28% Veterans: Virgin Import Continues [Update]

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” – Mark Twain

Have you been to Burning Man before? For many people at Burning Man, the answer is NO.

Last year we presented analysis of the Burner breakdown from the Census: 60% Veterans. In retrospect, the title is a little confusing. You see, according to the OFFICIAL presentation of numbers, it was 40% Virgins, meaning that everyone else had been to Burning Man at least once before. But looking at the number in a different light – defining “Veteran” as you’ve been to Burning Man twice, not once – gave us the surprising result that only 29% of people at Burning Man were Veterans.

Well, guess what? 2014’s numbers are out, attached to the now heavily redacted Afterburn Report. I must praise the BRC Census team for producing the most comprehensive and useful interpretation of Burner data since statistics collection began in 2001. There are some interesting nuggets within the 45-page document.

The most interesting is the % of Veterans. Has it improved on 29%?

Nope. It’s almost exactly the same. At least, it was…until the Statistics were “adjusted”.

I am not an expert in Statistics, but I did study it in my first year at college, so I have more than just a passing knowledge of the field. The main thing I know is that modern statistics have been designed to be easy to fudge. That’s why Obama can claim “unemployment at 6%”, when the real unemployment rate is over 12%. The statistics can be manipulated to come to whatever conclusion is most politically expedient.

In the case of Burning Man 2014, Burners filled in the Census results after the event at Burning Man’s web site. They received 11,909 responses, 1 in every 5.5 Burners. This puts the sample size at almost 20% , which is definitely large enough to be useful.

The Census takers then “corrected for bias”. This is a process in which statistics turns from a science into an art, and the number wizards can work their magic. Always justified in the name of “making the numbers more accurate”, a whole bunch of mathematics and other variables can be brought in, to shift the results in whatever direction is desired.

In the case of Burning Man, a random sampling from the gate was mixed with every person on Burner Express. They used 8 different variables for the data reconstruction bias adjustment:

Day of arrival versus number of participants arriving – Gender – Age – Virgin Burner or not – Foreigner or not – English Speaker as a first language or not – US Party Affiliation (if eligible to vote in the US) – Voting Behavior

The theory is that Burners who answer the survey, may not be representative of all Burners; whereas Burners on Burner Express are. We could debate that all day long, at least the natural and adjusted results are shown for us to compare.

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According to the pollsters, the adjustment had a major effect on the % Virgins number: “Improvements in Weighting Procedure Impacted this Measure Significantly, Virgins -6% From Preliminary Results”.

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Unadjusted: 28.1% Veterans, 71.9% newbies, 37% Virgins

Adjusted: 37.8% Veterans, 62.2% newbies,  35.1% Virgins

That is quite a swing – nearly 10% in the participation of Veterans. The results came in from 11,707 Burners – the most who had ever participated in the Census. The numbers were pretty much just the same as last year – just like Burners.Me has been saying. And then, a whole bunch of “adjustment for bias” is applied to the numbers, and all of a sudden, the results are completely different!

Not only that, there is a large discrepancy between the unadjusted number, and the 2014 “preliminary” number that was announced in September last year:

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This post reflects information collected from 1,367 entering participants randomly sampled at Gate Road from Friday pre-event through Wednesday mid-burn and 1,239 riders of BxB entering from Reno and San Francisco from Saturday, pre-event through Wednesday.

So if the preliminary results were MORE Virgins, how can it be that the adjusted results are LESS Virgins? In the past, members of the Black Rock City Census team have commented here on our stories, so I invite them to #pleaseexplain.

Whether it’s 35% Virgins, 37% Virgins, or 41% Virgins, doesn’t change my general point: every year, magically, mysteriously, it’s around 40% Virgins. And only 29% Veterans.

Some have accused me of being a “conspiracy theorist” for thinking that this massive correlation in supposedly random numbers suggests something is going on to ensure that the distribution is not entirely random. The system of Burner profiles was only introduced in the last few years. It makes you state how many times you have been to Burning Man, before you get through the definitely not First-In First-Out queue to get tickets. If you fail, you then take a place in the STEP queue – which we are led to believe is First-In, First-Out, but have absolutely zero information or evidence about. All we can go on is past behavior: if they have lied in the past, why should we assume they are telling the truth now?

