SCOUG-HELP Mailing List Archives

Date:	Fri, 18 Feb 2005 10:46:35 PST8
From:	Peter Skye <pskye@peterskye.com >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: patterns (was: testing)

Content Type: text/plain

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Steven Levine wrote:
>
> >Pretty quiet around here lately
>
> Peter, our resident pattern matcher, probably has analyzed this and has an answer.

I have taken a look at this in the past. Part of it is something known
to me as "queueing theory" and part of it is something I simply call
"excitement factor".

Queueing theory pertains to the randomness of when the first message of
a thread appears (there is a day-of-week factor here), and the thread
typically persists for more than one day so you can get overlap with
other threads and the list seems busy. When there isn't any first
message and no hang from prior threads then the list appears dead.

Excitement factor is the "hey, that message reminds me about this other
thing" human attribute. Somebody sees something on the list and it
reminds them to ask a question of their own.

Then there's a third situation. I was gleefully pounding on Lynn's
software over on the SCOUG-Programming list for a week when San Diego
exploded again on Tuesday. Although Janean is now in the slammer and
gets sentenced on March 3, there are still two other nuts down there and
they are quite busy. When you don't have any spare time you don't post
to the lists.

- Peter

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