There are lots of contests on the site this week, and there should be many more to come soon.

Start your search engines!

This big news for the week was the update to contest judging criteria and feedback. I made a newsfeed post about it which, because of it’s importance, I will repost here.

----

We are working hard to make the contest process as transparent as possible, as well as provide more feedback to users on their submissions.

We will be providing feedback on your submissions to the Artificial Flame Device and User interface with “throw” gesture contests. You will receive a score from 0 to 3 on your submission, reflecting how well your responses satisfy the question criteria. Here is how the marking scheme works:

0: zero questions correct

1: greater than zero questions correct but not answering the "minimum criteria" questions

2: at least the minimum criteria questions correct

3: all of the contest questions correct

The "minimum criteria" are defined on a per contest basis and are detailed on the contest page.

Charge Pump Contest Winning Reference

To help make the contest process more transparent, we’re going to share the winning reference for the Charge Pump contest with the contest participants.

Many community members have asked to see the winning references for the contests they participate in to see what they might have missed and how they can improve their search.

We hope that revealing these references will be useful to you and will improve future results.

Charge pump contest participants can expect an email from us soon with the information.

Judging Criteria

Speaking of judging criteria, we’re making an important change to how we judge contests. As you know, you must include in your answer to each question a concise explanation of where/why the source(s) respond to each particular question. This explanation should specifically indicate where in the reference we can find the required supporting information.

In our upcoming contests (starting with “Efficient Communication through Networks”), if you do not provide an adequate explanation and we cannot readily locate the desired information in your reference for each question, you will not get credit for that question.

Contest winners will be selected based on who gets credit for the greatest number of questions.

We are doing this to reward true understanding of the subject matter, a change that eliminates much of the ‘luck’ factor in submitting. Because you get credit only for questions you clearly show are satisfied by a information you submit and adequately explain, it won’t help to submit a bunch of references and hope one of them contains what we’re looking for.

We hope this will create a better contest experience for you.

----

So it’s a very exciting development. A lot of people have asked for more feedback on their submissions, and I’m very excited to be making improvements in that regard.

The patent monetization webinar will be next week. If you’re an IP stakeholder, you should sign up. Peter Kim will be explaining how to get the most out of a patent portfolio. He’s a definite expert (former Director of IP strategy at Rambus) and has given talks that costed upwards of $100. It’s a rare opportunity to see someone like him speak, especially for FREE.

Sign up here.

We do it because we care :)

I know you’d be sad without a WotW (Wallpaper of the Week). Here’s the goodness.