The h Bar

2:59 AM

Lately I've noticed some unusual upvoting of blatant low-quality homework questions. I wonder if someone is trying to counter the cleanup algorithm or influence our close voting habits?

Recent examples: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/144404/… and physics.stackexchange.com/questions/144492/… and physics.stackexchange.com/questions/144493/…

Granted people can vote however they choose but some real crap is getting upvotes.

Kyle Kanos

It's not just those 3 either

Brandon Enright

Oh no, it's almost every question.

Kyle Kanos

I've been seeing copy-and-paste HWs get upvoted

Brandon Enright

I tried to pick 3 from today I thought were particularly blatant about being homework.

Kyle Kanos

I guess it doesn't quite bother me too much because we're usually able to close them fast enough

Brandon Enright

3:10 AM

Yeah it doesn't bother me either. I just have homework closing on the mind because Dilaton emailed me yesterday and again today to tell me that he's identified me as the worst of the close voting problem and that I must be politically motivated.

Kyle Kanos

Hmm, I'm not too far behind you in the stats page (2768 vs 3324) and I've not gotten any emails

Maybe he doesn't want another book list :/

Brandon Enright

Well he thinks I target "very high-level technical advanced topic theoretical physics questions" and basically said he thinks I'm doing it because I don't understand them

Kyle Kanos

He didn't add "legitimate" in there?

Brandon Enright

I do target questions I think are purely calculational in nature and that's often the "I was working on such-and-such advanced problem in my favorite physics book and..." which I think is the ones he really is upset about.

Kyle Kanos

Were those types of questions allowed over at TP.SE when it was alive?

Brandon Enright

3:19 AM

TBH I'm not sure.

If I saw a meta post where the community agreed that advanced calculation help was on topic I'd change my stance on them.

I think the reason Dilaton rubs me the wrong way (and probably others) is that he has trouble separating his argument about what this site should be about from underhanded accusations that people are either dumb or somehow politically motivated to censor certain types of science questions.

Kyle Kanos

The only thing that really bothers me about him is how uneducated he is when it comes to the actual policies of this site vs what he thinks they should be

Like that Meta Post he cites when removing HW tags from "advanced" questions

The only answer to that question contradicts the post!

Brandon Enright

Yes he included a link to that post in his email to me today :-)

Kyle Kanos

Have you responded? Or plan to?

Brandon Enright

I'm actually responding to him now. I'm going to suggest he makes a meta post about primarily (or purely) calculational problems on advanced topics.

I don't think we should treat "advanced" learners any different than beginners. I think everyone agrees we should close questions that are basic number crunching or apply-the-formula type questions.

Kyle Kanos

He emailed me once after the Meta post "What is PO & how is it related to Physics.SE?"...I responded with a list of like 30 literature books he should read because he didn't know what newspeak was

Brandon Enright

3:30 AM

Or even "I tried to apply the formula but I got the wrong answer, does anyone see where I went wrong" which is very common for even for questions even on advanced topics.

Kyle Kanos

That particular type of question probably could use its own Meta post

IIRC, the last time we dealt with HW questions, the community was rather split on those ones

Brandon Enright

Yeah it doesn't surprise me. Like I said, I'd rather not discriminate against beginners working on kinematics problems but allow the same type of question just because it's on general relativity or similar.

Anyways, that's what I'll suggest he does. Emailing me to tell me I should ignore questions I don't understand isn't very productive.

Brandon Enright

3:43 AM

So this is what I wrote back to Diliton: pastebin.com/GkH9nnYC

David Z

6:07 AM

For what it's worth, I never respond to emails about Stack Exchange (except from the SE team)

Ice Boy

That is worth something :)

David Z

6:36 AM

Oh, I don't think I can make it to the chat session this week :-(

New_new_newbie

7:22 AM

Mods: Regarding that declined flag (CW), thanks for the detailed comment for why you declined it. I find the reason sufficient and completely buy it, so I see no need to follow up on meta.

This was in response to the end remark "Feel free to follow up on meta", by some anonymous mod.

The reason make sense too, and makes SE more transparent and democratic. Thanks for the clarification :)

David Z

8:54 AM

0

Q: where do newoton's come from?

Hi I study physics about three years at university but after these years I still don't know how Newoton derive his laws.I know that he tried to find the best model to describe the motions but It's a bit hard to believe for example how did he knew that an object move in constant velocity without ...

