--- Joe Whitehurst <joewhite@MINDSPRING.COM> wrote: > Toby, > > This is a good question. One way of answering the question is that > the more posts analyzed the better. An analogy might be the behavior > of a hologram. Each post would represent a piece of the hologram > (still has the whole picture only vastly fainter). As you add more > pieces the pieced together hologram begins to approximate the whole > hologram. A lifetime of postings would represent the whole hologram. >

Hardly! A person's behavior here on SAS-L is not the whole of who they are. And, even if we are just looking at their SAS-L behavior, it is still just a sample of the posts that they would have made if 1) they had not been away from SAS-L for vacation when some topic came up that they would have otherwise responded to, 2) they had not reviewed other replies and found that their own contribution would have been redundant, 3) they were mortal and could not continue to give replies from the grave. The postings that a person makes are only a sample of the postings that they should have/would have/could have made. As such, you can never think that you have the whole picture, although I would admit that you get closer and closer with each additional piece which you evaluate.

BTW, there is a field of study devoted to this topic: it is called statistics!

Dale

===== --------------------------------------- Dale McLerran Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center mailto: dmclerra@fhcrc.org Ph: (206) 667-2926 Fax: (206) 667-5977 ---------------------------------------

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