A Blogging Survey - Or Another Shining Moment for the Research Scientists

This was fun. Although, as with many surveys, you see that the writers of the survey have missed the mark in some respects. I'm referring to the last section, where the choices are so limiting as to make one question what sense they can make of the results, or is it that they want to skew the results?  (i.e., Do you know a doctor/lawyer/teacher...etc.; is the person a friend/acquaintance/family....did you meet them online or offline?  Well, what if, as in my case, I have ALL OF THE ABOVE in each category? There is no way to answer that way, because the survey only lets you fill in one choice. Bleh. Dumb scientists.)

I'm kidding about the dumb scientists part. Or am I? (Now I'll be known as Norma, the scientist-basher. No, really, individually you're all lovable. Really. You just don't have a lick of common sense. I'm KIDDING. Really!)

A note to any MIT researcher who comes to read here: a) I'm largely full of shit, or if not fullofshit, then I am a pretty good bullshit artist and I'm also a liberal user of hyperbole.

and b) One observation I've made from the beginning is that we knitbloggers are a completely different breed than most bloggers. We are far more interactive than the others, and far more likely to meet each other in person and become close acquaintances and friends. (or am I just being ethnocentric?)

But they gave a cool button for the sidebar (<----- see over there?), so they're forgiven. Sort of. 

Oh, and you may or may not have noticed the little ads now appearing in my sidebar. Typepad made an offer to Pro-level subscribers to use ads as a way to defray the costs of the subscription. I thought it was worth a try. So I'll just go ahead and be shameless and ask you to click on them. Click, click! Bandwidth is expensive!

Comments

[Dawn]

Full of shit? Hyperbole? You? Never!

*Ducks to avoid being slapped upside the head*

[liz]

My husband has a PhD in inorganic chemistry. Common sense is not his strong suit. Nor is an accurate sense of time. He can use his powers for good though; he brews beer!

[freecia]

Did you try splitting the traffic load by republishing your feed with www.feedburner.com ? RSS probably generates a lot of the traffic these days. feedburner can take the brunt of that traffic and also gives you nice statistics.

I blogged RE: point b) in conjunction with the "BlogHer" conference being held for "Exposure, education and community for women bloggers..."
http://visit.freecia.com/archives/2005/06/blogher_female.html
Have a read if you're interested in how I agree that we're not typical bloggers, nor typical female bloggers. I plan to go convert the "BlogHer" bloggers. And note, they're holding their convention at the same place as
Stitches West was last year. Not really such an odd coincidence, but there's several convention centers around here.

[Stephanie VW]

You're a statistic. Nice. That's the threat my friends and I always used in university when we were leaving the apartment, "Be careful. You don't want to be a statistic." Only now, apparently, I do. I do want to be a statistic! Pick me pick me!

[molly]

I totally got sucked into that survey because of the cool button, too! Thanks for the idea. I just hated the part about instant messenger at the end, because I haven't seen any of the people I talk to on messenger for a long time--and I'm sure that fits into some weird internet nerd category for their study. I wanted to send them a qualifying email and tell them that it's because I live in another country and not because I'm socially inept!

[mamacate]

Very interesting comments. I do this for a living, and I gotta tell you, that was a well-constructed survey in the scheme of things. You should see some of the stuff that comes across my desk from both phds AND undergraduates (often impossible to tell the difference!).

Anyway, in the instructions for that section, they do address the issue of knowing multiple people with a given occupation: you're supposed to answer about the person with whom you communicate the most. That wasn't the person I would have chosen in a number of circumstances (the person who feels closest to me). But you know, the instructions for that section were complicated and long, so I bet a lot of people missed it. It's interesting for me, as someone who constructs these things, to see that. So thanks!

I work with MIT survey research people from time to time (not this group--the online surveys we do with them don't have some of the dynamic stuff this one did), and generally they have a pretty high standard. But you never know.

I'd be really intrigued to see the results. I think they asked about the professions to try to find out some kind of class/SES stuff about who's blogging and who's communicating online. I was just chatting with Sara (sara skates) about class and blogging, and it has come up on a lot of political/feminist blogs lately too. I just realized, though, they didn't ask MY profession. Hmmm.

Okay, rambling here, sorry. Interesting, and thanks for the link!

[Kathy]

I grabbed the "I Made Some Science" button. Appealed to the Kindergartener in me :-)

[Ann]

Sputtering with giddy laughter at the idea of knitblogger as ethnicity...

[Carole]

I thought the survey was fun but agreed that some of it is flawed. Designing surveys is tough work, though - as someone who has done it - and even scientists don't always get it right. Just saying.

[Elisabeth]

I'm a scientist (PhD student in cell biology). My husband is an astrophysicist. I am around scientists all day and night. I can personally vouch for the fact that we have no common sense. My theory is: we have so much information (from experiments and stuff) coming in the front of our brains, stuff falls out the back. Like how to tie our shoes. Or simple math (I'm convinced my husband can no longer do math that has actual numbers in it). Or our names. Or how to tell time (especially that one--scientists are rarely on time). Sure, we write down the time for our experiments, but actually being able to understand that it is now 1:25 and the seminar starts at 1:30 and it is _all_the_way_across_campus_ which takes 12 minutes to cross and therefore, we should've left at least 3 minutes ago (see, I told you!) is something completely out of our grasps (though we're very good at knowing when the damn seminar should be _over_ because I often think "Time is up, you boring, arrogant idiot--stop talking now!").

I say this with the utmost respect to all scientists, everywhere, of course.

Or, maybe we were all born without common sense and now we just have a good excuse for it (I think this is the theory my mother agrees with).