RealityCheck: moderators are trolling and treating me unfairly

Discussion in 'Site Feedback' started by Quantum Quack, Jul 29, 2012.

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  1. RealityCheck Banned Banned

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    Please do! I'm counting on it. Thanks again. Your thread here is very useful for many reasons, especially for the future of Sciforums itself. Cheers!

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  3. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    RealityCheck:

    You may not be aware, but ALL CAPS in discussion forums such as this one is usually taken to indicate SHOUTING. Shouting at people in an attempt to bludgeon them into agreeing with you or giving in is unlikely to be a very productive strategy, especially with moderators on a forum such as this one.

    I suggest you consider simmering down a little. And please stop SHOUTING, because it's starting to get through my shout-proof goggles, and that's a tad annoying.
     
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  5. Gustav Banned Banned

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    whats to like about thuggish punks?

    /snorts perplexedly
     
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  7. prometheus viva voce! Registered Senior Member

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    This is quite clearly not going to get anywhere, so I rather suspect this will be my last post in this thread. My post to farsight was hardly what I would call intimidating. It was a call to farsight to revisit a past discussion that had been had and have a think about whether he really wanted to have the same discussion again, where he clearly showed that his understanding of GR is far less advanced than he would have people believe. That was one of my posts in that thread, another one is a short warning to behave yourslef which obviously went unheeded since the thread was eventually closed and the final one was to point out to you that you were being a hypocrite telling people to stop posting off topic when you started the topic, posted 10 subsequent posts and not a single one was on topic.

    I didn't read any posts as trolling until your post #12 (where you tell brucep off for pointing out the aether doesn't exist, which is a experimentally verified fact). Syne's post #15 could be considered trolling (the one you reported), maybe it wasn't the most helpful posting ever but I do agree with his assessment broadly speaking. By page 2 the bickering from you reached fever pitch.

    The sum total of mod action on this thread has been to close it. We would have been justified in passing out an official warning to you (you received 2 informal warnings, one from me and one from AN which you ignored). I also would have been justified in giving a warning to emil, who posted the content of a PM without permission from the sender. We really aren't the power hungry megalomanics you are portraying us to be.

    For completeness, the thread this is all about is here.

    Comparing sciforums to the coffee houses of old is a joke. I challenge you and anyone else to find a single scientific paper that originated from a forum discussion (research of web forums themselves are excluded, of course). As I said, look through mine or AN's thread history and you will see a bunch of questions relating to the work we are doing, but I can state with almost 100% certainty that there has never been a collaboration that has started on a web forum with a question asked by a non scientist that has led to real science being done. What sciforums does it does well, but scientific research is really not one of those things. Thinking you can come of the street with little or no scientific training or education and pose a question that will lead to new research being done is not only extremely arrogant on your part, it's also pretty insulting to those of us who have worked hard for many years don't you think?

    I repeat, in science all opinions are equally valid - they're equally irrelevant. If you have an uneducated opinion then voicing it on here is going to lead to no change in our scientific understanding whatsoever. If you can't back up your idea / opinion / whatever you want to call it with evidence (and that means published and peer reviewed work, or a mathematical derivation) then your opinion means nothing, and you might as well make up a fairy story - at least that might have some entertainment value.
     
  8. Gustav Banned Banned

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    writing off a medium that is in its infancy is...well......just thuggish

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    lets examine doom9.....

    Due to the concentration of forum members who have technical backgrounds, there have been various software projects developed and maintained by forum members. These include:

    * Media Player Classic Home Cinema, a lightweight media player using the DirectShow API
    * ffdshow-tryouts, a collection of free software codecs, most notably libavcodec, provided as DirectShow filters

    Doom9 members have also contributed significantly to various software projects, including:

    * x264, a free software H.264 video encoder
    * VirtualDubMod, a video capture and linear editing tool

    The VirtualDubMod project began after many modifications to VirtualDub were posted on the Doom9 forums.​


    the development of open software tend to be a collaborative effort played out online in forums

    the crux of the matter. these goons have been slogging and slaving and have nothing to show for it. no original thought so they hysterically shill for an orthodoxy established by real scientists

    *The cognitive scientist Walter Pitts was an autodidact. He taught himself mathematical logic, psychology, and neuroscience. He was one of the scientists who laid the foundations of cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics.

    *Mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan was largely self-taught in mathematics. Ramanujan is notable as an autodidact for having developed thousands of new mathematical theorems despite having no formal education in mathematics, contributing substantially to the analytical theory of numbers, elliptic functions, continued fractions, and infinite series.​


    now
    let peer review on a journal be equivalent to mod goons on sci...

    But peer review is not simply synonymous with quality. Many landmark scientific papers (like that of Watson and Crick, published just five decades ago) were never subjected to peer review, and as David Shatz has pointed out, “many heavily cited papers, including some describing work which won a Nobel Prize, were originally rejected by peer review.” Shatz, a Yeshiva University philosophy professor, outlines some of the charges made against the referee process in his 2004 book Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. In a word, reviewers are often not really “conversant with the published literature”; they are “biased toward papers that affirm their prior convictions”; and they “are biased against innovation and/or are poor judges of quality.” Reviewers also seem biased in favor of authors from prestigious institutions. Shatz describes a study in which “papers that had been published in journals by authors from prestigious institutions were retyped and resubmitted with a non-prestigious affiliation indicated for the author. Not only did referees mostly fail to recognize these previously published papers in their field, they recommended rejection.”

