From 8ad96ceb8675499c25bca8b734fa1f34dacefaaf Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Nicholas G Reich Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2013 14:47:40 -0500 Subject: [PATCH] added section on encoding information with formatting instead of text (bad!!) --- README.md | 2 ++ 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 5aca3e86..c876cdd1 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -131,6 +131,7 @@ In general, try to avoid coding categorical or ordinal variables as numbers. Whe data, it should be "male" or "female". The ordinal values in the data set should be "poor", "fair", and "good" not 1, 2 ,3. This will avoid potential mixups about which direction effects go and will help identify coding errors. +Always encode every piece of information about your observations using text. For example, if you are storing data in Excel and use a form of colored text or cell background formatting to indicate information about an observation ("red variable entries were observed in experiment 1.") then this information will not be exported (and will be lost!) when the data is exported as raw text. Every piece of data should be encoded as actual text that can be exported. ### The instruction list/script @@ -184,5 +185,6 @@ Contributors * [Jeff Leek](http://biostat.jhsph.edu/~jleek/) - Wrote the initial version. * [L. Collado-Torres](http://bit.ly/LColladoTorres) - Fixed typos, added links. +* [Nick Reich](http://people.umass.edu/nick/) - Added .