Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2015 February 10

= February 10 =

Customers personally donated money to Southwest Airlines so they would not go out of business.
I heard that Southwest Airlines received about 5,000 checks from devoted customers when they were on the brink of bankruptcy which SWA cashed. How much did the donations total?

Thanks! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.176.107.2 (talk) 15:04, 10 February 2015 (UTC)


 * No signs of any such event. The stock symbol is LUV. Went public back in 1971.   Very healthy.  Collect (talk) 19:15, 10 February 2015 (UTC)


 * As per Collect, SWA is commonly cited as one of the most financially stable airlines in the whole world. It does this in a number of ways 1) It's entire fleet uses a single model, the Boeing 737, which cuts down on maintenance costs: you can buy parts in bulk, you only need to train mechanics to fix one plane, and they are more efficient since they are very familiar with that one plane 2) SWA flies shorter legs using point-to-point routing, which while requiring more transfers for customers, does assure that planes are more full for each trip (major airlines use a hub-and-spoke routing system often requires airlines to fly lots of half-empty planes).  3) As a budget, no frills carrier, SWA keeps prices down, which increases ridership 4) SWA buys fuel contracts on speculation, and does so for years in advance, and is really good at market timing; before the big fuel price surge of the early 2000s for example, SWA had a contract locked in at 1990s prices; fuel costs are a MAJOR part of an airline's budget.  Most airlines prefer to buy fuel on shorter-term contracts, meaning they get slammed with rising fuel costs that SWA avoids.  See This article from 2002 explaining how SWA keeps labor costs down by shortening turn-around time (because of their use of one model of plane and their point-to-point routing model).  Here is one that covers other things I discussed, mainly the use of only one model of plane.  Here is an explanation from 2008 of SWA's sophisticated fuel hedging which allowed them keep fuel costs low.  Seriously, I'm not sure where the OP heard the story, but SWA is a huge financial success, almost alone among major carriers.  -- Jayron 32 20:18, 10 February 2015 (UTC)


 * So why doesn't every airline do the same things ? StuRat (talk) 21:29, 10 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Southwest Airlines is a very successful low-cost carrier which, like most low-cost carriers, only operates in a limited geographical space and tends to target a particular slice of the total market of potential air-travellers. The business model which works for a low-cost carrier operating only in the US and neighbouring countries (or, in the case of another notable low-cost carrier Ryanair, which borrowed a lot of its practices from Southwest Airlines, only in Europe and immediately adjacent areas) will not necessarily work for airlines that provide a lot of long-haul international flights in addition to shorter flights (and therefore, among other issues, have to use different types of plane) and which make a significant part of their revenue from wealthy and/or business travellers who expect a different level of service which they are prepared to pay higher fares for. Valiantis (talk) 22:19, 10 February 2015 (UTC)


 * I suppose there are significant risks to relying solely on one model of airplane:


 * 1) If that model is grounded due to a defect, they can't operate at all, versus other airlines that might be able to switch to alternate models until the crisis ends.


 * 2) When it's time to replace the current model with a new one, that will be a major hassle, since it involves replacing the entire fleet. This might cause them to stick with the old model too long, with resulting lower efficiency and higher maintenance costs and risks. StuRat (talk) 22:30, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

Online data collection
So I want to collect data for my research and want to conduct an online... not quite a survey, it's more like a series of sentences that participants have to rate on a scale of positive to negative. But the catch is that I want a different (randomized) set of sentences to appear for every participant - something that Google docs or most of the online survey websites won't let me do - most of them make you fill out individual questions and answers you'd supply for each, not batches of questions with the same kinds of answers (in this case a scale of positive-neutral-negative). Can someone tell me how to go about doing this? Thanks in advance. 202.153.41.162 (talk) 18:00, 10 February 2015 (UTC)


