And Kay Diedrichs suggested today that averaging out possible errors in the 
Lorentz correction is a potential benefit of collecting "real redundant" data.

(this would apply to both SR and lab sources).

Colin
-----Original Message-----
From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Colin Nave
Sent: 15 May 2013 22:17
To: ccp4bb
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] Fwd: Re: [ccp4bb] reference for "true multiplicity"?

Times up!

The 3rd case I had in mind was the presence of anisotropy of the anomalous 
scattering in the presence of a polarised beam. John Helliwell and Pete Dunten 
suggested this. Dave Waterman identified the general issue with polarisation. 
All three kept the fun going (as John put it) by just responding to myself.

The Templetons and then Schiltz and Bricogne regard this as an opportunity 
rather than a source of errors. See also the paper by Fanchon and Hendrickson.

This leads me to think that there are four ways of handling this sort of issue 
(or rather among the many ways there are at least four).

1. Pretend these errors don't exist and ignore them. This is maximising the 
probability of not getting a structure.
2 The pragmatic approach of recognising these errors occur and are difficult to 
correct. Then devise a data collection and processing strategy where they can 
be mitigated. This would typically involve a high "real redundancy".
3. Developing a model to handle the errors - for example a model for the 
absorption errors. This is presumably better in principle but suffers from the 
danger that the model is wrong.
4. Rename the "errors" as an opportunity - the approach taken by Gerard 
Bricogne and Marc Schiltz following the Templetons.  

The latter 3 are all fine and involve selecting an appropriate data collection 
strategy followed by appropriate data processing. For systematic "errors",  it 
is worth considering, for each type,  which of the 4 cases above are the most 
appropriate way of handling them. My present thoughts are 

Absorption errors - category 2 above.
Detector non uniformity - category 3
Anisotropy in a polarised beam - category 4.

As understanding evolves one would hope each systematic error would move at 
least to category 3.

I think Felix Frolow is a supporter of category 3 and, by implication, category 
4. 

Apologies for all the quotation marks round errors, redundancy etc. This of 
course relates to identifying potential transmission errors while communicating 
in the English (I guess it would also apply to Latin) language.

Colin

-----Original Message-----
From: CCP4 bulletin board [mailto:CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Colin Nave
Sent: 15 May 2013 10:21
To: ccp4bb
Subject: Re: [ccp4bb] Fwd: Re: [ccp4bb] reference for "true multiplicity"?

Oh – I seemed to have diverted Frank’s thread.

Fortunately most languages themselves are highly redundant, with following 
characters and words being quite predictable. The entropy and redundancy of 
English language  was analysed by Shannon (with the help of his wife) and he 
obtained figures of about 1 bit per character rather than  log base 2 (27), a 
redundancy of around 75%. I guess this redundancy helps us put things in 
context.  However, in order to avoid future misunderstandings, I would like to 
suggest that further communications with CCP4BB be done in Latin which I 
believe has less ambiguity. I hope people will adopt this helpful suggestion.

OK – perhaps not a good idea. More relevant to Frank’s question, I was 
referring to  cases where, for a particular reflection, the path of x-rays 
through the crystal was altered to average out systematic errors. What type of 
systematic errors would be mitigated by this? There is one potential addition 
to the list (absorption errors, detector calibration) I produced but it applies 
to synchrotron sources rather than the type of x-ray source used in the Acta D 
paper. I will let others have a think before suggesting it.

Colin

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