It has been pointed out to me that on 15th November Allan Reese
posted, to the RadStats list, a proposal which perhaps should
be borne in mind by people considering this question. I quote
from his posting. For the full text see
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/radstats/1999-11/0009.html
"There appears to be a gap for a neutral but professionally-critical
forum for statisticians, especially in the UK. A list at MCC called
stats-discuss appears to have died in mid 1998."
"I propose therefore to take to the RSS secretariat a proposal for an
open discussion list based at mailbase. As this would specifically
complement allstat, it would NOT be used for announcements, job adverts,
calls for papers etc. The new list would be specifically for the
discussion of statistics, uses or abuses of data or statistical methods,
and the promotion of statistics as a specialist and professional
discipline, and simple calls for assistance ("I'm and x-ologist and
don't know how to analysis this data - someone please tell me how." ie,
free consultancy) would be similarly discouraged."
The terms of this are very close to the sort of thing I was putting
forward, in a less detailed form, in my earlier posting (the "sister
list"). On the assumption that it stood a good chance of going well,
I would heartily support such an initiative.
However, I don't want to suggest that we stop discussing the question.
I'm still open to receiving comments (and a good few have come in).
The open question about the above proposal is whether it may receive
the support from the RSS that many of us would presumably think it
deserves. Interested parties also need to think about what form the
forum really should take.
By the way: [log in to unmask] is not at all dead -- it is simply
not being fed. Information about it is still up on
http://www.stats.gla.ac.uk/allstat/
and, if you do want to join, send a message to
[log in to unmask]
with, in the body of the message, a line
subscribe stats-discuss
though, in view of the current state of flux, I'm not insisting that it
will necessarily be the discussion list of the future. Subscribership
currently stands at about 290 ...
The pointer on mailbase to the stats-discuss archives is indeed dead,
however. It should be
http://veracity.mcc.ac.uk/archive/stats-discuss/index.html
Best wishes to all,
Ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 17-Nov-99 Time: 22:47:41
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