Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with rating

HVAC Filter MERV ratings - which is best (for my usage)?

torquemaniac — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:09:39 -0800

HVACFilterfilter: It's time to get a new filter for my residential HVAC system. Please help me understand MERV ratings. I've done quite a bit of research and it appears to me that MERV rated filters up to about 6 or so are used mostly to keep the insides of the HVAC unit itself clean & operational and that filters rated 7-12 are used for further conditioning the air itself. I.E. - filtering out dust/dander particles to prevent them from being breathed in & keeping the house cleaner as well. Is this assumption correct? In theory I can see it, does real world experience bear this out?

My house is a small 1000sf open plan with one bedroom that stays mostly closed off & a small bathroom that mainly stays open. I live with a flock of 9 parrots, three of which are old world birds who produce a *lot* of dander. Will the higher MERV rated filters help with the dander/powder? Or should I just keep dusting regularly & get the lower MERV (and substantially cheaper) rated filter? I'll note the air return is right next to the front door and away from most all activity in the house.

The filters themselves range anywhere from $8USD x 12 (MERV 6) to $16USD x 6 (MERV 12) when bought in bulk. They're generally $15 - $50 when sourced individually. I'm concerned that not only are the higher rated filters substantially more expensive, it appears they require a more rigid rotation schedule and could possibly bind up or air lock my HVAC system. I'm using a 20x20x4 filter which should get between 3 (Merv 12) & 6 or more (Merv 6) months per filter - which makes it look like the higher rated units are at least four times as expensive. The one that came with the unit when it was new a little over a year ago was touted as "change every year or two" by my HVAC guy - I took it out and banged a lot of the powder off it before firing up the A/C for the summer today & it seems to be working fine. I don't want to push it, though. I called my HVAC subcontractor and they didn't have a clue. So, here I am, trying to figure this out before dropping a huge chunk of change on a bulk purchase of filters I'll be using for the next few years. TIA!

Adding stars to wikis?

underthehat — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 07:24:02 -0800

How can I add star ratings to content pages in a free wiki like PBWiki or Wetpaint? I'm trying to create a site that collects and rates places to go sledding in Massachusetts. I'd like to use a wiki so that many people can contribute content. I'd also like users to rate sledding spots (maybe even rate in several categories such as ease of access or steepness of hill). If you know of a wiki site that has this feature, or if you have another idea about how to make a site like this, speak up!

I've looked at Blogger and Wordpress for this idea too. Both have star rating widgets, but the widgets just rate the post, which isn't quite what I'm looking for. Blog sites also have stricter permissions, and I'm hoping to create a site where it will be easy for many people to add sledding spots.

I've checked out Pligg, which looks promising, but I'd rather not have to deal with hosting, especially since it costs money.

Where to start with this good website idea?

nitor — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 12:18:00 -0800

Where do I start? I have an idea for a "rate my ____" website. It is not a photo-based one, more like the rate my teacher sites around. Where to start? My friend has an idea for a "rate my ____" website. It is not a photo-based one, more like the rate my teacher sites around.

She has SOME html experience, but no css. Building this herself is not really an option. So how do we find someone to pitch it to? We presumably need someone to invest time/money into it, as she don't have any disposable money to put into it now. Who do we need to look for?

If ever this were to actually get up and running, it would be a free service with ad-generated revenue.

We don't have any experience in this field, but it's a pretty great idea. Can anyone offer some help to a couple of naive idea-likers?

Help me pick safer banks?

weston — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 11:27:04 -0800

Choosing a safe(r) bank? I've been using WaMu as my primary checking/savings for years. There's lots of noise about them being on the list institutions vulnerable to failure. My secondary regional bank also just got downgraded to one step above junk. I'm happy the FDIC is there, but as a freelancer, I think it'd be especially bad to have my deposits locked up for a while. So, where and how should I be looking? I also have accounts at some regional credit unions. I've considered moving there, because my vague impression (based on talking to them as a potential mortgage customer during the housing bubble) is that they went less insane than other institutions.

However, I'm not really sure I want to be making decisions on vague impressions, and it would be highly convenient to have money in at least one national institution.

I've been to BankRate.com. It's giving me high ratings for both WaMu and my other regional bank when I know their credit ratings have recently been downgraded. Does this mean I don't understand the Safe & Sound CAEL Rating, or that I don't understand the major credit ratings? Or does it mean they're on outdated or incorrect information?