I liken it to playing Roulette, and betting on Red vs Black. In theory, if you had 50 blacks in a row, it’s the same as if there was just 1: there’s still a 50/50 chance of it being Red or Black. At what point do you say “this machine looks like it’s broken, it lands on black every time, it can’t be just random”? After a million blacks in a row, do you still assume the machine is fine and it’s all just random chance? At some point it either shifts from “accident” to “miracle”, or from “accident” to “planned”. We now have 3 years in a row of 40% Virgins.

Whether you look at the biased or unbiased numbers, the fact remains: it is much harder for Veterans to go to Burning Man than Virgins. And every year, the population of Veterans increases. Presumably most Veterans want to go back. So over time, it should be the other way around: it should be getting harder and harder for Virgins to get tickets. Instead the influx of Virgins seems to be fixed, and not influenced by the massive growth in the Veteran population over the last few years. It is not easy for Veterans to go, yet it still seems very easy for newbies to get there.

In 2014, 3 out of 4 Burners in Black Rock City had not been there more than twice before.


 

The rest of the statistics show what most Burners already knew: Burning Man is a white, educated, affluent, liberal, gay, Californian event.

15% of Burners were from outside the US, 4.4% from Canada. French, Spanish, and Russian (in that order) were the most common first languages spoken, other than English.

44% of Burners were from California, 5% from Nevada.

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The income of Burners has been increasing. 2.7% earn more than $300,000 a year – that’s 1800 people, supporting my previous assertion that there are thousands of millionaires at Burning Man. Nearly a quarter of Burners earn six figure incomes.

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The average Burner spent $639 in Nevada. A staggering 40% managed to attend Burning Man without spending more than $1000.

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STEP came through for almost 4% of Burners: 2573 tickets.

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This seems to add up with BMOrg’s claims, which suggests the unadjusted statistics are pretty accurate.

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So 73 STEP tickets came from Burners selling back to the queue, and the rest came from the “surprise” find of tickets that BMOrg released once their VIP Donation promotion was over. Unless BMOrg add another 2,500 tickets to STEP again this year, I think it’s safe to say Burners in the STEP queue this year are unlikely to get tickets.

Nearly 60% of Burners were in camps of 20 people or more.

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Only 5% of Burners didn’t have access to a bike. A third had some sort of solar, 44% had access to a camp generator and 19% to a vehicle generator. A full 6% of Burners were plugged into the BRC grid – nice action if you can get it.

42.1% of Burners report being worried about judgment or unfair treatment based on their participation in Burning Man.

Three quarters of Burners have college degrees, with a full quarter having a graduate degree. It also looks like a good place to get spa treatments…

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According to their “weighted” statistics, it’s a sausage-fest – 60% male, only 40% female. More than 1% identify their gender as “fluid”, which must help with those portapotty lines. 69% are heterosexual, and 72% have no religion.

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If Burning Man was a State, its 1.3% black population would rank it at #42 for racial integration. It would make #11 on the white population list, just beating Kentucky.

So much for Grover Norquist’s Dream Team and the Mainstream Republican Values of Burning Man. Black Rock City is full of left wing liberals, and skews heavily towards the democrats.

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18% of Burners came in RVs. That is 12,000 people. 0.9% flew into Black Rock City airport, 593 people.

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In 2007, the theme was The Green Man. As part of the celebrations, The Cooling Man did an analysis of greenhouse gas emissions from Burning Man. Their calculations went quite deep, estimating international and domestic air miles as well as use of generators on site. They estimated the average road miles per Burner as 654, which led to 16,500 tons of CO2 emissions based on a population of 40,000.

Cooling Man’s assumption was 0.0128 tons CO2e per gallon. Using BRC Census’s 320,000 gallons, that is 4,096 tons – so despite the population growth, Burning Man is getting greener.

Most Burners are Millenials – about 50% are in the age bracket 20-35.

