Thanks for the news about my spreading. Am I disease or what?!? (^;
 
"College Hockey News"? Do you mean College Hockey WEEKLY? Or THE Hockey News.
Never heard of the C.H. NEWS.
 
I am not surprised about me being mentioned in Maine. I am more popular
there than in Ohio. Shawn Walsh even called me at home to talk to me
about it. Sorta like Jerry Lewis being a hit in France, no? (^;
 
About the normalization:
Yes it does hid the numbers a bit. There is no way around hiding the
number, tho. Before I normalize, Yale gets a 0 and everyone else is + or
- based on if they rate higher or lower than the Elis. Then I 'fudge'
them to make the numbers look pretty. I *almost* did it differently,
basing it all on the last place team only (LSSU would have ~190 and
Dartmouth a zero). Still, your rating depends on Dartmouth going up or
down. I didn't see any great loss in making it dependent on 2 teams
rather than just 1. I get readability, since all the numbers are <= 100 and
positive. Your "last & first place effect" idea sounds too tough, yes.
What I CAN do however, is to tweak the results and see what happens.
Lets say Maimi upsets Maine Saturday nite, then you'll have an idea
about how much a certain win is worth this week.  Again, it is all
relative at heart. Next year I may not normalize as much.
 
I wouldn't have this problem with an ABSOLUTE system, where a win
is worth 3.4 points and a tie 0.9 or whatever.
 
Q#2: I have a Macintosh database of scores. I export those scores to
a plain old text file and feed it to a pascal program. Out pops a text
file with the rating in it (even my name is spit out so I don't misspell it!).
I usually crank out all the scores every so often and leave them on
archive for anon ftp.  I don't wanna give away my program, of course,
because it was hard work.  I'll give you the reference to the lone
paper that I based it on, tho.
 
Keith
My new motto: TCHCR--it spreads faster than Anthranx. (No sorority jokes,
please.)