    The Cochrane Collaboration, an international healthcare analysis group based in the U.K., published a report in 2003 concluding that there is “little empirical evidence to support the use of editorial peer review as a mechanism to ensure quality of biomedical research, despite its widespread use and costs.” The Royal Society has also studied the effects of peer review. As the chairman of the investigating committee told a British newspaper in 2003, “We are all aware that some referees’ reports are not worth the paper they are written on. It’s also hard for a journal editor when reports come back that are contradictory, and it’s often down to a question of a value judgment whether something is published or not.” He also pointed out that peer review has been criticized for being used by the scientific establishment “to prevent unorthodox ideas, methods, and views, regardless of their merit, from being made public” and for its secretiveness and anonymity. Some journals have started printing the names of each article’s referees; the British Medical Journal (BMJ), for instance, decided to discontinue anonymous peer reviews in 1999. The new system, called “open peer review,” allows for more transparency and accountability but may discourage junior scientists from critically reviewing the work of more senior researchers for fear of reprisal.

    and a look at the future...

    Beyond the many criticisms of peer review—some new, some perennial—two recent developments are especially intriguing. First, the open-access journals, which already make use of the Internet as their basic means of publication, are now finding ways to incorporate many so-called “Web 2.0” tools for collaboration, comment, and criticism. So, for example, a forthcoming multidisciplinary academic journal called Philica seeks to institute a peer-review process that is “transparent” (meaning that “reviews can be seen publicly”) and “dynamic” (“because opinions can change over time, and this is reflected in the review process”). Instead of following the print-journal model of publishing articles after peer-review, Philica will publish articles before peer-review. “When somebody reviews your article, the impact of that review depends on the reviewer’s own reviews,” the Philica website says. “This means that the opinion of somebody whose work is highly regarded carries more weight than the opinion of somebody whose work is rated poorly. A person’s standing, and so their impact on other people’s ratings, changes constantly as part of the dynamic Philica world. Ideas and opinions change all the time—Philica lets us see this. This really is publishing like never before.”

    Another new open-access journal is likely to have an even bigger impact on the scientific community. The Public Library of Science will be launching its seventh journal in November 2006, called PLoS ONE. In an implicit challenge to Nature and Science, PLoS ONE will be the first of the group’s journals to publish articles in all areas of science and medicine. Articles published in the new journal will undergo peer review, but some of the standard criteria that older journals use to screen out articles—like “degree of advance” or “interest to a general reader”—won’t be used by PLoS ONE reviewers; all papers of scientific merit will be posted to the public record. Only weeks (not months) will go by before a submitted article is published, since instead of coming out periodically issue-by-issue, PLoS ONE will be in a state of continuous publication. A more public review process will continue after publication, as readers will be able to rate, annotate, and comment on papers, and authors can respond to their comments. The original paper will remain as such, but comments, revisions, and updates will orbit nearby, an electronic Talmud on every article of significance.

    It is easy to believe, in reading the plans for this new publication, that it truly represents “the first step” in a wonderful “revolution” (as the Public Library of Science puts it). But it is worth remembering that gates and gatekeepers serve the important function of keeping out barbarians; it would be regrettable if the world of science journals came to suffer the sort of “trolling” and “flaming” so common today in comments on blogs and Internet discussion boards. It would be unfortunate if the deliberate, measured character of scientific research and discourse were lost to a culture of speed, hype, and quick-hit comments.

    The second major development is that traditional peer review is under reconsideration even within the heart of establishment scientific publishing. This summer, the journal Nature is experimenting with a similar system of public review. Although the journal’s articles will continue to go through the standard closed peer review process, a public version of peer review will be working in parallel: certain submissions will be posted online to solicit reader feedback, in hopes that experts will voluntarily review the articles. If this experiment shows that posted “pre-prints” receive enough attention online, Nature will apparently consider altering its traditional peer review practices. The journal is meanwhile sponsoring an ongoing online debate about peer review, with articles about the pros, cons, and future of refereeing.​


    most peculiar that
    i bet doom9 and its ilk will be similarly excluded
     
  9. Gustav Banned Banned

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    goon says what?


     
  10. Mazulu Banned Banned

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  11. Emil Valued Senior Member

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    2,801
    Have you an inferiority complex as scientist?
    You are not able to do a review ?
    You are only able to reproduce the mainstream ?
    You can recognize a valuable idea only if others say that and it was "published and peer reviewed work" ?
    This attitude is closer to a teacher than a scientist.

