[nc-whois] Full skeleton available / question 5 / caveats

[Thomas Roessler <roessler@does-not-exist.org>]

I have made a full skeleton for the preliminary report available at 
<http://www.does-not-exist.org/whois-ghana-020301-0.pdf>.  This file 
differs from the one distributed yesterday only by the tables I 
added for question 5, so I'm not attaching it again.

These tables do not contain any number crunching, because I didn't 
come up with any ideas on how to do it.  If Abel has any clever
ideas, I'm sure he'll share them.

You will, most likely, notice that I have even _omitted_ the average 
values given in ICANN's tabulation. I did so because it is certainly 
not obvious that these averages have any meaning at all.  (For 
instance, a purpose which gets ranks 7 and 1 half of the time, each, 
will have an average rank of 4 - just like one which is on rank 4 
exclusively. Still, the conclusions from these distributions would 
have to be vastly different.) Note that there are also other dangers 
hidden in the data contained with the skeleton: In particular, in 
many cases, we don't know which options are preferred over which 
other options. (Unless I'm missing some clever argument, of course, 
which may be entirely posssible.  If you find one, please make sure 
you include it in whatever you write.)

Thus, I'd like to ask those of you who are going to evaluate these 
numbers to be EXTREMELY careful with any findings and conclusions at 
this point of time. Please, make absolutely sure that you do _not_ 
make any assumptions which may not be backed by numbers.

Have a nice evening, and a nice remainder of the week-end!
-- 
Thomas Roessler                        http://log.does-not-exist.org/