[Ifeffit] Using this mailing list effectively

Ravel, Bruce bravel at bnl.gov
Sun Jan 6 10:47:13 CST 2013


> I think you are really right, I am in too great a hurry that I lost my patience to set a time to learn basics quietly. Thanks for reminding.
> And for my second question, could you give me some suggestion too?


Mr. Tian,

Asking questions is an art.  Anyone can barf out sentences that end with a question mark, but asking questions that will prompt a useful and constructive discussion is a subtle and skillful business.  Both Chris and I tried to tell you that in our earlier responses, but apparently there is a need to be more explicit.

You are doing some things wrongly.  I say this not to be mean and not to diminish you, but because I spend a lot of my professional time teaching people how to do XAS.  It is important to me that people practice our craft well.  This mailing list is a powerful tool to that end.  When it is used well, the people who solicit help from this list profit significantly.  When it used poorly, the people who volunteer their time answering questions become frustrated and the person asking the questions goes away with nothing.

So ... here are three comments:

(1) I am frustrated that you are not using the most recent version of my software.  You are using a version of Artemis that is about 4 years old.  I have no intention of continuing support for the older versions of my software.

(2) Your second question refers to 4 sets of data, which you posted to the mailing list not in an Athena project file, but in an Artemis project file.  That's odd.  It would be much easier to examine the data in the form of an Athena project file.  Many of the issues in your recent line of questioning referred to S02.  As Scott pointed out, the evaluation of S02 is related to the determination of the normalization and background.  If you want people to help you with your actual question, it would be prudent to provide the data in a form that allows examination of all steps of the data processing.  My point here is that you simply must think about how you pose your question -- that includes thinking hard about how to present your data to the person whose help you are soliciting.

(3) Your first email on the topic of these Cu films was somewhat misleading in that your initial complaint seemed to be about a strange measure of coordination number on a Cu foil.  In that email, you gave a hint as to the actual form of the data, but scant information about how the data were measured and none about how the data were processed and analyzed.  After prompts from Scott and other, you have provided a bit more information about your actual measurement, but not enough to actually know what's going on.  As long as your line of questioning remains vague as to the details of the problem, the best you can expect are vague answers of the sort that you have already received.


Since I am suggesting that you be more thoughtful and explicit in how you communicate here on the list, it is important that I do the same.  Here is an example of what I consider to be a well-asked question.  My example comes from a posting that I myself made to the WxPerl mailing list last year.  WxPerl is the programming tool I use to make the GUIs Athena, Artemis, and Hephaestus.  At the time, I was having a problem getting menus to post properly when making right-mouse clicks in various places in Athena.  While the question is rather technical and I don't expect a non-programmer to follow all the details, it is still instructive:

    http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.wxperl.users/2011/03/msg7929.html

Note first that in five brief lines of text I summarized my problem.  I then gave a complete example of how someone else could reproduce my problem on their own computer.  I then explained both what I expected to happen and what actually happened.

The point here is that I took the time to condense my question into a form that the people at the other end could understand and address with a minimum of effort.  Sure enough, I got useful responses from 2 knowledgeable (and, no doubt, very busy) people.


Mr. Tian, to the extent that it seems like I am singling you out for special criticism, I sincerely apologize.  But you have been posting to this mailing list rather often of late and you are doing so in a way that is probably not getting you the sort of results you would like to see.  I understand that this is an English language mailing list and that it is difficult to be as expressive in another tongue as you can be in your own.  (I really do understand that -- I have suffered through learning two other languages in my life.  It really is hard.)  But you have to try if you want to get useful results.

B



More information about the Ifeffit mailing list