 * First, sure, that's a survey, see Survey_data_collection and Survey_methodology. If you want this to be real science, and not just a fun project, you'll have to think a lot about sample selection and other stuff mentioned in our articles before you start collecting data. If it is just a fun project, please don't present it as science :)
 * As to how to go about it: there are several ways, depending on how good you are on the technical side. The basic idea is to write up all the sentences (say there are N many), then have a short script that grab the sentences that you want one respondent to rate (say K many). Then each respondent gets a survey that is a Combination of K out of N objects. This is broadly a text processing task. If I absolutely had to do this, I'd write the sentences one-per-line in one text file, then write a Bash script, maybe using a combination of sed, awk and grep to output another file to be rated -- but that's probably not the way many people would do it, those are just tools I know a bit about. You can also do it with Python_(programming_language) (e.g. ), or perl, etc. The point is, getting a randomized subset of sentences is the first part, and there's lots of tools and methods you could use. One thing that might help if you plan to use an existing survey site is to generate a large list of many combinations, and upload each one as a different survey, randomly assigning respondents to each combination. (Depending on what N and K are, you might be able to generate all of the combinations, so generating them ahead of time is no problem. If you can't generate them all ahead of time, and you can't pick K on the fly, then you have a serious methodological issue to address.)
 * Then of course you have to figure out how to get it online. I don't think this can be accomplished using existing public web tools like Google Docs or Survey Monkey - but I've also never used the paid "pro" version of that site. In principle you could set up an Apache_HTTP_Server and do all the web development from scratch. You probably don't want to do that, either. So if you tell us a bit more about what you know in terms of computer tools, languages, and putting stuff online, we can probably give you better suggestions. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:41, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

@SemanticMantis: Thank you for a detailed answer. I'm familiar with Python, but not a pro at it really. But I know enough to write simple programs/functions of my own to do basic text processing. As for the files, they're already divided into sets of random bunches of sentences (always the same number of sentences in each file). The main problem I've faced (even with Survey monkey) is that they make you write out the questions one at a time. A question is whatever you want the participants to rate. So you can't do a batch upload of multiple "questions", not as far I can figure out anyhow. I don't know any Bash scripting, or perl either. I know some very basic command-line scripting in windows, and some very basic html coding (things like  and so on that they taught in school). I'd prefer a single survey that presented different participants different sample sentences so that I could have only one url I could post on Facebook/mail to people. Is that doable? (Also, it's serious research, but gathering the ratings for the sentences is only a very small part of the task - it's a bigger project where I use machine learning methods for creating a tool for sentiment analysis). Thanks in advance again. La  Al qu im  is ta  19:56, 10 February 2015 (UTC)


 * If you have control of a webserver that supports PHP, then I would suggest you install LimeSurvey on it. It's not hard to set up. This is a response to a question about randomising the questions in a survey using Limesurvey. --ColinFine (talk) 23:57, 10 February 2015 (UTC)

@ColinFine : That link seems not to work. I tried installing LimeSurvey but I'm afraid I have no knowledge of PHP at all, and I didn't quite figure out how to use it. I'd want a simpler software, if such a thing exists. My main problem so far has been the fact that none of the sites I've gone to supports batch uploads of questions in one go - they force you to painstakingly type out each question and choose a set of answers for each. La  Al qu im  is ta  13:53, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

Matte or glossy
I just had my daughter's London photos developed and the photographer used matte rather than glossy finish. I'm used to the latter but what is the best finish for photos of buildings and urban scapes? --Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 18:45, 10 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Here's a few write ups by others . At some level it's a personal and subjective choice. Many people agree that (all else being equal) glossy shows colors more vibrantly and matte works well for black and white images, or images where texture is important. In addition to the subject of the photo, there is also the lighting where it is on display to consider. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:51, 10 February 2015 (UTC)


 * .I requested glossy but got pictures with a matte appearance although they're fairly smooth to the touch. Could be the new pearl finish I keep hearing about?--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 19:15, 10 February 2015 (UTC)


 * The "pearl" is presumably Fuji pearl which has "High gloss and metallic like appearance". 71.20.250.51 (talk) 20:55, 10 February 2015 (UTC)


 * The problem with glossy photos is that you can get glare off them, depending on the lighting conditions. StuRat (talk) 21:33, 10 February 2015 (UTC)