going on, but we're probably less than 1% of the people that will see the contest results. So I can't fault Keysight at all. And if they do what I think they are going to do with Carlos, then I really, really respect them, and you Daniel, for stepping up and helping out the community here
I would say just use this year as a learning experience, and know that no matter what, if you decide to do it on public voting contest format and not judged merit, there's going to be fraud. It's not possible to avoid with prizes of this value. If you're set on a public voting contest I'm not sure what I would do. Video-format votes like mentioned above is one idea, it would certainly get keysight a lot of mention on YouTube. I'm tempted to say another contest like this years except that only eevblog members can vote who had existing accounts at the time of the contests beginning, but that's horrendously inclusive and may as well be called eevblog contest.
I really like the idea of the main contest (for the top end prize) being merit driven, where it was decided by a panel of judges. To get the keysight exposure you want, make it popular judges. Dave, mikeselectricstuff, Applied Science, signal path, other people popular in the arena. Either way though I'm grateful you decided to give out so much equipment this year, even if I didn't win any drawings
it might have been the biggest EE giveaway I've ever seen!
Whatever you do, and however you do, please don't use Facebook in any way shape or form.
Seriously, engineers loath Facebook.
The solution next time is simple. Like other engineering contests, you have specialist judges. I've been a judge in many contests, and whilst not perfect, it really the best way to weed out the unworthy entries.
It would have been trivial to get some judges to watch all entry videos and rate them using various categories. Aggregate the results and the have a winner.
You can still have community voting, but only have it contribute say 20% of the overall votes (i.e. make the community one of the judges). And/or have a lesser prize for the People's Choice
Lower priced scopes are more a favour to citizens of countries with ridiculous tax systems, where even "free" gets taxed. I doubt it's much of a difference to Keysight to give away for example a MSOX3014T (100MHz) or a MSOX3104T (1GHz), the hardware is basically the same. Yes, high bandwidth analog frontends are expensive, but not $10K more expensive (in BOM to the manufacturer). The list price is more of a tax problem to the winner, once this is properly handled by Keysight, there is no need for the low bandwidth "Hobbyists" scopes to be included in the contest. The cheating and the tax problem are the two main problems Keysight may want to work on for next year, imho.
Oh, and please, more mugs and baseball caps and ballpoint pens
Lower priced scopes are more a favour to citizens of countries with ridiculous tax systems, where even "free" gets taxed. I doubt it's much of a difference to Keysight to give away for example a MSOX3014T (100MHz) or a MSOX3104T (1GHz), the hardware is basically the same. Yes, high bandwidth analog frontends are expensive, but not $10K more expensive (in BOM to the manufacturer). The list price is more of a tax problem to the winner, once this is properly handled by Keysight, there is no need for the low bandwidth "Hobbyists" scopes to be included in the contest. The cheating and the tax problem are the two main problems Keysight may want to work on for next year, imho.
Oh, and please, more mugs and baseball caps and ballpoint pens
This
Even the caps and pens are taxed here
Definitely more, lower-value prizes - few people really need a high-end scope - with lower end scopes you will benefit more people and potentially get more publicity. e.g. "we're giving away 500 scopes" or " a scope an hour" is probably a better headline than "scope month" which doesn't really say much about the promotion.
They should have called it scopeadaymadness.com
IDEA:
Bury the gear and get people to solve puzzles to work out the coordinates. See how many nerds bother to leave their computer and go into the real world for the hunt
(says the winner of several Geoaching time trial contests
)
How about only people who have entered the draw for the giveaways being allowed to vote on the presentations? They have presumably already been screened to be real people who want an oscilloscope. And if any of them are just opportunists looking for any old prize they probably won't bother to vote.