Decay VII: Supplemental Material, Excel Workbook mmc1

12. april 2015

As supplemental material to the Editor’s Note Elsevier distributes an Excel workbook named mmc1, “in order to enable others to verify the empirical claims made in the Article and correct any additional errors.”

The workbook mmc1 was created by user Elna on May 11, 2009, 20:45 UTC, and was last modified by user Vig on Feb. 13, 2014, 21:39 UTC. It contains six sheets named:

1. Data Fert.1,2,FN & IQ sources
2. D IQ sort
3. IQ D sort
4. statsb7910
5. DRAFTS & Sorting
6. Orientering

The workbook has obviously been authored by a person with a very limited grasp of the capabilities of the Excel application. Most values are filled out by hand, formulas are used to limited extent, and the author has evidently had great difficulties with the simple task of sorting the data. This is clear from the sheet DRAFTS & Sorting, which has been used for that purpose, by copy-pasting data from other parts of the workbook, sorting, and copy-pasting back, or referencing back, to the sorting sheet. A more proficient author would have made use of Excel’s named ranges, made use of its table functionality which allows sorting on any column, made use of arrays, made use of the VLOOKUP() function and other instruments that makes such tasks easy to perform, easy to understand and much less error-prone.

Furthermore, the sheet DRAFTS & Sorting contains values that have been copy-pasted as values from other sheets or workbooks, that are not available. From comments it appears that at least one sheet is missing from the workbook published by Elsevier namely FN-raternes virkning¹. It is impossible to derive any sense of the numbers in sheet DRAFTS & Sorting as there are no column annotations or any information to help the reader determine what is going on.