Reply #17: Well, I didn't

[Febble]

Kathy is wrong.

I can supply documentary evidence in the form of email exchanges that took place before the publication of the April 12th document.

Yes, the formulas are easy to derive. And certainly I contributed them to the group, in form of a spreadsheet emailed to the group on April 7th. The April 12th edition of the USCV actually acknowledges this, although Baiman rightly also assumes responsibility for his own version, which, although algebraically equivalent, produce a different measure, as he was interested in deriving response rates, whereas I was interested in deriving the ratio between them (and taking a log).

Ron continued to deny that the ratio was a useful measure until some time later, and may still do so. He nonetheless includes a derivation in his Appendix C to his current working paper.

How either Ron or Kathy can claim that a spreadsheet sent to USCV on April 7th can be derived from a document dated April 12th is somewhat mystifying - in fact I just emailed Ron for clarification. Apparently he is not in fact claiming I "filched" the formula but derived it from his "K and B". Seeing as what "K and B" are, in Ron's notation, are the response rates for Kerry and Bush, it is not surprising that these variables appear in my formula seeing as what I was trying to derive was the ratio between them.

To my knowledge, Ron does not hold copyright in differential response rates. I thought Mitofsky was supposed to have invented those.