9.77!

[marknhj]

After looking at the photo I'm shocked they could have given it as 9.76. Smack's of a certain Italian LJ result...I fear the worse and it is not incompetency.

[Daisy]

Please forgive me if this has been covered already, but why cant we call 9.766 just 9.76. Even if it was 9.769, it still is in that 6 hundredth of a second. To me, the thousandth should only be used to declare the winner if two athletes run the same time to the 10th. Am I wrong? Help me out here.

Pat, read this thread too.
http://www.trackandfieldnews.com/discus ... highlight=

[gh]

How incompetent could the officials have been? Rounding the times up is a very basic concept in T&F and required knowledge for obtaining even the lowest-level officiating license (at least where I come from).

This thread is getting long and I don't have time to re-read all the posts, but instead of there being any "rounding" problem, I'm wondering if the system was just programmed to truncate the last decimal point. Rules say you time to 100ths, so the use the 100ths column. I say that becuase anybody who gets into actual rounding by any formula and got it wrong would almost surely have done "mathemtical rounding"; 0-4 goes down, 5-9 goes up. Since all went down, did it just snip?

[Guest]

It's no different then if you went into a store and the taxes on an item made it 97.6 cents, you have to pay 97 cents. I think the meet officials for this race were layed of Enron accountants......... :lol:

I don't know where you live, but everywhere I've ever lived with sales taxes, they were always rounded up no matter what the decimal was.

[Daisy]

How incompetent could the officials have been? Rounding the times up is a very basic concept in T&F and required knowledge for obtaining even the lowest-level officiating license (at least where I come from).

This thread is getting long and I don't have time to re-read all the posts, but instead of there being any "rounding" problem, I'm wondering if the system was just programmed to truncate the last decimal point. Rules say you time to 100ths, so the use the 100ths column. I say that becuase anybody who gets into actual rounding by any formula and got it wrong would almost surely have done "mathemtical rounding"; 0-4 goes down, 5-9 goes up. Since all went down, did it just snip?

I suspect JRM's rounding the wrong way theory is probably correct.

I would have expected the photofinish software to be programmed to round up and present the time to two decimal places. We cannot tell the difference between snipping without rounding and presenting an incorrectly rounded time. However, if the snipping of the last digit is the problem this would imply a complete absense of the rounding alogorithm in the software. This seems less likely than the problem being a programming error that would round down instead of up.

We may never know. What we do know is that the photofinish 'expert' did not check the results spewed out from the machine with the actual photofinish picture.

[dukehjsteve]

. What we do know is that the photofinish 'expert' did not check the results spewed out from the machine with the actual photofinish picture.[/quote]

That's what is incomprehensible to me, plus why did it take 5 days for ANYONE to take a good look at that finish photo and then say, " Hey, wait a minute...". It's plain as day that he ran more than 9.760 so that makes it a 9.77 any way you look at it, no question. If any of US had seen it I am quite sure one/all of us would have waved a red flag.

[Track fan]

It's no different then if you went into a store and the taxes on an item made it 97.6 cents, you have to pay 97 cents. I think the meet officials for this race were layed of Enron accountants......... :lol:

I don't know where you live, but everywhere I've ever lived with sales taxes, they were always rounded up no matter what the decimal was.

Actually in Canada a few merchants were accused of shaving half cents, by putting prices at weird numbers so that they could get the half penny. It reminds me of Richard Pryor becoming a millionaire by stealing half pennies in Superman III.... :lol:

[EPelle]

Ratified, 9,77 +1,7 m/s

http://www.iaaf.org/news/Kind=512/newsId=34992.html

[DentyCracker]

Judging by this picture of the finish, it appears that all if this could've been solved, and then some, had Gatlin simply LEANED AT THE TAPE!!! It always bothers me when my sprinters don't execute a good lean at the finish, and this is a perfect example of why you should always reach for that extra 1/100th.

Then you must be REALLY pissed at Powell now then (I am)

[26mi235]

The story I heard (earlier in this thread) is that the timing company had the equipment for the speedskating up in Torino and the rule in that sport is to round down and the software was not changed when they moved the equipment to Doha.

As for sales tax, I think that you will find that there is usually the "standard" rounding rule. When you use this rule you only need to get the gross sales amount (before tax) of all transactions and then multiple by the tax rate. Otherwise you will have to add in the average affect of a systematic rounding rule (1/2 percent) to calculate whet the tax portion is. Now, in some states, prohibitions on raising taxes might have led to getting the 1/2 percent additional without a 2/3rds vote.

CUriously, in temperature data, the National weather service has taken the temperatures and rounded up. Then to get the average temperature for the day, they average the high and low (rounded up to integers) and round that up. Thus, the true average daily temperature is one degree lower, on average, then the reported figure (ignoring taking the average by "integrating" over the temperature throughout the day. The reason that they do this is, I think, historical consistency. It took me a while to understand and then explain to a client why the temperature and degree-day results we generated were different than those of NOAA. Now that temperatures are typically collected in Celius, they have the readings done in tenths, translate into F, then do the rounding from there.

The key thing is to be consistent with how you do the measurement.