[R] [FORGED] Re: If else

[Rolf Turner]

Jim: I'm sure that this is much more sophisticated than anything that 
the OP ever dreamed of dealing with.  And irrespective of that, the 
issue is not about there being more than two sexes in some contexts but 
rather of the folly of treating categorical data as numeric.

Moreover your "neither male nor female" sexes have nothing whatever to 
do with missing values.  Missing means that the value wasn't *observed*, 
not the values was weird/strange/unfamiliar.

cheers,

Rolf

-- 
Technical Editor ANZJS
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276

On 01/11/15 12:45, Jim Lemon wrote:
> Having had to face this problem myself more than once, I sympathize with
> Ted's argument. First let me confess that I regard sex as a measure of the
> reproductive phenotype. Given the ongoing experimentation with both sex and
> gender, I have had to add "U" (Unstated - includes all those acronyms that
> can be mistaken for gamma hydroxy butyrate) to "M" and "F" in a dataset or
> two.
>
> Even worse is the crap shoot of sex chromosomes. While XYY is not much of a
> problem at all, Turner's Syndrome (XO) is neither female (although they
> appear to be) nor male. Given a reasonably large sample (the dream of
> some), nature usually provides a few permutations that, while we know what
> they are, don't really fit comfortably in either "M" or "F".