@Silverfish If they are both old threads, the first I'd do is cross link both. That way people have a chance to find the other answers even if they don't get related as duplicates. Then use your own judgement about how close they are.
Incidentally, it doesn't have to be the case that the newer one is marked as duplicates. If the answers for one are much better than the other, it should become the canonical one (or even if the question is much better in some way). If they're about the same, the older one should have priority.
@Glen_b Thanks. Yes, I already cross-linked them: I do that a lot as soon as I find threads that have a bearing on each other. I've gotten better with it as my familiarity with existing questions has improved
The main things are (1) it must answer the question. (2) the poster must reveal any affiliation. I haven't looked at (1), but (2) is minimally satisfied (since "we" implies he's part of whatever company or group did it).
At first glance it might fail as essentially a link-only answer, but probably not as spam.
Revealed affiliation, and directly relevant to the OP
Thing is, if I always let that sort of thing go, then I'll never find out if I was meant to be flagging them in the first place, if you know what I mean...
Yes, that's true. Since you were about thought I would just ask directly. So long as I'm making a reasonable judgment on what I flag I'm happy. (Posting on meta would have had the advantage that other people could see how this kind of judgment call comes down.)
Even if nothing is resolved in a meta question we at least see the range of opinions.
With reviews at least it is sometimes possible to back up through the queue after you vote and see what other people do. Can't do that with something you're just flagging, but you can see other posts that people have flagged and ask "would I have flagged this?"
I frequently check close and reopen votes to see whether my vote was broadly in line with other people's opinions; I also check down the list of my "suggested edit" approvals/rejections to see whether other people opted the same way, which gives a feel about what kind of edit requests are considered acceptable.
I can't see other people's flags (well, don't think I can, maybe that's a 10k thing?)
I am very curious how @gung reached 1000 on late answers! That's remarkable. I reviewed them whenever I saw them and don't think I'd got to 20 before the current windfall.
Perhaps different timezones are busier on the review queue.
There's a bunch from several people. Given the review queue is half what it was when you posted to meta, you'd expect a few flags to arise.
I flag as well, especially when the reason for the action I plan to take may not be obvious. The flag gives a reason for my subsequent action. It's a trick I learned from talking to mods of other SE sites.
We need to be as "open" as we can be about how we act. It's one way of making an audit trail for why you did stuff.
It's basically just trying to follow the SE policy on moderation. I also happen to agree with it, which makes it easier to follow, but all credit to other people.
Aside from the technical issue of designing the moderation workflow, there is a lot of know-how involved in both creating a workable policy document and then getting folk in several dozen communities to abide by the culture.
Yes. There's also a degree of flexibility about how to interpret and implement the policies. To some extent the sites get to figure out how they work.
This is mostly a good thing.
Well, a lot of those late reviews I'm seeing needed review. That was probably a good change. Given the 20-a-day limit, the fact that 260-odd have already been cleared is amazing.
The Stackoverflow late answer queue is already empty
But they have 8200 in their close vote queue. It's an ongoing problem there.
Because they're users who didn't stick around, they often didn't know how to things like formatting. I did a lot of editing. But some of the content raised issues too, and obviously it went under the radar before.
I do wish some particular people better understood the distinction between "this is a bad/wrong answer" and "not an answer"
A genuine attempt at an answer that happens to be just flat wrong is not really something to flag, it's something to downvote.
And maybe comment on. ... In fact I see just such a suitable comment from Silverfish on one now. Someone else came along and flagged it as not an answer.
I have occasionally seen answers so wrong that they were utterly nonsense (as in, the answer itself makes no sense) and have been tempted to flag them as Not An Answer on the grounds that it can't possibly address the OP's issue. Something so beyond redemption it's at "not even wrong" levels.
Occasionally there are one-liners that could be arguably converted to comments. But if I see a poor one I actually prefer it to stay an "answer", so it gets downvotes.
And of course there's some grey area near the border where there's plenty of room for difference of opinion about whether it's really an answer
I kind of wish review queues could be toggled (at the user's own behest) work like the mod queue.
