5:56 PM
@Sycorax Lousy data are abundant. In many fields, good data remain costly and scarce. This was a conference on environmental statistics. Some environmental data, such as groundwater monitoring data, require a capital investment up to $100K (US) at each location and many thousands of dollars to obtain and analyze a single sample.
@Sycorax Voting irregularities can include (but are not limited to) two or more people colluding to vote for each other frequently and opening multiple accounts that vote for each other.
Sometimes such irregularities have benign explanations. That's why we institute temporally limited suspension periods, such as 7 or 30 days, and no public record of suspensions is maintained. Often people learn from the experience and when they return they manage to use the site more effectively and constructively. We have positive evidence that this is a likely outcome for one of the current cases (several user accounts for several users are presently suspended for various reasons).
