Thanks and I will follow up your link when I awake in the morning.

For now, I want to say that the article says twice that a more sophisticated analysis is needed, specifically to take into account several relevant variables that we see discussed in many posts.

The key issue, I think, re. the article's usefulness is whether a much more sophisticated analysis would overthrow its main message -- to get good payments consistently you have to tend to have much greater than the average number of up-votes for your particular kind of article.

I wish to emphasize that this is not a hard-and-fast rule like 2+2=4. It is a statement of a statistical tendency, to which we will find exceptions in various cases.

Cheers!