Curious as to why someone upvoted that

@New_new_newbie it's good that you feel the issue is resolved, of course, but I also want to mention that when there is a nontrivial or "interesting" reason for why a flag is declined, we often prefer to have it show up on meta. That way other people benefit from the explanation too.

In other words, if you ever have a flag declined for a reason that doesn't quite make sense, or if you feel the decline comment doesn't explain the decision, it's not because we (mods) are trying to be opaque or undemocratic. We're trying to push the issue out into the open to get community input on the decision and to set a public precedent.

New_new_newbie

11:12 AM

@DavidZ Yes, that's a nice policy actually. In this case however, it is good that making a post CW is a decision to be taken by the post owner only, and not the mods. So, I have no issues with the decline reason.

But again, not as a mod, but personally, do you agree that it is a Danuesque canonical question?

David Z

11:40 AM

@New_new_newbie which question was that?

New_new_newbie

12:05 PM

@DavidZ This -

("All deletions are soft deletions, mods can see it") :P

Ice Boy

:O

except for those who are present

New_new_newbie

@IceBoy - The sole reason behind removing is political correctness. It is not the kind of things one should be caring about, but if I post a question some time, and the author of the post happens to know the answer, I don't want him to not answer thinking "Oh! He's that SoB who flagging my posts and costing me rep".

Of course, no will concede that it will be so, but of course, it will be so. :)

So, I humbly request "those present" to add more fiber to their diets :P

Ice Boy

12:26 PM

@New_new_newbie I see nothing ;-)

David Z

12:58 PM

@New_new_newbie I guess it looks like one

(BTW I don't know that there's anything to be gained by hiding the link)

ACuriousMind

2:00 PM

Is it me, or is the site unusually slow right now?

Qmechanic

@ACuriousMind : Nah, it is also very slow for me.

Jim

2:17 PM

i just thought maybe i was going really fast today. Bummer :(

Mew

Ah awesome, I thought it was just me

Kyle Kanos

2:54 PM

It's almost 10 am for me and I have only 9 close votes left.....this must be some sort of record

ACuriousMind

@KyleKanos I've run out of votes every day in the last week...but not that early

Kyle Kanos

I've only actually done it once in the last 7 days

But I've gotten down to 4 for most of those days

And I technically started at 9 pm last night when it's 12 UTC

Here is the attached exam.   I was testing to see if Gmail would warn me that I should have an attachment since I used the word "attached" in the last email.    The only way to test it is to "send" so it didn't work.   So much for a good feature, right?

I just got that in an email from my TA boss

Jim

I remember gmail used to remind me that i was forgetting attachments

i just figured maybe I stopped forgetting. But maybe gmail stopped reminding

Kyle Kanos

3:11 PM

Looks like it was a non-Google-affiliated Google labs thing

Wonder if they're "new version" that they released last year disabled it somehow?

ACuriousMind

5:17 PM

@ACuriousMind I need answers with proper validity as zeroth law explains to us. — Vinayak 3 mins ago

Anyone understand that sentence?

Jun-Goo Kwak

@ACuriousMind You're on a downvoting closing thread spree.

Kyle Kanos

@ACuriousMind Not me, sorry

ACuriousMind

@Jun-GooKwak No, my voting behaviour has not changed over the last few months. It's a habit, not a spree.

JamalS

5:39 PM

@ACuriousMind: Hi, I was wondering if you could help with an issue I've been pondering. How do you define a 'small' perturbation in GR? It doesn't make sense to simply say that the components of the perturbation are small relative to the background, as for example, any would seem large relative to the off-diagonal elements of the Schwarzschild metric. The reason I ask is because I'm performing some perturbation theory on a particular solution, and I'd like to address that issue in my paper.

ACuriousMind

@JamalS Uh...that's a good question. And I've no authoritative answer. Perhaps one could diagonalize background and perturbation and say the perturbation is small, if its eigenvalues are small? (I don't even know if that is true for "small" perturbations in practice...)

JamalS

6:19 PM

@ACuriousMind: I'll look into it. I suspect it has to be handled case by case.

Physics Meta

9:32 PM

0

Q: Let me write "lagrangian" in lower case

I wrote this question, intentionally using lagrangian, not Lagrangian. Google is a company name, a proper noun, but google is a verb; Fermi is a person name, but fermion is a noun. I think this is right, alike Feynmann. I know that Lagrangian is widely accepted and if I write different, readers w...

discussion

ACuriousMind

@PhysicsMeta Lolwut?

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