On Feb 13, 2008 11:37 PM, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
So, where is the justification for outrage here? Easy - there is none.
The 'problem' springs from folks who are righteously offended by the
transgression against our bureaucracy, but both the transgression and
the bureaucracy are of little importance next to the point - the
published content. Remember that we are real people, generally adults,
who live in the real world. Sometimes we get caught up in our
processes and view events in our little world as if they had
significance in the wider world - but they don't. Only the product has
significance in the real world.
I don't really care about the product, I care about the fact that this has
pissed off so many people that the little battles they've fought over it
have spilled all over the project and made everyone else's time miserable.
Somebody needs to ensure that doesn't happen again.
Having said that! Focusing on the actual evidence here - I'm not a
mathematician or an expert in statistical analysis, and few of the
folks working on this analytical project are either. However, it is
clear to me that the sample suffers from a number of mathematical
problems - mostly relating to its size and selection, and the
significance attached to the results. If you want to make a
comprehensive declaration based on this type of analysis, you need a
much more robust set of data to work with and a much more serious
approach to mining it for significant data points.
Nathan
Err, you'll have to expand on that. I have some fairly advanced statistical
training, and I see several problems with the collinearity here, but its a
pretty good rough reckoner, and - as I said - light years ahead of anything
I'd seen before.
Definitely, 10 data points is too small, but in the interleaving comparison
in particular, the difference is stark enough that I don't think the degrees
of freedom matter. And what do you mean by "serious approach"?
RR