In sci.stat.consult Herman Rubin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>
> Those who voted for Bush are more likely to be literate,
You're really quite serious, aren't you? Can
you site any demographic data to support this?
> and in particular aware of what the punch card devices are
> doing, and so push harder on the punch to make sure that it
> went all the way through. A lesser effect (one person on
What does this have to do with "literacy"? It seems it
has to do with having one's hands on a piece of machinery
and having a little "machine"-sense. I daresay that there are
literate people who cannot change a flashlight bulb --
on the one hand; and illiterate people who can take
apart automobile engines and put them back together --
on the other.
Think of the Empress Dowager, CiXi, late of the Qing Dynasty:
Very literate -- you cannot deny it. Now look at
those silly fingernails! If she'd had to punch a
ballot, well, you see the problem here.
My mother, another example, is a Phi Beta Kappa from Case
Western Reserve. She took many years of guitar lessons
back in the 1960s. But she simply made very little
progress. Why? She simply refused to cut down the
long fingernails on the left hand. Thus impeding
all action on the fingerboard. Literate? Faugh!
Will you at least concede that perhaps a good many
Commoners are not so unfit as to merit such
casual contempt as you are wont to dole upon them?
And in regard to partially punched cards, without
some attention to these machines and some effort to
assess the possible failure modes that led to this
condition -- of which I assure you there may be
many that you are not even allowing to enter into
consideration -- I will not jump to such ill-mannered
conclusions such as previously averred.
To name just a few *possible* failure mode:
The carrier which holds the card somehow is slack
in the up/down dimension, and allows in some places
the distance between the tip of the punch and the
surface of the card to become large; or that somehow
the tension on the card surface is weak, and the
tip of the punch is blunt; or the so-called "chad"
is imperfectly perforated; all of these conditions
could conspire from time to time to produce incompletely
punched entries.
Regards,
Mr. Bloom
=================================================================
Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about
the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
=================================================================