The mod queue is different. You get a vertical list of flagged posts all at once, and can go up and down through the list. As they get handled they disappear. It means you can remove the obvious ones, but the hard ones you can think about and they're still there later. You can see what others have done. Maybe another mod added a comment or something after an hour and that might be sufficient, or it might help you figure out what you should do.
Being able to work through the list that way could make reviews "easier" to do I think.
It's not that it allows "conversation" but simply being able to see other people's actions makes it easier.
If you just happen to open a post on which there's a flag without going via the queue, stuff pops up from the bottom relating to the flag. That would be another feature I'd like to be able to turn on for review queues
I often find myself going back to posts that have disappeared from my review queue. And I'm not always engaged in the comments discussions so don't get pinged. With duplicate discussions, people often identify alternative targets, for instance, which you might not see the first time you look in on it.
Under 200 now. People are still busy on that queue.
Looks like there were a fair few flags handled overnight (my time)
Only to be expected I guess.
Gee I've had a lot of upvotes on old answers in the last day. Part of that may be the extra attention old questions are seeing. Outside that I can't explain it.
I'd usually see a few each day, but nothing like that.
Well that's the mod queue out of the way, only a couple of items acted on in some way but not finalized, which I'll leave for other mods to see. But I better get to other things I guess. Maybe a quick scan of the questions first in case there's something I can deal with quickly.
@Ghost Better not to repost. If you think it's better here, flag it for migration. It is on topic here, but there's some information that would help. I guess those clarifications can come once it gets here.
@Erik -- Generally signatures and taglines should usually be removed as per SE policy, but you should edit everything else wrong while you're there. If the only issue with a post is one or two extraneous words (like "Hi--" or "thanks" or "--John") you're generally best to leave it; there's a competing principle of not making trivial edits.
I think it's possible to make a permutation test out of Bhattarcharyya distance, but I'd be inclined to look at basing it off one of the more common two-sample goodness of fit tests.
Bhattarcharyya distance, if I understand it correctly, suffers from the same problem as chi-square -- they both ignore the ordering in the bins and so throw away vast amounts of information.
This will mean very low power to discriminate between two smooth densities.
Nevertheless at that sample size, you'll probably have plenty of power to burn.
If I could be convinced there was any point to actually formally testing for a difference (since it's sure to reject, that would take some doing), I'd be inclined to look at something like a two-sample Anderson-Darling statistic but you'd have to deal with the heavy ties induced by binning.
I think I will have to continue the research - am looking up and reviewing papers of the same field of research - and see what they've used, how they've used it and what significance/justifications they come up with
Another alternative would be to take advantage of the approximate lognormality, take logs, construct some decent test (such as a likelihood ratio statistic) assuming normality and then if you were worried about it not being lognormal you could build a permutation test out of that to allow for some deviation from it.
I have lognormal means and standard deviations calculated
perhaps, as you said earlier, base it on a comparison of lognormal means and standard deviations/variances between the measured and baseline histogram data?
@Dawny33 Yes; asking and answering your own question is entirely allowed, and indeed often a very good idea. It's a way of telling the forum about a problem and a solution, which could match our goals exactly. Nothing rules out other answers, comments on the answer offered, etc., as appropriate. Similarly nothing rules out removing such questions or answers if they are inappropriate.
@Glen_b I was talking more about the plea that I removed here: stats.stackexchange.com/posts/174696/revisions Based on what you've said it was probably a trivial edit since I didn't fix anything else. That not withstanding I should remove the "Please help" text as part of a larger edit correct?
@ Erik: Certainly remove stuff like that as part of a larger edit. Personally I don't see much harm in trivial edits while the review queue for suggested edits is as typically short as it is now.
@Erik Personally I usually wouldn't edit just to remove something like that (since to my reading of it, SE guidelines on edits say not to), but there's no harm if you're not bumping dozens of posts. If I can find anything else to fix (usually at least tags can do with some work), I probably would edit.
e.g. from the help "Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged." ... there's some grey area about how small is small. Scortchi is right to point out that the suggested edit queue is empty so it's not that big a deal in any case.
However, if you tend to operate in that grey area you'll probably hit some inconsistency in reviews of your suggested edits -- some people will reject as too small, and some will approve.