Please take 5-10 minutes to help me on my thesis questionnaire and get the report

[Gabriel]

Hi All,

(First my apologies for this kind of "spam" message. But for my thesis
this will be my once in a lifetime spam moment... )

At the moment I have to graduate for my master in Business Information
Management and need to do a survey for my thesis. The thesis is about
Web vs. Desktop based applications and the differences perceived by
the user. So not from the management/technology point of view but from
the end-user. I focus now on Desktop vs. Webmail and need a whole lot
of respondents to get some usable statistics.

Everyone who uses email (Outlook/Gmail/Thunderbird/Yahoo, etc!) is a
valid respodent for this thesis.

Therefore I would really appreciate it if you would take the time to
complete my questionnaire (available in Dutch and English) and (maybe
even) forward it to some of your colleagues, friends and family!

It's 50 closed and 3 open questions, so it shouldn't take more than 5
minutes.

You find it at: http://www.amteam.nl/thesis

And of course everyone who submits his or her email address will get
the final report, which can be very interesting for application
developers.

Thanks a lot!
Gab

 

[Michael A. Covington]

I notice that Gabriel will not identify his university or use his
university's e-mail address.

He apparently has a reason. At all universities, research on human subjects
is regulated by some type of ethics committee. All we have to do is tell
his university's ethics committee that he is spamming newsgroups -- a
practice almost universally considered unethical -- and they will order him
to stop his research immediately.

If any of you find out what university he's at, please let us all know.

I am a professor myself and am involved in human subjects research both in
the USA and in the Netherlands.

 

[Peter Duniho]

[...]
If any of you find out what university he's at, please let us all know.

Or, alternatively, if he believes that his post is a legitimate way to go
about his research, surely he would not mind posting those details here.
Full name, university, etc. so that anyone who wants to participate in the
survey can verify that he is in fact a Master's student, working on a
thesis for which survey responses solicited in this manner is considered
legitimate research.

Not that I think this is an appropriate place for such a request
regardless, but anyone should be suspicious of someone who asks for this
sort of thing without being up-front about who they are and why they are
doing it.

Pete

 

[Michael C]

I notice that Gabriel will not identify his university or use his
university's e-mail address.

He apparently has a reason. At all universities, research on human
subjects is regulated by some type of ethics committee. All we have to do
is tell his university's ethics committee that he is spamming
newsgroups -- a practice almost universally considered unethical -- and
they will order him to stop his research immediately.

If any of you find out what university he's at, please let us all know.

I am a professor myself and am involved in human subjects research both in
the USA and in the Netherlands.

Bit harsh don't you think?

Michael

 

[Michael A. Covington]

I am a professor myself and am involved in human subjects research both

Bit harsh don't you think?

No. Spamming is wrong, period. Further, all research on human subjects is
heavily regulated by the universities themselves and the granting agencies
that fund them. A graduate student cannot just go out and do human-subjects
research without institutional approval. Our people have to do a *lot* more
than just refrain from spamming.

We would be doing this fellow a disservice by allowing him to "finish" a
thesis which is going to be rejected as soon as his university finds out how
the data collection was done.

Further, if I were on his thesis committee I would vote to deny him
candidacy if he claims to be studying the Internet and does not know that
newsgroup spamming is considered unacceptable. Canter & Siegel and all
that, you know. In order to be competent to do the research, he needs some
background knowledge that seems to be lacking.

Last, as others have noted, the fact that he does not identify his
university raises suspicion. Normal practice is to disclose fully, to the
human participants, the institution, sponsor, and goal of the research.

I know this sounds harsh, but I'm involved in this kind of thing
professionally.

 

[Michael A. Covington]

(First my apologies for this kind of "spam" message. But for my thesis

this will be my once in a lifetime spam moment... )

If we let you have one moment of spam, a million others will each want their
moment, too.

 

[Michael C]

We would be doing this fellow a disservice by allowing him to "finish" a
thesis which is going to be rejected as soon as his university finds out
how the data collection was done.