Are there indicators I should be looking at beside ratings? For example, I've also heard that highly active participation in Credit Default Swaps is a strong indicator of potential trouble...

Lastly... am I overthinking this bank of beans? Is simply dividing my deposits over 3-4 institutions most likely to get me the most reduction in risk for the amount of time I might invest in research and understanding?

Thanks!

mo money mo problems

randomstriker — Wed, 28 May 2008 13:55:15 -0800

Why is my credit score so @#!%$ing low? I am in a better financial position than anyone I know in my age / earnings category. I've never had any long-term debt whatsoever. No loans, mortages, nothing.

I always pay my credit card balances in full. The only payment I missed in recent years was one for less than $50.

I make $75,000 annually, and save at least a third of it.

I have over $100,000 in cash or short-term deposits, and a lot more in other assets.

So why the !@#!%!% is TransUnion giving me a credit score of 665, in the bottom quartile for Canadians? Of course they were completely unhelpful on the phone when I asked them.

This is affecting my success at applying to rent a new apartment.

What program lets you rate many things by comparing two at a time?

hjo3 — Fri, 02 May 2008 20:56:07 -0800

Help me find a program/web app that sorts lists by asking you to compare two items at a time. I'm pretty sure I've actually seen this program (web site? Excel sheet?) somewhere, but I only remember the basic concept.

It works like this: You type in/import a list of things (e.g. book titles). Then the program asks you "Which do you like better, X or Y?" Then, "Which do you like better, Y or Z?" And so on and so on. Eventually it spits out your list, but now it's ordered according to your preferences (from favorite to least favorite).

Does anyone know where I can find this... sorter thingy?

What's the fairest way to rank entries to a creative contest?

stokast — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:13:01 -0800

I ran a creative contest. 17 people submitted. 8 judges each chose their top three, in order of preference. What is the fairest way to rank each entry?

Tick, Tally, and Cull in Bloglines

chase — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 08:46:30 -0800

Within the RSS feedreader Bloglines, is there a simple method to keep track of which feeds have been most valuable? I am wanting a way to flag or tally which feeds have been most useful to me over time. How can I rate my feed subscriptions? I want to be able to cull unproductive feeds. Marking posts as "keep new" sorta works. However, then glancing through the truly unread posts per feed becomes cluttered with all the saved posts. I've tried moving feeds into different folders based on usefulness, but that is just way too labor intensive. Adding notes inside the "edit subscription" has also been experimented with: again too labor intensive and I can not see any overall comparison. Any third party apps or undiscovered Bloglines feature that would make this task simple?

I'd like to keep the scar as small as possible...

miss lynnster — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 21:01:26 -0800

Credit rating/report question... Okay, I used to have GREAT credit. It was about 750+ when I moved into my current apartment in 2005. I had worked really hard to clean it up (finally got my student loan off there!) and I was making super good money, all was well. But then over the last year some bad stuff hit and I was stiffed by a client, etc. (When I saw it coming, I stupidly signed up for one of those "credit saver" programs through my credit card just in case, only to discover when I went to make a claim with them that it was a scam and they couldn't help me at all because of fine print I didn't read that said I had to make absolutely $0 for 30 days to be elligible. Which, I never did. Bastards.) Anyhooooo, I had to just accept that I had no choice but to let stuff go while I did damage control and that I was just going to have to accept responsibility for it. I haven't looked yet but I'm thinking I may now have about 2-6 months or so of some freshly reported poor payment history on my record now.

I'm about to get a bunch of paychecks soon and pay off everything, but is there anything I can do to minimize the permanent damage? I may need to get some credit reports to move into a new apartment and I'm afraid I've totally screwed myself up. I want my credit clean again, but I know it probably is just going to take time to live this down. And if I'm looking at apartments, is there any way I can make it clear that the incidents were just special circumstances and not something that's going to continue? How should I approach this to make it just a little blip in the radar instead of something that haunts me?

Thoughts? (And yes, I know I need to look to find out what the damage really is... I'm going to do that right after things are paid off.)

Looking for an online image rating system.

DulcineaX — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 07:24:35 -0800

I'm looking for some code or a survey/rating system to rate images for inclusion in a student art journal. Difficulty: no money, no support from college IT. I apologize in advance for the length, but I'm trying to be exacting in my descriptions here.

