From: Michael Koppelman <lolife
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 11:29:16 -0700

The problem is we end up with people doing more thorough error  
analysis getting uncertainties an order of magnitude greater than  
those doing 1/SNR with no way to tell the difference. This makes it  
impossible to meaningfully do weighted averages or weighted fits. I  
always put in the comments that my uncertainties include comp scatter  
but I'm not sure that info gets to researchers who download data  
(yet). If we ask people like me to submit 1/SNR uncertainties, we are  
essentially asking them to throw away part of their data.

If we are making any effort to get people to calculate uncertainties,  
it makes sense to me that the effort should guide people to the most  
useful technique and not the easiest, especially when the most useful  
technique is pretty darn easy.

If we could flag which method we used, that would be the best of both  
worlds.

Cheers,
Michael
http://www.lolife.com/astronomy/

On Mar 15, 2006, at 7:47 PM, Walt Cooney wrote:

> I'd still argue that we only ask observers for the reciprocal S/N  
> for their
> error.  Some of the reasons why I would argue that are

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