dennis roberts wrote:
>
> happy new year to everyone ... hope your y2k +1 year is great! ....
>
> now, the y2k scare provides us with an excellent example of confounds (more
> or less) .. consider the following:
>
> Time One: lots of hype about "potential" disasters related to y2k ... (PRETEST)
>
> Time Two: billions of $$$ spent on "fixing" y2k "problems" (TREATMENT)
>
> Time Three: world notes relatively few y2k problems ... (POSTTEST)
>
The flaw with many pretest/posttest experiments is there is no
way to know what would have happened without the intervention.
With y2k we know, in many instances, what the consequences
would have been, for example, that pension checks would
have stopped because a recipient was no longer eligible or that
new orders were outdated or that "update" programs would
overwrite the new version of a file thinking it was older.
