On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, Johannes H?sing wrote:
Peter Dalgaard:
Ben Bolker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
1. compose your response
I've always wondered why step 1. - often the time-consuming bit - is not
listed last.
The advice applies to the situation when answering immediately would be
your knee-jerk reaction. It is assumed that actually composing and sending
the mail would take very little time and thought, whereas coming around to
answering it after runif(1)*4 hours would take considerably more time, even
when mulitiplied with the probability that you are still the first one.
Looking at the submission times of questions and answers in this
particular case, though, I would be upset if the helpful guys actually
used this algorithm. Most of the answers were submitted after 3.5 to 4 h
time, thus revealing a possible flaw of the random number generator
underlying runif().
Johannes,
Turn on 'full-headers' in your email reader.
Most of the replies were submitted within 20 minutes of the posting of the
original query by the list-serv (to me and I assume to others) and several
that said essentially the same thing were posted within the first 10
minutes, I recall.
The list-serv held the initial email for a couple of hours before passing
it on. The replies are processed more rapidly, being held at most a few
minutes each.
Given the initial hold placed on that email, runif(1)*4 hours would have
increased the overall response time (from time of initial posting to time
of first response) by less than 25% (with high probability). And would
have saved several respondents from having to type up their replies.
In this case even runif(1)*20 minutes would likely have cut the response
traffic to one or two and would have increased the overall response time
by less than 10 minutes.
Chuck
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Charles C. Berry (858) 534-2098
Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine
E mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] UC San Diego
http://biostat.ucsd.edu/~cberry/ La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0717
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