Trade · 6 pages · 12 min
Why a scan is not a census
A scan lists only the units a reader actually captured, so anything that missed the reader is absent from the total.
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From the opening
A census, in the plain sense, tries to count every member of a group that has been defined in advance. A scan counts the items a reader captured, and units that were silent, skipped, or out of range never join that list. The opening covers only captured units enter the list, a miss is not stored as zero, and precision is not the same as coverage.
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Inside
- Only captured units enter the list
- A miss is not stored as zero
- Precision is not the same as coverage
- Name the group before claiming completeness
- Where the idea stops applying
- A distinction worth keeping
Sources
- Inventory coverage and missed reads
- Census contrasted with a partial count