Further, if I were on his thesis committee I would vote to deny him
candidacy if he claims to be studying the Internet and does not know that
newsgroup spamming is considered unacceptable. Canter & Siegel and all
that, you know. In order to be competent to do the research, he needs
some background knowledge that seems to be lacking.

Last, as others have noted, the fact that he does not identify his
university raises suspicion. Normal practice is to disclose fully, to the
human participants, the institution, sponsor, and goal of the research.

I know this sounds harsh, but I'm involved in this kind of thing
professionally.

Chill out a bit Michael A. Covington. This is not the sort of thing that you
change someone's life over. I certainly wouldn't be keen to post all my
details in a newsgroup.

Michael

 

[Michael A. Covington]

Chill out a bit Michael A. Covington. This is not the sort of thing that
you change someone's life over. I certainly wouldn't be keen to post all
my details in a newsgroup.

Have you been to graduate school yourself? In a field that involved surveys
or human-subjects research?

Here's the thing. This fellow's thesis isn't going to pass. It has a
serious ethics problem, and it also has a serious problem with validity of
survey data. If you survey by spamming, you only get people who are willing
to answer spam, and that's not likely to be a fair sample of the target
population. A survey of "people self-selected by some criteria, we don't
know what, who didn't even know what the survey was for" is a useless
survey.

I don't want him to waste his time trying to do a project that is doomed to
fail the thesis defense. He needs to get advice from his professors and
switch to something else.

 

[Michael C]

Have you been to graduate school yourself? In a field that involved
surveys or human-subjects research?

Here's the thing. This fellow's thesis isn't going to pass. It has a
serious ethics problem, and it also has a serious problem with validity of
survey data. If you survey by spamming, you only get people who are
willing to answer spam, and that's not likely to be a fair sample of the
target population. A survey of "people self-selected by some criteria, we
don't know what, who didn't even know what the survey was for" is a
useless survey.

I don't want him to waste his time trying to do a project that is doomed
to fail the thesis defense. He needs to get advice from his professors
and switch to something else.

I never said he wasn't going around things the wrong way, just that you
*really* need to chill out a bit.

Michael

 

[Kevin Spencer]

In fact, you're both being a bit naive. You're both assuming that he is
telling the truth. The message mentions providing an email address via the
"survey." This is a perfect way for a SPAMmer to harvest emails. There is no
evidence that the poster is being truthful at all, either about who he is,
what school he attends (if any), or what his motives are.

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP

Printing Components, Email Components,
FTP Client Classes, Enhanced Data Controls, much more.
DSI PrintManager, Miradyne Component Libraries:
http://www.miradyne.net

 

[Michael A. Covington]

In fact, you're both being a bit naive. You're both assuming that he is
telling the truth. The message mentions providing an email address via the
"survey." This is a perfect way for a SPAMmer to harvest emails. There is
no evidence that the poster is being truthful at all, either about who he
is, what school he attends (if any), or what his motives are.

An apt observation, and although I'm not sure I mentioned it, I definitely
was thinking that this may not be academic research at all. The link goes
to a commercial web site (in Dutch and English) with absolutely no mention
of a university on the first page (and I didn't go beyond that).

 

[Michael C]

In fact, you're both being a bit naive. You're both assuming that he is
telling the truth. The message mentions providing an email address via the
"survey." This is a perfect way for a SPAMmer to harvest emails. There is
no evidence that the poster is being truthful at all, either about who he
is, what school he attends (if any), or what his motives are.

Hardly, the thought did cross my mind.

Michael

 

[PS]

In fact, you're both being a bit naive. You're both assuming that he is
telling the truth. The message mentions providing an email address via the
"survey." This is a perfect way for a SPAMmer to harvest emails. There is
no evidence that the poster is being truthful at all, either about who he
is, what school he attends (if any), or what his motives are.

The simple fact that the OP has not responded to any of these posting
solidifies the fact that the posting is spam.

PS