Problems in mathematics are easy to completely describe (within boundaries). Medical answers also need knowledge of say conditions this person had in the past...
And often, people who ask such questions are not competent enough to actually think this could matter.
But a medical SE in a way of research in medicine could actually be quite cool!
@JonasTeuwen That's what I had in mind, but one where patients could participate. It would give researchers access to much feedback from patients - just as teachers here get feedback from students.
And can a community reach a workable consensus on which questions are request for medical advice in the first place? See Wikipedia's "reference desk" for an example of caution run amok.
No doubt someone has thought about this since if done correctly one could make big bucks. Perhaps SE does have things like this in mind down the road, and we're all guinea pigs beta testing the software before it goes prime-time commercial.
@JonasTeuwen Are you familiar with how "forbid them completely" works at Wikipedia? If you ask: "I've noticed that both my hands have the same number of digits, and I wonder how such symmetry comes about during gestational development -- what is known about that"? -- then your question will be erased faster than you can click submit, and you will be told snottily to go see a real doctor to find out whether your number of fingers constitute a congenital defect.
@BillDubuque Well, it's a set of wiki discussion pages where people add questions, and then people add their attempts to answer them in a threaded format below. As far as structure goes, it is very low-tech compared to SE.
@BillDubuque Ostensibly the purpose is to help users of the encyclopedia find the right article their question is anwered in, but in effect it's just a general Q&A feature.
(All of this is from several years ago when I was fairly active on the math refdesk).
@BillDubuque Hard to compare based on fuzzy memories. I remember it as pretty good, though I'd say the total amount of expertise one can draw upon here seems to be higher.
@HenningMakholm I just searched for "unique factorization" and I see replies by L.C. Washington (famous number theorist), Jack Schmidt, etc. So there is some expertise there. I suppose I should ask Michael Hardy since he seems to be very active.
@BillDubuque Discovering SO: I'd been reading programming blogs on and off for some time and noticed Spolsky & Atwood wax lyrical about their new pet project. Thought that sounded like a cheap knockoff of Usenet and didn't investigate it further. But then about a year ago I needed a program with a particular feature and found that my google searches pointed to SO/SuperUser and thought what the heck, I'll give it a try...
In fact the great thing about Google, back when they started out, was that the PageRank thingie could mostly eliminate the need to explicit human reviews of the sites it indexed.
@JonasTeuwen Re: candida, there ought to be a paste they use for thrush, made also by that Belgian pharmaceutical company. Your doc ought to know about that...
@HenningMakholm And we know from here how well "popularity" based rankings work, right? Votes/reviews aren't too useful without knowing something about the expertise of the voter.
@BillDubuque It probably worked pretty well when the link graph was created by authors who didn't know what Google was going to be using it for. Later on, though ... the act of measurement skews the phenomenon being measured.
@BillDubuque That's software developer to you, sir. But I'm not sure what I would improve. Also, I suspect MSE har enough critical mass that it would take a greater-than-usual technical superiority to outcompete it. (Barring some completely atrocious PR mistake by Messrs Atwood & Spolsky).
@HenningMakholm I think we could do much better. But we'd need many people to contribute (we have enough expertise in the community). Would you be interested in contributing should such a project every materialize?
@HenningMakholm For example, abstraction would be built-in to the system, so abstract duplicates would be handled better. Answers could be reused, they could be displayed at the appropriate level of generality based on your profile, etc.
Is the loopspace of the Eilenberg-Mac Lane space K(G,1) dependent only on the cardinality of G? For instance, is the loopspace of K($\mathbb{Z_4}$, 1) homotopy equivalent to that of K($\mathbb{Z_2} \times \mathbb{Z_2}$, 1)?
@OldJohn I did not see this, but: cool! :-). For now I can also do the math I like... my advisor is not yet complaining. He just stated: "if the quality is high enough, I am fine with it" (can be even physics).
@J.M. Only Rob gets to see the Bezout-based proofs! Rob: but HAL, I'd like to really see a proof using ideals. HAL: Sorry @Rob, I've have a hard-coded rule that guards against that.
@HenryT.Horton Remember how I wanted to prove that the statement "$f:X\to Y$,$g:Y\to X$ are inverse continuous function" is equivalent to "for every closed subset $F\subset X$, $f(F)\subset Y$ is a closed subset of $Y$"?
I wondered about why Newton said this. Would it suggest that he was humble (as in: I have hardly done anything) or would it be comparing himself to Galileo?
I would have to see the text where it is cited from.
Let $F\subset X$ be closed. Then $f(F)=g^{-1}(F)$ is closed for $g$ is continuous. Let $f(F)\subset Y$ be closed. Then $f^{-1}(f(F))=F$ is closed for $f$ is continuous.
@JM I never had any big trouble with that... But quite recently my back starts complaining a bit. No biggie, but still quite annoying. But luckily at my work everything is tall enough! :-). I have a desk which is specially "designed" for tall people 8-). It can be electrically adjusted to "standing".
@BillDubuque Would I contribute as a user? Perhaps. I'm not perfectly happy about being at the mercy of SE Inc. here. However, getting a new site to run robustly requires a cash flow of some sort, so we might simply be swapping SEI for new overlords instead.
@BillDubuque Would I contribute programming effort? Probably not. I get a sufficient outlet for that side of me from my paying job. And web programming doesn't excite me terribly.
@KannappanSampath That is bad. I mean, you don't deserve to feel that way :-). But still, I think the world is full of idiots and you will have this everywhere. Don't let the idiots win!
@BillDubuque The coding could conceivably be crowdsourced -- though a project leader with an iron fist, good people skills, and plenty of time to spare would be needed. But for day-to-day operations you'd need some full-time techs.
@PeterTamaroff Hey baldy, I thought you wanted "$f$ and $g$ are continuous inverse of one another" $\iff$ "$C \subset X$ is closed $\iff$ $f(C) \subset Y$ is closed"
@HenningMakholm Right, that's the idea. Many folks would contribute once we got it bootstrapped and it was clear how much better it was. For just one site like Math.SE the maintenance overhead shouldn't be too high, and we'd probably have many volunteers.
When I would have write code for a living, I would probably feel the same as when I would have to be a journalist for The Sun. Maybe not if it is a cool company like FoxIT, but there are not many of those :-).
Is the loopspace of the Eilenberg-Mac Lane space K(G,1) dependent only on the cardinality of G? For instance, is the loopspace of K($\mathbb{Z_4}$, 1) homotopy equivalent to that of K($\mathbb{Z_2} \times \mathbb{Z_2}$, 1)?
