Editing 2894: Research Account

Jump to: navigation, search

Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.

The edit can be undone. Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
Latest revision Your text
Line 14: Line 14:
 
In the title text, he says that his research focuses on “extreme pettiness and unwillingness to let anything go” (in all caps), further reinforcing the reason that he is doing this solely to win an argument. It is possible this is a pun on different meanings of the word "focus" - while the question about the focus of one's research is typically about the subject matter they are researching (raft building in fire ants, etc), Cueball appears to be writing about what drives his desire to do research. Similarly, Cueball is not doing research INTO pettiness, but rather is focusing entirely on his pettiness as his main reason to perform research and achieve his goals. Of course, there is a focused area of research related to individuals who obsessively pursue matters disproportionately to their severity, who are known as {{w|querulant|querulants}}.
 
In the title text, he says that his research focuses on “extreme pettiness and unwillingness to let anything go” (in all caps), further reinforcing the reason that he is doing this solely to win an argument. It is possible this is a pun on different meanings of the word "focus" - while the question about the focus of one's research is typically about the subject matter they are researching (raft building in fire ants, etc), Cueball appears to be writing about what drives his desire to do research. Similarly, Cueball is not doing research INTO pettiness, but rather is focusing entirely on his pettiness as his main reason to perform research and achieve his goals. Of course, there is a focused area of research related to individuals who obsessively pursue matters disproportionately to their severity, who are known as {{w|querulant|querulants}}.
  
It is not uncommon for online forms to include fields like these, where it's unclear what, if anything, will be done with the input, and therefore how much it matters what is entered. It's unlikely that anyone would have the capacity to review all the freetext answers submitted, and in any case, by the time they did so, Cueball would presumably have already accessed the materials he wanted.
+
It is not uncommon for online forms to include fields like these, where it's unclear what, if anything, will be done with the input, and therefore how much it matters what is entered. It's unlikely that anyone would have the capacity to review all the freetext answers submitted, and in any case, by the time they did so, Cueball would presumably have already accessed the materials he wanted. They may be able to mine the data for insight about their users, or simply be collecting data against a vague ambition to do so in the future. However, even if nothing is subsequently done with the data, the very existence of the field may be serving a purpose, by deterring some people from completing the registration for frivolous purposes (though as Cueball illustrates, this is not infallible).
 +
 
  
 
==Transcript==
 
==Transcript==

Please note that all contributions to explain xkcd may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see explain xkcd:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!

To protect the wiki against automated edit spam, we kindly ask you to solve the following CAPTCHA:

Cancel | Editing help (opens in new window)