    Personally, I'm less interested in ideas that I found in Wikipedia.
    I am interested in new ideas and reasoning to support these new ideas.
    It is embarrassing that these are considered as "Trolling / Meaningless Post Content"
     
  12. Gustav Banned Banned

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    i got two words....resign, prometheus
     
  13. Mazulu Banned Banned

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    Technically, scientific journals/peer reviewed work/math derivations are not the final arbiter of what is evidence. How nature behaves under experimental conditions is the final arbiter of evidence. As a result of your definition of "evidence", there exists a whole set of natural phenomena that doesn't see the light of day because the idea(ingenuity)->experiment cycle is blocked. We could have been jetting around the solar system by now if the physics community wasn't so anal about mathematical proofs. Sometimes, it's about ingenuity. If the Wright brothers were mathematicians, airplanes would be a fairy story.
     
  14. prometheus viva voce! Registered Senior Member

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    2,045
    No, doom9 and it's ilk are excluded because it isn't scientific research. It's software development. A totally worthwhile endeavour too, but not scientific research.

    On the contrary, I'm rather proud of the slogging and slaving that helped me acheive the recognition of my peers and a job that pays extremely well that I love doing on the cutting edge of physics research.

    Feel free to try again. I'm finding your efforts rather entertaining.
     
  15. prometheus viva voce! Registered Senior Member

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    There are such mythical creatures as experimental physicists you know. I would counter that if your crazy ideas are true, then why are you limited to posts on internet forums and are not enjoying the adulation of the scientific community for creating whatever breakthrough you think you've managed to create?
     
  16. Mazulu Banned Banned

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    Because I like to chat on sciforum when I should be preparing the experiment.:shrug:
     
  17. Gustav Banned Banned

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    disingenuous and narrowminded political garbage

    disregarding the idiotic qualifiers (non scientist/real science) that disingenuously constrict the proposition, we shall eyeball x264 that got its start from...

    H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC (Advanced Video Coding) is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video. The final drafting work on the first version of the standard was completed in May 2003.

    H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO)/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) joint working group, the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). The product of this partnership effort is known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 – MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content.

    ...and resulted in....

    x264 has some notable psychovisual enhancements which help to increase the visual quality.

    * Adaptive quantisation in two modes using VAQ. The second mode, a later addition, adapts the strength per frame in an attempt to improve the quality.[6]
    * Psychovisual Rate–distortion optimization which attempts to maintain a similar complexity. The complexity is measured using a combination of SSD and SATD.[7]
    * Macroblock-tree rate control which controls the quality by tracking how often parts of the frame are used for predicting future frame​


    ...innovation by scientists collaborating on the doom9 forum

    oh
    pardon
    make that "fake scientists" :bugeye:


    mend your thuggish ways or get out
     
  18. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    I don't really buy any of that ("clunkiness" or "ease" of italics or bold). To the extent that you are correct about capitals being better at drawing attention, you undermine your suggestion that they do not constitute "shouting." That is, in fact, exactly what SHOUTING is.

    You'd do better at all of the issues you raise there by simply writing shorter, more direct posts. I tend to write skimmers off, and maybe occasionally call them on their superficiality if they're really bothersome, but if you're determined to ensure that even that audience gets what you have to say, there is no real alternative to simply writing shorter, punchier posts. Spend a few minutes editing down your posts before submitting - I predict you'll have a lot more success.

    I hope you weren't offended. It was not my intention at all, mate!

    Well, thanks for that anyhow.
     
  19. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    I suspect that better examples might be found in places like the unmanned space exploration forum, or the galaxy zoo forum.

    Consider Hanny's Voorwerp - discovered by Dutch School teacher, Hanny Van Arkel.
    Or the Pea Galaxy - also from the Galaxy Zoo project.

    I can't think of any similar examples off hand from the unmanned space exploration forum, but I do know that they are frequented by people involved in the Gallileo project, and the martian rovers. I also recall that they have taken advice from posters on the forum for photo opportunities.

    I'm not sure that any of this really helps your case, per se though, because both of those fora are far more strictly moderated than SciForums is, and most of the posters complaining about the behaviour of Prometheus would find themselves permanently banned inside of a week.
     
  20. Gustav Banned Banned

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    12,575

    good show trippy
    still tho i refuse to feed the prom troll by constricting the scope of science
    your "better examples", astronomy, is a subset(?) of physics
    it is obvious the troll would like to consider that the only legitimate field in science
     
  21. MacGyver1968 Fixin' Shit that Ain't Broke Valued Senior Member

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  22. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    :Shrugs:
    On the one hand they're successful because they're strictly moderated and have a narrow focus.
    On the other hand, what use is a hypothesis that can produce no testable predictions?

    Or, let me put it to you another way. If I produce an Aether theory without understanding General Relativity, how can I legitimately claim that my Aether theory produces a better match to experiments than relativity.

    We have Alternatives Theories and Pseudoscience sub-fora. What harm in asking or otherwise encouraging people to discuss their Alternative Theories in the Alternative Theory sub-forum? Equally, if your alternative theory can't stand up to scruitiny by people with an understanding of the state of play of the mainstream, what makes anyone think it's going to be easier to get it published?
     
  23. Syne Sine qua non Valued Senior Member

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    3,515
    I guess you missed:
     
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