> 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
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