Archive for April, 2009
Friday, April 3rd, 2009
Final Short List Announced – Island Reef Job
The Queensland Tourism Committee announced the final list of candidates for the Island Caretaker position. Interestingly, the competition was originally slated to have only 11 candidates (10 who made it through the selection process and the wildcard applicant). However, the judging committee was "so impressed with the way our Top 50 have gone out there to promote themselves and the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef during the last few weeks that we found it impossible to choose just 10 short-listed candidates." Hence the final short list is made up of 16 candidates including the Wildcard. The Island Reef Job web site provides the names and a personalized snippets of each candidate. This information was clearly provided during the essay portion of this contest. Clare Wang was the runaway winner in the Wildcard vote with an outsanding 156K votes. This was very impressive and 3x greater than the closest competitor. At this point in the game, all the contestants will be flown to Australia where it is surmised that they will engage in "Survivor-like" activities to help the committee determine the final Island Caretaker. Our friends at STK did a good job of calling 37.5% of the finalists based on their Tot2 analysis. While we didn’t get to review all of the candidates as hoped, some of our top picks were either eliminated by one means or another. Also, this final list of candidates disproves the conspiracy theory by Jacques Droit that this was rigged for the Australian, David Whitehill. (See the comments at the bottom of Clare’s page.) Without further Ado, here are the finalists…