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According to the unweighted numbers, 0.5% of Burners were 19 or younger. Applying the bias adjustment nearly tripled this, to 1.4%. It is still an incredibly small number, given how much Burners have to sacrifice for kids to be there. Almost half of Burners are completely opposed to kids being at the party, nearly 60% when it comes to kids under the age of 5. A whopping 15% of Burners do not think that the Playa is a safe place for children, and only 20% think that it is.

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Finally, it looks like more than 80% of Burners are using social media to get their Burning Man information.

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They might as well give up on ePlaya, most Burners have never even looked at it. And if they did, they probably never went back. Burning Man Facebook pages and blogs are being visited by Burners more often than Burning Man’s own site.

There is more interesting information in the full 2014 Black Rock City Census Report.


 

[Update 4/8/15 1:24pm]

The Black Rock City Census site originally published these preliminary findings for 2014:

A vast majority (2/3) purchased their ticket this year from the Burning Man organization either directly or through the STEP program. Nearly 25% purchased their ticket from someone known to them. The growth of STEP coincides with a 50% drop in purchases from Strangers (potential scalpers) when compared with data from 2012. Additionally, 92% obtained their ticket for face value or less. Though the remainder who weren’t lucky enough to receive their ticket this way may feel frustrated, the data indicates that the issue of scalping has been mitigated significantly.

Where did you buy?

BM 60.57%
STEP 6.37%
Someone_known 24.56%
Stranger 3.26%
Reseller 1.46%
IDK 0.56%
No_ticket 0.68%
Other 2.55%

This would put the number of STEP tickets at 4200, meaning 2500 from BMOrg and 1700 from Burners. This seems a more probable number to me. So why the big swing – 6.4% from initial data, to 3.9% in the adjusted data? In a similar fashion, “Third Party reseller” went from 1.46% (963 tickets) to 0.7% (461 tickets).

 

And The Most Popular Camp Is…

Burnerlove is a site linked to Burner Map, which lets your Facebook friends see where you are camped.

The folks who brought you BurnerMap love Burners and Burning Man so much we just had to do more!

Please welcome BurnerLove!

‘BurnerLove’ aims to help Burners find out more about other Burners, cool projects, insider news and gossip as well as exploring and cultivating the Burner spirit that makes Burning Man so goddamn fucking awesome I giggle like a teenage girl just thinking about it.

BurnerLove aims to be the TigerBeat of Burning Man.  With your help and advertising support from Sony Records and L’Oreal Cosmetics we’ll be launching a Burner-based Boy Band into the charts and giving a little pat on the back to your eating disorder and negative body image…BurnerLove – Fuck Yeah!

They have done some big data analysis on the information provided to Burner Map for 2013, plotting the connections between camps. Heart Tribe narrowly edges out IDEATE as most connected camp on social media, making it the place to be for Burning Man networkers.

The data map is not related to the actual camp layout. The big red dots are the most connected camps.


 

Re-blogged from Burnerlove.com:

So we geeked out a bit to visualize the camp data from Burner Map 2013 with the help of our good friend Matatertots. By measuring the number of friendship linkages between each of the camps on our crowd-sourced list (eg. 2014), we processed some aggregate data on the social webs connecting camps which used the app that year.

Big100NetworkPic-bm2013

This plot is of only the most-connected 100 Burner Map camps (of 2,600) due to processing capacity. Sized by degree centrality, which is the volume of links the camps has. Colored by eigenvector centrality, which is similar to degree centrality but takes into account the centrality of the camps a given camp is connected to.

Top 25 camps according to three standard centrality measures:

Eigenvector Centrality Degree Centrality Betweenness Centrality
1 Heart tribe IDEATE Fractal Planet
2 Fractal Planet Heart tribe Heart Tribe
IDEATE Fractal Planet White Ocean
4 Sacred Spaces Village Disorient Sacred Spaces Village
5 Disorient Sacred Spaces Village Disorient
6 camp mystic Chakralicious Nexus
7 Chakralicious Black Hole Camp Contact
8 UFOm Abraxas Pod camp mystic illumination Village
9 Psyclone Kostume Kult camp mystic
10 Kostume Kult The Phage IDEATE
11 Camp Contact Psyclone Chakralicious
12 Bumblepuss Bumblepuss BMIR-FM, Burning Man Information Radio 94.5
13 The Phage Dustfish The Phage
14 Dustfish UFOm Abraxas Pod Camp DDI
15 Playaskool Camp Contact Trifucta
16 Black Hole Black Rock Cantina Shadyvil
17 Shift Trifucta UFOm Abraxas Pod
18 Trifucta Team Shenanimuffins @ The Sunset Trip Tasty Heart Deco
19 illumination Village Shadyvil Ego Ergo Frum
20 Nexus White Ocean Red Lightning
21 Team Shenanimuffins @ The Sunset Trip illumination Village Kostume Kult
22 Uhuru Playaskool Bumblepuss
23 Shadyvil Nexus DISTRIKT
24 Play)A(Skool Camp DDI Love Potion Camp
25 White Ocean Shift Pink Heart

