On Sep 13, 2009, at 11:22 PM, Ole Jacobsen wrote:
How is any of this relevant to an EXPERIMENT ???
A maxim about experimentation: If the design of and data resulting
from any experiment are made available, people may use these results
to test hypotheses that were not necessarily envisioned by the
experiment designers. In other words, people are likely to do things
with the result of the experiment that we don't necessarily have in
mind. This is a given, and is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, it
is how a great many discoveries are made.
But the experimenters (and/or their sponsors) are not without
liability in today's unfortunately litigious world. By making the
results available, we have made some level of express or implied
warranty about those results. There may also be some liability toward
the experimental subjects (those of us with RFID tags, or those of us
interacting with tagged persons). For example, people might use the
experimental results in prosecution of patent lawsuits. If there are
errors in the data, or if it can be argued that there were flaws in
the experiment that were not disclosed to the users of the data, we
could potentially be liable for damages.
So any collection, retention, and/or release of data has to be
protected by explicit disclosure of policy and known limitation. The
"implicit warranty" has to be made explicit, and in our case it most
likely had better explicitly say that we're not making any assertions
about the validity of the data, the collection method, the names or
locations of the participants, or anything else. We should probably
also document the data retention policy, which in this case is
probably "We may dispose of these data at any time and are not
obligated to preserve or retain them or to make them available at any
future date." Further, we may wish to release the data with some sort
of explicit licensing terms that include this explicit non-warranty of
the experiment's validity.
--
Dean
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