Eric Bohlman <eb******@earthlink.net> wrote:
I would not use any dash or hyphen, because there is a widespread
convention in statistical tables that a hyphen indicates an exact
value of zero. (It's more zero that 0 or 0.0, which indicate just
a value that is zero when rounded to the precision used.) Those
conventions
I assume you mean a "structural zero," as in "number of male
subjects who became pregnant."
I think that would be rather be "." 'not applicable', whereas
"-" might indicate the total number of pregrancies in a hi-tech company
where people are just too busy to reproduce. It's a bit debatable, of
course, whether male pregnancy is logically impossible (hence N/A) or
just currently a low frequency (exact zero, to be exact) phenomenon.
ObHTML: In principle, you could use
<abbr title="Not Applicable">N/A</abbr>
or
<span title="Not applicable">.</span>
to explain the notations. But in practice, that will hardly help - the
notations should be explained explicitly, unless the audience can be
expected to be familiar with them.
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