Matatertots plotted in degree centrality vs. eigenvector centrality.  Points lying above the line are camps that are more connected to influential camps than their own level of connectivity would, on average, predict.  Similarly, those lying below the line are camps that tend to be connected less to influential camps than their level of overall connectivity suggests.

  • Above Line: HeartTribe, Camp Mystic, UFOm Abraxis Pod, Fractal Planet, Sacred Spaces, Chakralicious, Camp Contact
  • Below line: IDEATE, Disorient, Black Hole, The Phage, Bumblepuss, Dustfish, Black Rock Cantina

scotterPlot-bm2013

Degree centrality: The sum of all links between the focal camp (the one for which you are calculating the centrality) and other camps. So if I was the only one in Camp Dark Sparkle (CDS) on Burnermap and I was only friends with the four of you guys, CDS would have a degree centrality of 4.

Eigenvector centrality: An eigenvector centrality is like a “spread out” degree centrality, where a focal camp’s eigenvector centrality is higher if the camps it is connected to have high degree centrality.  Having a lot of ties to, say, Fractal Planet would give your camp a higher eigenvector centrality than camps with a similar number of connections to more average-sized camps.

Betweenness centrality: This one is related to information flow through the network.  You can find the shortest path through the network between any two camps.  Betweenness centrality is equal to the proportion of all of these shortest paths that pass through the focal camp.

Eigenvector Centrality – This was the name of an important but obscure sub clause in the Cold War era Warsaw Pact.  Frederick Eigenvector was a minor Slovakian General during the Soviet era known for his love of combining statistics, military strategy and meetings.  At an early meeting of Warsaw Pact representatives in Bratislava in 1958 Eigenvector convinced the other delegates of having all future meetings of the Warsaw Pact in the most central part of any city they agreed to meet in as a defense against a pre-emptive strikes from the West because Nato would want to minimize civilian casualties.  Attendees agreed and inserted it into the Warsaw Pact Framework where it was named ‘Eigenvector Centrality’.  Frederick Eigenvector was assassinated by a Nato Fields Medal winner on the outskirts of Ljubljana in 1962.

Source: Burnerlove.com

Burner Profiles Controversy Politely Heats Up

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It seems that even within the ranks, there are some strong reservations regarding the new Burner Profiles, a mandatory (if you want to buy tickets) scheme that gathers data about you and stores it. . . somewhere.

Late yesterday, the following e-mail was sent to one of the Org’s internal mailing lists (reprinted here by permission of the author, aestetix):

Dear Burning Man,

Now that the Burner Profiles are public, I’ve seen a lot of comments about them, in the Burning Man blog and otherwise. It’s interesting how many viewpoints there are, both for and against. The truly remarkable element to me is that there doesn’t seem to be much middle ground: people are either fervently opposed, or ardently in favor of it. As we all know, pushing things to the extreme doesn’t serve anyone well, so I decided to try and take a more balanced look at it.

First, the obvious benefits. There is definitely a lot of convenience to this. Within the community, there is talk of how it could become an online portal for me to keep track of news updates, make friends, etc. If I’m a Burning Man executive, it makes it easier to make educated decisions on crowd control related issues (“how many port-o-potties will we need this year?”). And when things go sour, it could help Burning Man cooperate with law enforcement– if “Sky Phoenix” commits domestic assault on the playa and nobody knows how to find him, there’s a chance law enforcement could consult the profiles system and bring on due process. That might freak out some people, but it does create a system of accountability in many ways– assuming, of course, there’s a proper security audit. According to one blog comment, there’s also the perceived benefit of being able to keep up with playa friends off the playa. Whether or not these are *actually* Burning Man’s plans, people seem to be confusing “Burner Profile” with “Facebook Profile” and drawing conclusions.

