mmt@BEN.DCIEM.DND.CA [Martin Taylor 920707 14:45] calls me to task:
I was basing my answer earlier today on your statement that the length
distribution had been found to be constant ove all fish even though the
distribution within a species was not. Do I understand you now retract
that statement.
(Now you say that the data are not that clean, and you can't tell
whether the Test has been applied. Right? Then the questions in your
original posting are based on a hypothetical situation, and my answer
applies to that hypothetical situation, not the real one as determined
by inadequate measurements.)
Did anyone else understand that I meant to imply that data on the total
biomass of fish are exact numbers? To all who did so, my apologies.
Martin and perhaps others will perhaps be surprised to discover that we
have yet to come up with exact methods for sampling fish in the ocean.
I clearly erred in assuming that the readers of this group knew that.
Just for future reference, real data are rarely exact. Saying that this
is due to "inadequate measurements" seems a bit unfair (anyone here ever
hear of the uncertainty principle, which makes some physical
measurements not exact?). But honestly, I thought that control theory
had at least some relevance to the real world!
Bill
ยทยทยท
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Bill Silvert at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography
P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2
InterNet Address: bill@biome.bio.dfo.ca