On Jul 14, 2006, at 3:07 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
Try taking the overall NA data, and removing the NA people; the remaining data should be relatively unbiased (e.g. the Asia/Europe ratio should be fairly close to the "actual" value). Do the same for the European and Asian meetings, only there remove the respective "local" numbers (i.e. European and Asian). Judicious comparison of results should give you a pretty close values for the true overall NA/European/Asian ratios.
OK, so I have just gone through an analysis of this. Like any good researcher, I started with a simplifying assumption and then criticized my own assumptions.
Assumption: if a person is from a country, when they list their home address, they will list the country. So I can look for names of countries.
Criticism: US folks don't do that. They do well to get a two letter postal identifier in for their state. Mea Culpa. So the results one gets from this analysis will not reflect US population. (note: I did find 61 I-Ds that listed that the person was from the United States.)
Criticism: I found two internet drafts that take it upon themselves to list countries - one of them appears to try to list all of the countries in the world.
Criticism: "Aruba Networks" is a company. "Chad" is a common name for men. Atlanta is in "Georgia". And so on.
Assumption: the "we" in question is folks who post internet drafts. Attendance at an IETF meeting or being on the mailing list doesn't qualify for consideration here.
Criticism: there are SO many ways to approach that one. This is the assumption I made for this analysis. So there.
So I wound up putting a bit of work into this. If you don't like my analysis, do your own analysis :-)
I started from the Wikipedia list of countries. This is a very good article, BTW: it lists about 253 regions and peoples that think of themselves as countries whether anyone else thinks so or not, including self-ruled regions of Denmark (Greenland), Islands protected by nations (Guam, the Falklands), Cities that act a lot like countries (Hong Kong), people groups that don't like other people groups they live with (Palestine), and so on.
Basically, I assumed that if someone said they lived or worked at some address in a named place, they probably did.
Criticism: I know of some people who probably don't know where they live. I fly more than some of them :-)
By my analysis, the people that are involved in the IETF claim in Internet Drafts to have mailing addresses in: United States, Germany, France, Finland, Canada, Japan, China, Belgium, Sweden, Korea, United Kingdom, Israel, India, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, Norway, Australia, Netherlands, Ireland, Hungary, Singapore, Portugal, Turkey, Bulgaria, Denmark, Taiwan, Argentina, Egypt, Poland, Hong Kong, Venezuela, Croatia, New Zealand, Syria, Sudan, Romania, Lebanon, Mongolia, Greece, Thailand, or Costa Rica. Yes, there is an order to that list - the countries at the beginning have a lot of I- Ds posted, and the ones at the tail have one I-D posted.
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