Some background: I'm an editor of my college's student-run journal of literature and art. Every year the staff takes submissions from students, judges the entries, and then publishes a book containing the best work of the student body. In previous years, the judging (for artwork) has worked like this: I create a web gallery with photos of all the art submissions (usually about 650). Each member of the staff goes through the website image by image, and enters their rating (on a scale of 1 - 10) for each piece in an Excel file. We then all send the Excel files to our advisors, who manually add up all the votes. There's a lot more that happens after that, but that's the relevant part.

For many reasons, we need to change this system. What I'm looking for is either some code or a complete survey system that would allow each editor to enter their votes onto the web gallery itself, rather than using separate individual Excel files. My hope is that each page of the gallery would have the image, and a scale of 1 - 10 below that, with radio checkboxes. The editors would vote on all the pieces, and all the votes would be entered in a database that would allow us to view the total score for each piece, as well as how each editor voted. I've found a few complete survey packages, but they all seem to be more than what we need (as well as costing a lot more money than a student-run arts journal has available).

I don't have that much coding knowledge, but I can follow instructions pretty well if I'm pointed in the right direction. We have our own webhost and have MySQL, PHP, etc. available. One big complication is that the school's IT department is absolutely unavailable to us (our website isn't even hosted by the school), but like I said, I can generally figure things out if I know where to look. We could pay for a small survey system if that's what it comes down to, but as I said most of the ones I've looked at are for larger-scale projects than this.

Thanks for any advice/suggestions/input/whatever. If I can provide any more info please ask.

Question about Elo ratings

justkevin — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 15:14:14 -0800

How to implement an Elo-based rating system for Go? As an exercise in keeping my programming skills up to date, I recently wrote the game of Go as a Facebook application. Right now, the game has a few hundred members who can play against their friends or practice against a GnuGo bot.

I'd like come up with a way of rating how well the players do against each other. After a bit of research, it seems that some kind of Elo system is the way to go.

I have a number of questions:

The wiki article on Elo gives a formula for calculating a new rating based on the result of a contest, but it assumes both players had a rating to begin with. If I'm starting in a vacuum, should I just assume a player has an Elo of X at their first game? What's a good value for X? Will this affect what the K-factor should be?

Also, the players may be playing each other with handicaps. How do you calculate an Elo change when one player has elected to play with a handicap (which will be common)?

If someone can point me towards some pseudo-code (or better yet, php code) implementing Elo, that'd be great, too.

Adding functionality to a static, html website?

JaySunSee — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 14:04:02 -0800

I'd like to add a comments section to my website ..., and some kind of non-obtrusive rating system (like 1 to 5 stars). I'm not a code jockey, and my website is a simple html/css outfit with no backend, so it needs to be relatively easy to install, but configurable so it can fit with the look of the site. What are my options?

What do you think of used Infinity vehicles?

jspierre — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 10:52:36 -0800

Would I be making a mistake or a great choice to buy a 2002 Inifinity I35 that I only plan to keep and finance for 36 months? I am considering the purchase of a 2002 Infinity I35 with about 75k miles. Does anyone have any experience with this make/model? Are they expensive to maintain? Lots of problems or relatively few compared to other vehicles you've owned?

I only plan to finace and own it for 3 years (36 months) and then trade in for something else, so my only wish is that I only have to pay for minor repairs in the 3 years I own it - perhaps less than $500/yr. I drive about 15k miles a year, so it will be a little over 105k miles when I get rid of it.

I've only seen really good reviews of this brand, so I'm a bit skeptical.

Your opinions and experiences are appreciated.

Get me a license, quick!

mhz — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:05:58 -0800

What's the best location for a driving test in New York? Does anyone have any experience at the Wantagh location? I've got a bit of a problem:

I need to schedule a driving test in New York State on or before April 16th. I'd have scheduled it earlier, but I just received the required 5 hr course certificate.

Also: with Passover coming up, my regular restrictions on Saturdays are expanded to include April 2,3,4,9&10.

Currently the only thing I found available is the Wantagh location, and I've booked it. Is it an 'easy' site?

Apparently the Staten Island sites are easy, but they're not available within my limited timeframes.

So, just general reviews of NYS driving test locations, along with specifically the Wantagh location, and with a preference to relative closeness to the 5 boroughs.

Thanks!

What is the most reviewed Amazon product?

tasty — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 20:20:17 -0800

What Amazon product has the MOST number of reviews/ratings? The most rated item so far I've found has 5806 reviews. Does anyone know of a product with more?

I have tried the Amazon API and it could not query something like this.

Bonus question: Besides Netflix movies, what product/service has the most number of ratings online? I need to be able to scrape/pull all this data.

