This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
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Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
I promised that all donations to Pharyngula for a couple of weeks would go to the Ada Initiative, less the price of taking my wife out to a nice dinner; I’ll be sending them the money on 1 October. I figured I’d fill you in on how things are going.
OK, I splurged. I took my wife out to the fanciest restaurant in Morris, Minnesota, and we just went nuts and ordered a fabulous meal. I hope you’ll all forgive me: dinner for two was -$21.18. A little extravagance was acceptable, I think.
The sum remaining is $1756.82. You could add more to that anytime — just click on that big “DONATE” button on the sidebar.
Too busy admiring the vast piles of completed grading on my desk. It’s like my little conquered empire.
I thought those didn’t exist! The countdown clock for Emma Watson, which was supposedly a 4chan effort to attack her for her pro-feminism speech at the UN, has now been revealed to be a marketing stunt by a PR company hired to discredit 4chan.
I have foolishly scheduled the exams in my two classes back-to-back…so it’s therefore twice the usual size. Furthermore, like a good liberal-artsy professor, my questions include a couple of subjective, explain-why-you-think-this-answer-is-right sort of questions that are going to be hellish to grade. How do you humanities professors cope?
Now sinking into a sea of red ink…
Most of you won’t have heard of him; he and I collaborated on research on zebrafish goosecoid about 20 years ago, and were good friends at the University of Utah, although we drifted out of contact during the usual academic wanderings since. I’ve just now learned that he died on his boat while living in the Dominican Republic.
We had some discussion here a few years ago about implementing some scoring method for comments — there were some proponents who thought it would be a useful way to get community input. I’ve always been dead-set against it. It turns out I have scholarly justification now.
Abi Sutherland discusses a psychology paper at Making Light, which examined the effect of up- and down-voting on large user communities at CNN, IGN, Breitbart (oops, there’s a dollop of poison in the database), and allkpop, a Korean entertainment site. Cheng, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Leskovec proposed to test a prediction of the operant conditioning model, that peer feedback would lead to a gradual improvement in the quality of posts. That’s not what they saw.
This is the lounge. You can discuss anything you want, but you will do it kindly.
Status: Heavily Moderated; Previous thread
I promised to pass along everything donated to Pharyngula until the end of the month to the Ada Initiative, less whatever it costs to take my wife out to dinner this weekend. You’re a generous bunch: the total so far is $1583. I know many of you also donated to Janet Stemwedel’s similar fund drive, and that’s just fine — we’re not competing, and it’s all good no matter how the money gets there!
