From: stanley@ruby.OCE.ORST.EDU (John Stanley)
Newsgroups: news.admin.misc
Subject: Re: *BAD* music group reorg will not be honored
Date: 24 Nov 92 01:47:21 GMT
Article-I.D.: talon.1es1j9INNfqf
Organization: Oregon State University, College of Oceanography
NNTP-Posting-Host: ruby.oce.orst.edu

In article <EMCGUIRE.92Nov23134800@fuller.intellection.com> emcguire@intellection.com (Ed McGuire) writes:
>In article <1emuddINNs9k@talon.UCS.ORST.EDU> stanley@skyking.OCE.ORST.EDU
>(John Stanley) gives various objections to the validity of the straw
>poll which I conducted recently.
>
>Overall, it seems evident to me that John misunderstands the reason
>for the straw poll on the r.m.synth renaming.  He seems to believe it
>is being held up as a replacement for the reorganization vote.  

Don't tell me what I seem to believe. If you have a doubt, ask me.

I believe that this straw poll was being run to gather an indication of
the "will of the net" regarding the renaming. No, actually, just the
"will of r.m.s readers". All it takes to come to that conclusion is to
look at the questions.

For all the reasons I gave in my last article, this straw poll is no
better an indicator of that than was the original vote, and actually
much worse.

>The following quote exemplifies John's position.
>
>   despite all these differences (and all of them limitations in
>   allowing people to participate in your straw poll) your straw poll
>   is a better indication of what people want.  Sorry. It isn't.
>
>I have made no such claim.  

You have me stumped. Why did you bother to ask people what they want
unless your goal was to find out what people want?

>Now I shall address the specific objections John has to the straw
>poll.
>
>   You didn't include a number indicating total response in your
>   extremely long analysis [. . .]  If you DID include totals
>   somewhere, it apparently was not in the first 26 lines, and thus
>   those results are meaninless.
>
>I included the total response in the section titled RESPONSES, lines
>15--27.  

You included no heading for Total Responses. There was a Total
container, but that total container counted people who selected 'b', 'c',
'd', AND both c and d and both b and c. Subtracting the duplicates gives
less than 100 responses. 

Gee, wouldn't it have been so easy to just tabulate the responses
instead of tabulating groupings?

And, in any case, the totals showed up in line 27 of the posting. That
has already been proven to be much to late in a posting to be of any
worth. 

>The total number of respondents is 109.  

Subtracting the 15 double-counted 'bc'/'cd' respondents leaves 94.

>Your unfamiliarity
>with the crosstabulation leads me to suspect that you did not take
>much care to understand the results.

Why waste time on a poll that is statistically less significant than a
vote that just happened? One where the pollster couldn't be bothered to
report the results of the first question, and couldn't be bothered to
say, in simple english, "I got 94 responses"?

>   The vote had, as I recall, slightly more than 270 voters. Even if
>
>Only a part of the voting population were *.synth readers.  

So? Only a part of the poll respondents were *.synth readers. I assume
that, but don't know how many since you didn't bother to report the
results to your first question.

>Your objection quoted my claim:  "The dispute brought more people into
>the process than the vote did."  Perhaps my meaning was unclear.  This
>was not a comment on the straw poll.  It referred explicitly to "the
>dispute."  I never claimed to have gotten a larger response than the
>vote.  

Too bad that all those extra people that were brought into the process
didn't stick around to vote in your poll. It would seem, from the
response to your poll, that 170 some people LEFT the process. This is
progress?

>They cared about the outcome but the process let them down.  

They chose not to read the RFV. They have nobody to blame but
themselves.
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