Now then, some of the downsides. I saw quite a few of the crazies coming out and saying Burning Man is trying to use this to track people, and even spy on them. My response to that is that perhaps they should get involved as a volunteer, wherein they will discover the Org is spending enough time trying to make things happen, that there is no time left to be a secret police or whatever. There’s a concern I actually agree with a bit more, in that keeping a dataset like this does create an opportunity for law enforcement or government subpoena. I can’t predict when or why that would happen, but given the political climate we’re living in– ask Google or Facebook how many subpoenas they get– it’s inevitable.

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On to the primary reason I don’t like it, will not use it, and it may impact my decisions on whether to ever return to Burning Man (I’ve been four times). The mandatory collection of legal names, IMHO, sets a dangerous precedent for a community hitherto known for its autonomy and “freedom.” As one of the creators of NymRights, I’ve been watching closely as a number of online social networking sites (Google, Facebook, etc) have forced a rigid naming standard onto their user base. While I understand that, as a company, either of them has the ability to lawfully set policies and terms of service as they desire, there’s a more general social loss when naming standards of any type are forced upon a people.

When I have spoken publicly on identity issues, I often cite stories from Genesis, such as Adam naming the animals and the Tower of Babel: the former demonstrates that by creating names and labels for animals, Adam establishes a power dynamic over them, often cited as Adamic language wherein the true name of God exists; the latter explores an angry Old Testament God/YHWH, bitter that people are trying to become His equal, who responds by destroying the language gestalt everyone has and removing peoples abilities to talk with each other, thus ending the efforts of Babel. While those are fables from thousands of years ago, I think their meanings still hold relevance: language is an inherent part of how we perceive and interact with the world, and the language we use to define ourselves, our names, creates in many ways a core of our own identity.So imagine my dismay when not only did I see mandatory legal names on the Profiles page, but also saw the framing of “First Name” and “Last Name.” I feel that both the mythology that defines a culture and the language used to teach it are crucial to understanding beyond a cursory and playful dabble what “we” are really all about. When we bring the outside doctrine of legal names into the fold, in my opinion there is a culture and context clash which, while it may not be evident at first, can create a dynamic in which an identity that many Burners (and others) have created for themselves over many years is suddenly cast aside and devalued. While I understand that our current “real life” culture is so broken that most people are unaware that such contexts could even exist, I have higher hopes for people who create one of the most important events for self-exploration of which I am aware.

Do we tell new Burners that their “playa name” is a joke, and that its the name on their ID that actually matters? What kind of culture will that breed in five or ten years? Will it continue to creatively redefine all kinds of beautiful things, or fold back into the pale of “how things are supposed to be?” This is my chief concern. I don’t expect many people to understand this, especially not law enforcement or “muggles”, but I hope that within the Burning Man Org, there may be someone who can listen.

Responses to aestetix’s opening salvo have been similarly civil, but point out some of the more specific concerns with the Burner Profiles system, such as lack of SSL encryption, the involvement of a third party for gathering and storing the data and subsequent lack of control of the dataset generated, and a weak privacy policy regarding data protection in general. Also of some concern is the fact that the privacy policy doesn’t mention legal matters (subpoenas, etc.) except to say that the Org will respond to any that come up, without spelling out what notifications might be granted the user in such an instance, nor does it deal with what happens to the data that is stored with a 3rd party or the accountability standards that that party is held to with respect to this data.

The Profiles FAQ states:

Q: Who stores my information?

A: Your data will be stored by Black Rock City LLC.

Which is not true; the data is being stored by a third party.

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All in all, fears of Orwellian data manipulation on the part of the Org seem rather silly and can be safely discounted. . . but the Burner Profiles scheme is also looking terribly, terribly half-baked, like the lottery system that preceded it and the hastily-applied patches the Org came up with when the lottery went wrong.

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