Hey, is all this turbulence from Santa and those eight tiny reindeer?

@ChristianHummeluhr Nah, 1th of April. :)

You played StackEgg yet?

@StevenJeuris Castaway quote.

And no, but I have to fly today, so maybe later.

Cool.

Where you headed?

Copenhagen, visiting home for a week.

@ChristianHummeluhr Uh ... I live there. ;p

Doing a PhD here at IT University in Amager.

Haha. And you're Dutch, no? Or am I misremembering? I'm in the Netherlands.

I'm Belgian.

But I did graduate for my Msc in Utrecht.

Ah. Oops.

I have to run in about an hour, but the NS willing, I will be back in an hour and a half or so.

Haha ... NS is awesome. ;p The dutch don't know how good they have it. Belgium is way worse (I used to go back and forth for about 4 years, so I know what I'm talking about ;p)

Talk to you later!

I was actually supposed to fly yesterday, but a tree fell on my track.

Trees next to tracks? Makes sense, NS.

Just take a cab?

It was easier to just reschedule for the next day.

And they are supposed to cut them down as they get older ... It is quite rare that happens, even though there are trees next to tracks.

There were ... many people for Assen.

Anyhow, talk to you in a little while!

Late to the party but MAN I miss NS.

@Krysta What brought you to the Netherlands?

Did a year at the Donders Institute/Max Planck in Nijmegen way back when.

Which made me decide that trains are the greatest thing since ever.

You know you've been away from the Netherlands for a long while when you stop complaining about NS.

Hi @Krysta

I was starting to think my Castaway gimmick was getting a little too apt.

Hi @Chri

Bah, hi @ChristianHummeluhr! I appreciate all the QC work you've been doing lately, it is much needed.

And I have definitely been away from the Netherlands too long--my Dutch has gotten overlaid with French almost completely. I still like the Dutch language better though.

@Krysta :O :O :O April's fools?

You must be one of the first foreigners preferring dutch over french otherwise.

Noooooo. I like Dutch. It's got vowels like rubber bands.

Or trapezoids.

You don't mind the G's?

No what's to mind?

Your throat ... :)

No, it never bothered me. I was happy to be not quite south enough to land in zachte gee territory!

You mean my territory? ;p

Yep! I wanted to learn the harde gee.

Thanks @Krysta

Ugh, Dutch vowels!

Whoever came up with the ui sound is no friend of mine :v

@ChristianHummeluhr Danish ain't much better. ;p

@ChristianHummeluhr Whoever came up with the glottal stop isn't mine either.

Oh come on, they're great! One of the first sentences in my Dutch book involved een leeuw in de tuin.

Danish is a terrible language

@Krysta Well .. that's useful. That is something you encounter every day!

It's better to think of it as a secret code

(That's the secret of why Danes mostly don't care for foreigners to learn Danish.)

What is that saying--Danish is Swedish pronounced as if it were Finnish, am I remembering that right?

No idea, but Finnish is like the opposite of Danish. Pronouncing double consonants? Heresy. Barbarism.

@ChristianHummeluhr I dated a Danish girl shortly, she was very keen on me learning Danish. :/

Probably also why it didn't work out, haha. :)

Does Finnish have conjugated infinitives like Hungarian? I love that that exists but do not understand it at all. . .

I don't know, they're pretty distinct from the rest of us

DK/NO/SE are the close ones

Yeah, Finnish is part of the Ugaric family which also contains Hungarian, which is why I asked. Thought you might have picked up some structural knowledge by geographic proximity.

I take it your field is or has to do with language, @Krysta?

Not really any more, but linguistics was my entree into cognition.

Ah. It's my weakest area, somehow it's always a bit too long between meeting someone in the area foe all the terms to stick.

Memory was my entry, incidentally.

What kind? The bio side or the behavioral side? What about you @StevenJeuris, how did you get started?

Primarily behavioral working memory, but I was drawn to the dark art of methodology.

What kinda methodology?

Bayesian statistics, mostly with Bayes factors, and some dynamical systems theoretical stuff.

What are you in if not language?

@Krysta My field (Human-Computer Interaction) is only tangentially related to cognitive sciences.

It's our theory side of things so to speak, ... we don't really do theory, but more use it to found our methodology/motivation.

Oh hey, me too! I do human factors and HCI. Did BCI for a while.

Cognitive ergonomics and whatnot.

@Krysta Cool! So does @BenBrocka. We've been hoping for some higher influx of HCI people here. We can definitely use a nice Q & A forum within our field.

It makes sense to have it here ...

Human Factors is a bit more theory-heavy no? :)

(and dare I say old school)

Yeah, I don't really see how HCI or BCI is only tangentially related to cogsci

@ChristianHummeluhr All depends on what you do I guess, it is a broad field.

I guess, but it seems like at some point, what you're interested in is either behavioral or cognitive?

I don't work with actual behavior, but I still think of what I do as cognitive science methodology rather than math or philosophy.

The main thing I am personally interested in is system design.

We just design and evaluate it taking behavior into account. ... I am however not your 'traditional' representation of HCI.

Well actually, ... I am 'traditional', ... just not contemporary. :)

E.g. this is what my thesis is about: dl.acm.org/…

So much much much more Computer Science oriented than CogSci.

Ah.

