The Founders of SHRARE

Bonnie scratched the ground in front of her nervously, making the two other rabbits huddling to either side of her shiver with anticipation.

Finally Snow Ears looked up from his calculation and said, "We have our results, 196 respondents."

Fluff, the youngest in the group, said, "But there were a lot of animals who could not be bothered to answer the questions, and this does not show in the results."

"Yes, I just realized it. Then again, our service is very niche. So just focusing on those who feel that they need the service is a lot more practical because it can help us understand who needs what kind of information."

Cotton Ball, a large grey rabbit, said, "The smaller animals appear to need information more than the bigger ones."

"That is because most of your respondents are small mammals and birds. But Bonnie had collected a lot of information from the large mammals, especially the deer and cows by the border country. In fact we got responses from 68 birds, 57 small mammals and 71 large mammals."

Bonnie stretched forward, and sniffed at the survey forms. "How do we interpret all this data?" she asked.

"I guess we can use the cross tabulation method," Snow Ears said. "First we arrange the data by order of location, then by species and finally by quality of source of data."

"What about the 'Concerns' portion of the survey?" Fluff asked.

"Oh we only look at that after we figure out which animal need good information the most. No point in comparing that portion of the data now, because we may only end up with nothing but frequencies of ones, which will not help us interpret anything at all," Snow Ears explained.

So they did what Snow Ears suggested and he drew up the cross tabulated data below.

Area	Species	Good	Average	Bad
.	Bird	9	7	5
Canopy	Small Mammal	5	13	6
.	Large Mammal	5	12	8
.	Bird	2	5	17
Floor	Small Mammal	9	6	4
.	Large Mammal	10	5	6
.	Bird	11	4	8
Border	Small Mammal	3	5	6
.	Large Mammal	7	10	8
	Total	61	67	68

"Oh my," Cotton Ball said. "That's very complicated. What do we even look at?"

Snow Ears said, "We find the segment which shows the highest rating of 'Bad' for 'Information Source'. Now let's see…" He ran his nose down the table, once, twice and finally settled on Forest Floor Bird. "Here it is. This is the one - 17 unhappy forest floor birds."

"What now?" Fluff asked.

"Now we break down their information concerns and find out what kind of information they need." Snow Ears collected the survey forms on Forest Floor Bird and drew up the following table.

Floor Bird Concerns	Good	Average	Bad
Education	0	0	1
Food	0	1	2
Mate	0	0	5
Songs	0	1	3
News	1	1	3
Territory	1	2	3
Total	2	5	17

"Hmm, interesting," Snow Ears said. "This species appear to be very interested in mating issues. Although we only allow each respondent to choose one concern, I won't be surprise if their interest in songs, news and territory is also related to finding mates."

"Yeah! We can start a business," Bonnie said as she hopped and twirled about them.

"Not yet," Snow Ears said, though he could not stop himself from letting out a shy chuckle of glee. "We must test to see that they really want what they say they want. We must do trial runs first."

Cotton Ball asked, "We need to have a name. A good name, so everyone will know who we are and what we do."

Bonnie squealed, "Let's call ourselves 'Super Hares and Rabbits Association of Relevant Entropy' or SHRARE for short."

Loud hear, hear and hurray greeted her idea. Then the four of them huddled together as Snow Ears detailed out what kind of information they had to look for and where to look for them. They talked and whispered and snickered until late into the night.

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