The best of the week

The current issue and the next will cover only six-day periods as we transition our coverage from Mondays–Sundays back two days, to Saturdays–Fridays. This is important to our need to meet the weekly publication deadline of 03:00 UTC Mondays.

After last week's tsunami of 15 featured article promotions, this week saw no changes to the featured article logs. However, the list of candidates undergoing scrutiny for promotion now numbers 55 articles, so readers can look forward to what will probably be a feast next week. FAC and other content-review processes always welcome more reviewers (see previous Signpost coverage).

Nine lists were promoted:

• List of sects in the Latter Day Saint movement (nominated by ARTEST4ECHO, Ecjmartin, and Surv1v4l1st), referring to the "group of sects that follow some portion of the teachings and revelations of Joseph Smith, Jr."
• 2006 boys high school basketball All-Americans (TonyTheTiger), the best high-school basketball players in 2006. "All-American team" is an honorary term for the best amateur players of a specific season for each team position; it is usually bestowed by members of the national media. Notable All-Americans include former number-one draft pick Greg Oden and NBA All-Stars Derrick Rose and Kevin Durant.
• List of former and unopened London Underground stations (DavidCane), which were closed or never opened for a variety of reasons. One station, St Mary's, was used as an air-raid shelter during World War II.
• List of museums in Somerset (Rodw), containing exhibits about topics ranging from plastics to cricket to dolls.
• Paolo Nutini discography (Mister sparky). Nutini's album Sunny Side Up peaked at number one on the UK and Ireland charts.
• List of New York Yankees first-round draft picks (Wizardman and Muboshgu). Four of the picks have won World Series with the team, including three who are currently with the Yankees: Derek Jeter, Phil Hughes, and Joba Chamberlain.
• 3,000 hit club (Staxringold), a select group of baseball players who have recorded at least 3,000 hits. According to the list, "membership in the 3,000 hit club is often described as a guarantee of eventual entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame."
• 1980 Winter Olympics medal table (Courcelles). In those Olympics, the Soviet Union won the most gold medals, while East Germany won the most medals overall.
• Hugo Award for Best Short Story (PresN), given by the World Science Fiction Society for works of fiction that have fewer than 7,500 words.

Choice of the week. We asked Courcelles, author of three featured lists and regular reviewer, for his favorite: "In a subject that offers such potential for high-quality lists, I notice we only have ten FLs related to Christianity, and just a few more on other religions. Seeing one come through FLC is a nice treat, and we got a good one this week: List of sects in the Latter Day Saint movement is a well referenced, well illustrated, neutral account of a subject that is familiar only in passing to many. This is one of the highest-quality lists I've seen come through FLC recently, and I hope more are forthcoming."

One topic was promoted: Transandinomys (nominator Ucucha), with two featured articles and one good article. Transandinomys is a genus of rodents found in forests from Honduras in Central America down to the coastal regions of Ecuador and northwestern Venezuela in South America. They are distinguished by their very long whiskers.

This week was quiet compared with last week's 23 promotions, although this is partially because of the six-day period we're using to give our commentators a bit more time.

Five images were promoted:

• Black-headed Bunting, a bird from Southeast Europe and the Middle East, by Mark S Jobling
• French cyclist Léon Georget in 1909. Photo by Bain News Service, restoration by Jujutacular
• Brandenburg an der Havel, a panoramic image of a town in Brandenburg, Germany, by Mathias Krumbholz
• Mating wheel of the Common Blue Damselfly, by L. B. Tettenborn.
• An odd-eyed cat, with one eye yellow and the other blue, by Keith Kissel.

Choice of the week. TonyTheTiger, a regular reviewer and nominator at featured picture candidates, told The Signpost, "My choice this week is French cyclist Léon Georget. It is a timely choice since the 2010 Tour de France concluded yesterday. I consider the restoration work to be tremendous. I am also excited to see an interesting non-taxonomy of life image get promoted."

Selections from our favourite articles and images to reach the main page this week.

Bedřich Smetana (1824–84) was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style which became closely identified with his country's aspirations to independent statehood. Internationally he is known for his opera The Bartered Bride, and for the symphonic cycle Má vlast ("My Fatherland") which portrays the history, legends and landscape of the composer's native land. A gifted pianist, Smetana studied music under Josef Proksch in Prague. In 1866 his first two operas, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia and The Bartered Bride, were premiered at Prague's Provisional Theatre, the latter achieving great popularity. Factions in the city's musical establishment interfered with his creative work, and may have hastened his health breakdown. By 1874, Smetana had become completely deaf but, freed from his theatre duties and the related controversies, he began a period of sustained composition. His contributions to Czech music were increasingly recognised and honoured, but a mental collapse in 1884 led to his incarceration in an asylum and his subsequent death. Smetana's reputation as the father of Czech music has endured in his homeland, where advocates have raised his status above that of his contemporaries and successors. (more...)

The Mary Rose was a warship of the English Tudor navy of King Henry VIII in the first half of the 16th century. During four decades of service in wars against France, Scotland and Brittany, she was one of the largest ships in the English navy and one of the earliest ships specially built for warfare. The Mary Rose is well-known today due to the fact that she sank intact on 19 July 1545 in the battle of the Solent north of the Isle of Wight, while leading an attack on French galleys. The wreck of the Mary Rose was rediscovered in 1971 and salvaged in October 1982 by the Mary Rose Trust in one of the most complex and expensive projects in the history of maritime archaeology. Though much of the ship has deteriorated, the surviving section of the hull, with thousands of artefacts, is of immeasurable value as a time capsule of the Tudor period. The excavation and salvage of the Mary Rose has since become a milestone in the field of maritime archaeology, comparable only to the raising of the Swedish 17th-century warship Vasa in 1961. The finds include weapons, sailing equipment, naval supplies and a wide array of objects used by the crew, providing detailed knowledge of the era in which the ship was built, in peacetime as in war. Many of the artefacts are unique to the Mary Rose and have provided insights into topics ranging from naval warfare to the history of musical instruments. While undergoing conservation, the remains of the hull and many of its related artefacts have been on display since the mid-1980s in the Mary Rose Museum in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. (more...)

Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions, independently of whether they are true. As a result, people gather new evidence and recall information from memory selectively, and interpret it in a biased way. The biases appear in particular for emotionally significant issues and for established beliefs. Biased search, interpretation and/or recall have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a stronger weighting for data encountered early in an arbitrary series) and illusory correlation (in which people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations). Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Hence they can lead to disastrous decisions, especially in organizational, military and political contexts. (more...)

There were no promotions to adminship.

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26 July 2010 (all comments)

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• Maybe you could say how by how many GAs went up on this page? - Peregrine Fisher (talk) 23:04, 28 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]