Well, I don't really see the cs emphasis from the abstract, but as I am no computer scientist, I'll take your word for it :v

@StevenJeuris we really could! HCI moves so fast, much of the knowledge is in people's heads instead of somewhere findable in the world.

Human Factors in my experience just means more in the physical world instead of only on-screen (although multimodal computer input devices are changing this, of course).

@ChristianHummeluhr A scheduled chat topic actually just came to me.

We should revisit some open meta posts and act on them.

(ironically including scheduled chat sessions)

That would be GREAT! So often good questions or real problems are raised in meta and just. . . die there.

E.g. suggested tag synonyms etc ...

Yes. Scheduled chat topics should happen. How to address time zone problem, though? Do we know what zones we're concentrated in?

@Krysta That's what I'm trying to find out in that post. ;p

Also mandatory ping for the other moderators: @Artem, @Jeromy, @Josh

Brilliant.

Not to pin this on the mods, but I think it matters a lot for a mod to support meta questions. If no diamonds put a finger in the ground and make a call about community consensus, in my experience it will peter out more often than not.

We're too small to really have consensus on most things

@ChristianHummeluhr That's why we've been hesitant to make too many decisions on our own thus far.

Agreed! Non-mods don't want to overstep.

Are either of you playing the weird Stack Exchange Egg game thing?

Is there a mobile version?

I tried it shortly but couldn't find any strategy ...

I understand not wanting to force your opinion on the community, too

There's a fine line between taking responsibility and tyranny :v

Do the mods have their own chat, or do you only talk occasionally?

@ChristianHummeluhr We do, but it is as dead. We only use it when we need to discuss sensitive matters.

That is the upside of things on CogSci lately. Although it is quiet, I have the impression the community is becoming much better at self-moderation.

Agreed. Part of the reason I came back instead of checking in and moving on again is that it seemed we finally ditched the velvet gloves.

Boo, plane delays.

@ChristianHummeluhr Better than another Lufthanza crash, right?

You flying SAS?

Norwegian.

I didn't think it was LH?

@ChristianHummeluhr Oh, I might be mistaken. I've got a horrible memory. :)

It was germanwings, which is owned by Lufthansa, so not far off.

Ah, right.

Yeah @ChristianHummeluhr I appreciate all your close votes--to have a good and useful site we need much better QC than we have, but closing questions discourages traffic I guess so we've been reluctant (I think too reluctant) to do that until you and AliceD showed up.

Traffic is good ...

'Excellent' even according to Area51.

So we definitely still are growing and no sign of decline.

I don't get any credit, I left in the first place because I was sure the site was doomed to bleed out

It's all the core users.

The traffic seems to be mainly search engine based on indirect observation of questions

I wish they'd graph those Area51 metrics, it's hard to get a sense for trends and changes with just those numbers.

@ChristianHummeluhr Which means 'mission accomplished' no? :) We are already making the internet a better place.

It seems like the people who held this place together mostly succeeded in building a valuable resource, just not in attracting anyone to help maintain it in the long term.

Which I can only attribute to sheer determination on the mods part

I ran some napkin math the other day and a good 1/5 of site answers come from five users :p

@ChristianHummeluhr Napkin math is unreliable. What do you do when you run out of space?

I wonder how exactly those numbers differ from SE mother ship or other higher-traffic/activity SEs.

Flip it over!

That is how you end up proving 2 equals 1. ;p

I've not done so yet, but maybe one day. Sure would be a revolutionary proof

Nah, I'm not denying we've still got a long way to go, it is slow progress, but it is progress.

Some things are progressing, others are regressing.

There are five times as many unanswered questions as when I first came here, and the proportion answers had dropped over 10%.

Huh? Look at the starred message here of August 27.

" Our percentage of answered questions is down to 80%. Perhaps we should focus on unanswered questions by obviously answering them, but also by sugge... - aug 27 at 15:51 by Steven Jeuris"

That's from 2014

Currently, it is at 81%.

I don't see too much difference.

We've always hovered around 80%.

I see.

Stagnating might be a better word for it. :)

Don't know ... this recent sun must have turned me into an optimist again ...

I don't really want to get into this, at any rate. As far as I am able to perceive the situation, there is progress and regress, rather than only one or the other.

Stagnant is more or less what I was going for, yes.

I'm strongly convinced that the community only exists because of the core users that stuck around against all odds, but that core didn't seem to be growing until now, basically.

(I am obviously not such a core user.)

Hmm, I don't know. I've seen decent answers being contributed by 'temporary' users, not necessarily core users.

So yeah, they don't stick around, but it does mean that some knowledgeable users find it a worthwhile source to (even when temporarily) contribute to.

I call that progress.

You can also see a clear increase in users signing up.

I think you have me at a disadvantage here, since I don't have access to mod traffic data and am going off what I can glean from area 51

But as you said ... it's more of a useful resource than a community as it stands now, and it is definitely something to work on, so I really appreciate your efforts.

Thank you. Again, while I'm more likely to call it stagnation than progress, sometimes "not dying" is an impressive result.

:)

Ugh, does Schiphol have phone charging service? Got hit by another 30 min delay, and my charger is in my luggage

Would be surprised if they hadn't, but wouldn't know where.

You can always try to look for the lounges and demand access due to the delay.

Excellent idea.

Ah, no dice, but it kept me occupied for a bit

My plane is now boarding, except it hasn't arrived yet. Got to love airport logic.