Well, I am kind of back for a couple days, and then off through Labor Day.
The sequence that the annual counts appear in is not quite random, and in a twisted way - it is logical.
I think at the bottom of the ABA form, it says to put them in any order - but I did not. Some of the possibilities I considered were the same sequence as the top, or alpha order by the two position code, etc.
The ABA report allows reporting ten areas for annual counts, and so did the first versions of the BD program. But - I knew that in some years, I had more than ten areas that were eligible for annual reporting. In order to make some sense of it, I assumed that if you had more than ten areas that were over the threshold, you would have to select some for reporting, and you would probably want to report the ones that you had really impressive numbers for. As a result, in order to get the ten most impressive numbers first, the annual counts are sorted by Percent_of_ABA_Threshold (descending)
However, the new BD version will show up to 70 count areas, so it will not arbitrarily cut off important counts - but the ABA report is still restricted to 10 areas. So how should the BD report be sorted? I still like using percent of threshold, but if there is a consensus on another sequence, we can change it.
If there are reasons for other sort sequences, we can put in a switch - but I kind of hate to, since we have already added some new options to the next version, due out before the end of the year. |