[ssml] Re: Guidance intended (Saar)

[Kevin Karplus]

I have been accused of rudeness before for answering questions with
the admonition that the asker should try a simple google search,
rather than wasting the time of all the readers of the list with
questions that can be answered easily that way.

I will probably be accused of such rudeness in the future also, as I
do not intend to simply ignore questions that are reasonably on topic
but easily answered.  Pat of my job as a professor is to teaach people
how to find out things for themselves.

Note: I did not refer to the question as "idiotic or trivial"---it was
a very reasonable question about where to find DNA data.  I even
answered it with a list of URLs for 5 databases that took me 10
seconds to find.  I have taken to answering some of the easy search
questions with the search technique and the the search results, so
that people with limited search skills can see how to do it for
themselves.

A reasonable followup would have been a discussion of the strengths
and weaknesses of the databases (coverage, data documentation, ...),
which would require user knowledge not easily found with google---that
is where mailing lists like this one have their greatest strengths.
In fact, this may have been what the original questioner was really
looking for, and just phrased the question poorly.  That question I
would have had to refer to someone else, as I have not worked with the
microarray databases myself.  I do often refer interesting questions
along those lines to my colleagues.

Note: it was someone *defending* the practice of asking questions that
are easily answered with google queries who referred to "idiotic and
trivial questions"---not necessarily meaning the question that started
this discussion.

------------------------------------------------------------
Kevin Karplus 	karplus at soe.ucsc.edu	http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
Professor of Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
(Senior member, IEEE)	(Board of Directors & Chair of Education Committee, ISCB)
life member (LAB, Adventure Cycling, American Youth Hostels)
Effective Cycling Instructor #218-ck (lapsed)
Affiliations for identification only.