Quite a number of people agreed with the basic thrust of my posting
which was my admiration of the qualities of the people who supply high
quality assistance despite the often ungratefulness of those who
benefit from it.
The only smidgen of disagreement was from Nicole DePriest Demers to
which I would respond:
|> Now, now Mr. Connolly, me thinks you are giving the undergrads an unfair
|> rap. We won't go into the statistical methodology you used to obtain you
Is it unfair to say that many 5 year-olds haven't mastered tying shoe
laces? I think not. Courtesy is a far more subtle concept which
requires years of life's experiences to master, and few have done so
before they're 25. By the time I'm 90 I might have got it myself. :-)
|> 80% nonresponse estimate and how you were able to conclude the majority
Methinks you flatter with the word "estimate". I used the tried and
untestable 'best guess' method which is frequently necessary even in
scientific work (and always necessary in sample surveys). Suffice to
say that email addresses give a useful indication. People who work
for an organisation nearly always acknowledge assistance I've given
them; those with a .edu or .ac address and without an indication of
being staff thereof seldom do. Details on the GLM used and the
F-statistics available on request. :-)
|> longer than others). Of the three years I have been a part of this group
|> it seems to me that this past year has seen a noticeable improvement in
|> summarizing responses to the group. Hopefully this trend will continue.
My data collection comes from my experience answering basic (I can't
answer the tricky ones) FAQ-type questions such as subsetting a
dataframe to omit rows with NAs in certain columns. Those probably
don't need a summary to the list, but an acknowledgement would help to
indicate whether the answer was indeed useful to the requirements of
the question's poster even if nothing else.
Share and enjoy (as Eddie the shipboard computer would say).
best
Patrick
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