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TSG Report 3

"Where Are We?"

by 'oscar51'

April 2002

Location of TSG Members by Time Zone

In my two previous reports on the posting habits of TSG members (TSG Success Rate and "Rambling On..."), I assumed that members located in the eastern USA time zone submitted more posts than members located in any other time zone. To see if that was a good or a bad assumption and to get a feel for where in the world the posts to TSG come from, I made the effort to determine the geographical location and thus the time zone of each member whose posts were included in the above two reports. The results of this effort are shown in Table I and discussed below.

Table I - Number of Members and Number of Posts By Time Zone

Note:

The numbers in this table reflect the participation of only those members who posted to the threads included in the above two reports. Those members represent about one percent of the total TSG membership. The posting dates fell within the range November 2001 through February 2002.


Column A1: Number of members who posted to the Help forums
Column B1: Number of posts made by these members
Column C1: Cumulative total post count for these members
Column A2: Number of members who posted to "Rambling..."
Column B2: Number of posts made by these members
Column C2: Cumulative total post count for these members

Zone Help forums "Rambling..."
GMT A1B1C1 A2B2C2
+12 2 8 91 0 0 0
+11 3 11 106 0 0 0
+10 6 27 82 0 0 0
+09 2 6 14 0 0 0
+08 4 9 306 0 0 0
+07 0 0 0 0 0 0
+06 0 0 0 0 0 0
+05 4 5 8 0 0 0
+04 1 7 51 0 0 0
+03 1 3 28 0 0 0
+02 3 13 310 0 0 0
+01 11 158 2,553 0 0 0
+00 31 212 7,578 5 168 5,772
– 01 0 0 0 0 0 0
– 02 0 0 0 0 0 0
– 03 0 0 0 0 0 0
– 04 3 7 35 0 0 0
– 05 154 94148,040 21 56722,049
– 06 74 75531,950 161,47319,890
– 07 13 75 819 31,332 2,648
– 08 39 28216,391 8 67210,570
– 09 1 5 125 0 0 0
– 10 0 0 0 0 0 0
– 11 0 0 0 0 0 0
Totals:   352 2,524 108,487    53 4,212  60,929

Discussion

To help you interpret this table, consider the numbers in the row labeled '– 08'. This time zone in commonly called 'Pacific Time' and for the relevant dates (November 2001 – February 2002) is identified as 'Pacific Standard Time' or 'PST'. (It also happens to be my time zone. :-)) The first number, 39, means that 39 members located in this time zone made one or more posts to one or more of the threads in the Help forums during the period middle November 2001 to middle January 2002 as reported in 'TSG Success Rate'. The second number indicates that these 39 members actually made 282 posts during that period. The third number, 16,391, is the total number of posts these 39 members had made to all TSG threads as of middle-January 2002. The next three numbers in row '– 08' are interpreted similarly: 8 members made 672 posts to the thread "Rambling Discussion" during the period November 2001 through February 2002 as reported in "Rambling On...". These 8 members had accumulated 10,570 posts as of February 28, 2002.

Now that we know how to interpret the table, we can draw some conclusions.

1. The plurality of posts made to the Help forums were from members located in the 'GMT – 05' time zone, aka 'EST'. This confirms my assumption noted above.

2. The plurality of posts made to "Random Discussion" were from members located in the 'GMT – 06' time zone or 'CST'. This does not confirm my assumption noted above.

3. The bulk of the posts made to the Help forums and almost all the posts made to "Rambling..." are from members in the four USA time zones.

4. Posts were made to the Help forums from almost all the inhabitable time zones in the world while posts were made to "Rambling..." from only those time zones inhabited by members who like to 'ramble'.

For a related but slightly different approach to the data in Table I, if we assume that the members in each time zone are located in the center of their time zone (a point-mass assumption that is not true, of course, but is common in engineering work), then the "center of posts", i.e., the point on the earth's surface where the posts could be considered concentrated, is located as follows.

1. For the Help forums based on 2524 posts: Somewhere along longitude 66-deg, 45-min west, a line in the Atlantic Ocean that runs about 375 miles east of New York City and 100 miles west of Bermuda. (If this calculation is redone based on total post-count of 108,487, that line moves to 77-deg, 33-min west, right through Waynesboro, PA. How's that for a coincidence?)

2. For "Rambling..." based on 4212 posts: Somewhere along longitude 93-deg, 54-min west, a line roughly through Minneapolis, Kansas City, Shreveport.

I did not attempt to calculate a latitude for the center of posts, although I would guess it to be somewhere around 39-40 degrees north (Baltimore, Cincinnati, St.Louis, Kansas City, Denver).

Finally, remember: This is a very limited data sample compared to the overall TSG data set -- about 1% of the total number of registered TSG members. But I'm willing to guess that the trends shown here are typical of TSG as a whole.

Details (for the record; you won't miss anything if you skip this)

Out of the 475 members (417 Help + 58 Rambling) considered in this study, 385 posted only to the Help forums, 26 posted only to the "Rambling Discussion" thread, and 32 posted to both. Therefore the total number of unique members whom I attempted to locate was 443 (385 + 26 + 32). Of these 443 members, I was able to locate 320 in Help, 21 in Rambling, and all 32 who posted to both: 373 in all. I was not able to locate 70 members with any degree of confidence: 65 in Help and 5 in Rambling.

To locate members and assign them to a time zone I proceeded as follows:

1. For those members who specified both a location and a time zone, I used location if location and time zone did not agree. (In most cases they did agree.) I assumed such members were giving their correct location and either did not choose a time zone (likely) or chose the wrong one (unlikely).

2. For those members who specified a time zone other than GMT but not a location, I used the time zone. Because GMT is the default time zone, I did not assign a member to GMT unless there was a confirming location specified.

3. For those members who did not specify a location or a time zone, I did a bit of snooping. If a member had a home page, I looked there for clues. In some cases I could remember where a member was located from reading past posts. If I was unfamiliar with a member's posting habits, I looked at a sampling of his/her current and past posts. Occasionally I found a clue in a member's profile (like a flag) that correlated with other information.

4. In some cases, I had to get out my globe and a map: Kentucky and Tennessee were a bit tricky because the time-zone line cuts through those states. All of Europe is one hour ahead of GMT even though part of Europe is geographically west of Greenwich. There are some half-hour time zones in India and other parts of the far east. Some locations in the southern hemisphere were on daylight saving time. But I think I got most of the assignments correct. And I found WoldClock very helpful.

5. Data for those members who did not specify a location or a time zone other than GMT and whom I could not locate by snooping were ignored for this calculation. I briefly was tempted to assign these members randomly to time zones in the same proportion as those I could locate, but I could think of no justification for doing this. And the question is not benign because such assignments can make a big difference in the results when some of those members have a high number of posts. (If they all had about the same number of posts it would not make a big difference.)
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