Rating-type poll

dagnyscott — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 08:22:42 -0800

What's the easiest way to add a "Hot or Not" style poll to my website? Any sort of free scripts or the like to provide a rating system poll (1-10).

Seeking Source For HDTV Ratings

Mckoan1 — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 16:09:24 -0800

What is the Best Source for keeping up with the ratings on HDTVs. Any recommendations such as a magazine or website would be appreciated. Like so many others, I are going to purchasing a HDTV this Xmas. If I am to shell out 2 to 3 thousand dollars, I am looking for the Best Value. Thanks in advance.

Rating site for b&b's

Sara Anne — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 09:40:39 -0800

Does anyone know of any websites where the public can rate a bed & breakfast? The owner of the bed & breakfast (Casas de Suenos in Albuquerque, NM) where I booked a room for my sister's wedding night has been a real asshole, rude & unprofessional. I think people should know that before they go looking for a place to stay.

Movie certificates in the 50's/60's

spinko — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 12:40:18 -0800

Nowerdays we have ratings on films (PG, PG-13, 15, 18, etc). In the 50's or 60's what was the certificate for the films? Im currently doing a creative website for someone who wants to make them look like a movie star in the 50's.

If you know can you show me some examples of what they used to look like.

Top Podcast Download Numbers?

davebug — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 10:00:53 -0800

Where can I find numbers of downloads for, say, the top 100 most downloaded podcasts?

iPodding With The Stars

Chuck Cheeze — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 09:27:30 -0800

I have a 3G iPod 20GB, been working great for 2 years now. I am an avid song rater, and I always find myself going to rate songs, only to find out I already rated them! (I have my iPod docked in my car so its easy to rate songs while listening). So, is there a software hack out there that will allow me to see the rating of a song while it is playing?

Approval ratings for presidents.

JokingClown — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 23:33:43 -0800

Can anyone suggest a link that has approval rating polls of all of the previous presidents. It doesnt have to be all, but preferably the last ten presidents. The more information the better, for example preferrably more then one apprval rating for each president (perhaps their highest and lowest rating). Any links will be greatly appreciated, even if they arent exactly what im looking for.

Manhattan realtor-rating website?

mert — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 17:43:15 -0800

Does anyone know of a website that rates realtors in Manhattan?

How does IMDB rate their top 250 films?

jdroth — Fri, 03 Sep 2004 07:45:35 -0800

This has been bugging me for a while: On IMDB, why are some highly-rated films not listed in the top 250? [more inside] For example, The Station Agent, rated 8.1 out of 10 (in 3833 votes), is ranked #231 on the list. But The Fog of War, rated 8.4 out of 10 (in 2047 votes), doesn't make the list. What gives?

As an aside: what's the highest-rated non-top-250 movie you can find? The Fog of War is high, yes, but higher still is Pride and Prejudice, 9.2 out of 10 (in 4667 votes). That's higher than the film ostensibly #1: The Godfather.

(I'm assuming Pride and Prejudice is disallowed because it's made for television, but that's a shame. It really is quite good.)

Are there other highly-rated films that don't make the top 250 for some reason?

Weird calls from 877-252-5308 - is this a collection agency?

scody — Sat, 15 May 2004 16:38:17 -0800

I've gotten several vaguely ominous sounding messages on my voice mail from what seems like a collection agency, but I can't figure out exactly what's going on. (Come on inside! I'll tell you more!) The messages never leave a business/organization name or any specifics, nor do they ask for me by name -- at least not that I can tell, because they start at some point within a recorded message, so the first part gets cut off. It's mostly just a terse "due to the sensitive nature of this call, no further information will be left. You are advised to call [vaguely fake-sounding name here] at [toll free number here] immediately before further action is taken against you." So when I've called back, I just get a message saying that "this message box is full. Press 1 if you are disputing a claim against you, or 2 to arrange for payments." So then I press 1 or 2 and get the same "this message box is full" message. I can't tell if it's got anything to do with this question I had awhile ago; I'm certainly not behind on any of my regular payments to any of my other accounts/utilities/student loan, etc. (I get a fair amount of wrong numbers for the same couple of names, too, so it seems possible that the message isn't even really for me.)

Would a legitimate collection agency or legal firm operate this way? How do I find out who this is? I've tried doing reverse lookup online and by calling 411, but nothing comes up. Anyone with better Google-Fu feel like taking a crack at the number? (I'll post it in full or email it if someone's interested.)