st: RE: RE: RE: RE: Recent postings for help on course work and theses

["Nick Cox" <n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk>]

That's one strong positive. 

I am not sure I want to start telling people where else to look for
statistical advice, but over on Andrew Gelman's blog at
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/blog/ he is giving very timely
advice to all of you complicated modellers. See the item "Problems with
inappropriate combination of data". 

Nick 
n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk 

Martin Weiss

" At the same time, I
think many would regret a morphing of the list towards being more of a
general statistical list."

That would call for yet another addition to the FAQ: Links to other
lists
where these questions stand a chance of being answered satisfactorily. 

I personally find these questions enjoyable, not least because I am not
a
professional statistician, and tend to profit from the answers almost as
much as the original poster...

Nick Cox

I don't know if Tony had this in mind too, but either way here is a
related point. 

I've sensed a recent increase in questions of the form 

How should I approach the analysis of these data? 

and 

I intend to do this. Is it statistically (or econometrically) correct?

Often such questions have little or no Stata content. 

As the list subjects are declared to be Stata and statistics, it can
hardly be said that such questions are out of order. At the same time, I
think many would regret a morphing of the list towards being more of a
general statistical list. But many would regard a discussion of
statistical issues once a Stata question has been raised as totally
desirable and valuable, so it would be unwise to base too much on
whether the statistical question came first or the Stata question came
first. 

For the moment, the answer seems to be again to delete what you don't
want to answer, but there may be a variety of views on this point. 


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