"What day is it? Do days exist without calendars? Does time pass when there are no human hands left to wind the clocks?"
-- Howard Koch, Invasion from Mars, the 1938 radio play based on H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds

Survey 2.2

An Educational Experience

Martian Time Survey 2.2 provides an educational experience for the newcomer to the subject of Martian time. To access concise background information, click the Info button next to each response option to each question. In many cases, these brief info topics include links to source documents containing more detailed material.

Responding to the Survey

In order to protect the integrity of the data, survey responses must be submitted via e-mail.

The Launch Response Message buttons post to my e-mail address.

Your e-mail address will only be used to guard against repeat responses and will not be used for any other purpose.

If the Launch Response Message button, fails to launch the response message or if it launched without containing data, click the Launch Failure button. This will take you to a default page from which you can download the RTF version of the Survey.

If the Launch Response Message button worked properly for your system, click the Continue with Survey button to proceed to the next page of the Survey.

Note: In the Internet Explorer version of the Survey, the Launch Failure button and the Continue with Survey button only appear after you have clicked the Launch Response Message button.

Some pages in the survey redesign use JavaScript that in Internet Explorer conditionally displays text and questions based on the response to a previous question on the page. These blocks of conditional text do not currently display in the Netscape browser. If you are using Netscape, or if your e-mail system does not transmit data from HTML forms, please download the zipped RTF file, unzip it, mark the file electronically using your word processor application, and e-mail the marked file to marcus@martiana.org.

Adding New Material

Please feel free to write up general information, pro arguments, or con arguments on issues in which you are interested. You can submit such information by clicking the button for each specific issue in the Info files. Your submissions should, however, be concise and to the point. The Info files are intended to be a quick reference guide for survey respondents. I will be happy to link from the Info files to documents containing lengthier material, and you will see that I have done so in cases where such source material exists. The survey redesign includes buttons for submitting new ideas on specific questions. You can do this by clicking the button provided with each question. You can also suggest new questions by clicking the button at the top of each Info document. All three of these types of buttons open a message to me in your e-mail application. The address and the subject are autofilled, but the body is blank; you have to write the message.

In order to properly baseline the collection of data, I will add new material to the survey at specific intervals, since the addition of such material will influence the data collection process.

Reporting Results

Results of the original survey as of 29 July 2000 were presented, "The Martian Time Poll: One Martian Year of Data," at the Third International Convention of the Mars Society. Results as of 1 February 2001 will be appended to the online version of this presentation.

The results of the Martian Time Survey 2.2 will be presented at a future Mars Society convention. If feasible, periodic results of the new survey may be provided online; however, one drawback of the new survey is that organizing the results is a much more labor-intensive effort.

Acknowledgements

I see this effort as a synthesis of both the existing on-line survey and the very fine work that Mark Knoke and others did during 1999 in organizing the periodic e-mail vote in the Martian Time Virtual Conference. I'd like to capture the best of both of these preceding efforts and also build on them with new ideas. Everyone who contributes to this effort will be listed in this "Acknowledgements" section, as well as in presentations of this material at future symposia.

My thanks to the following people for contributing information to the Martian Time Survey project:

Gard E Abrahamsen
Matt Arnold
Jean-Luc Azra
Frans Blok
Jim Brown
Allen W. Bryan, Jr.
Christian Commarond
Anthony Davis
Jeandré Du Toit
Gary Fisher
François Forget
Carol Foster
Bruce Grant
Alan Hensel
Leon Heron
Bruce Jakosky
Ian Kelly
Peter Kokh
Mark Knoke
Lance Latham
Shaun Moss
Dorothee Mounier
Linda Naughton
Terry Phelan
Hans-Joachim Schneider
Bill Woods

I would also like to thank the following individuals for beta-testing the new survey:

Jeandré Du Toit
Alan Hensel
Mark Knoke

Finally, I would also like to thank the following individuals for translating the survey from English into other languages:

Hans-Joachim Schneider & Peter Collier (Deutsch)
Pablo Flores (Español & Русский)
François Guesdon (Français)

Ad Martem!
Tom Gangale