Massimo Ortolano

However it is pronounced.

@BryanKrause Lol. Luckily he was not a mathematician, for otherwise we would now hear of the Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Sr number…

@BryanKrause Haha! Cool! It also simplifies a lot the double-blind peer-review process: with just a few authors, one no longer needs to anonymyze anything.

@Buffy Thanks!

Or maybe I should ask to cryptography…

@Buffy Since you know both sites, would this question be a good fit for CS educators?

@Nobody Something like this one? academia.stackexchange.com/q/31405/20058

@TheMatrixEquation-balance Sorry but your question is unclear and it can’t really be answered in the current form. This is outlined in the close reason and has nothing to do with stereotypes. Note also that there are legitimate questions that are considered off-topic for hit site nonetheless.

@Nobody :-)

@StrongBad Welcome back, and please stay!

@Buffy My PhD thesis starts with this strip from C&H: sjsuwritingcenter.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/image-copy-2.png

I even met someone in person or have acquaintances in common.

@Nobody I understand the feeling because I was a Usenet user too, since 1995. Actually, there are a few users around SE who I first met on Usenet back in those days.

@Nobody Let me add a further remark: we really appreciate your flags, and thank you for your work behind the scenes. In fact, if you look at your flag history, you'll see that we declined just a negligible fraction of your flags. So, don't be scared by the possibility of a declined flag.

@Nobody Note that in case of a spam flag, I'd have marked the flag as helpful, but I wouldn't have deleted the post, even though this might be confusing for the flagger.

@Nobody Since nuking a post as spam gives a high penalty to the poster, I prefer to nuke just in clear-cut cases. In borderline cases I prefer to give the benefit of doubt. After all, we're usually pretty quick in reacting to spam, and should a seed become actual spam, it wouldn't survive for long.

@Nobody I read it, but I still wouldn't consider it as spam or spam seed. Maybe they are just someone who has a fixation for that topic.

@Nobody Unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem to be spam because it doesn't really promote a product. It's certainly not a good question and I'm inclined to consider it opinion-based, but it doesn't seem to be mod-hammer worth.

It’s even less useful now that there is the save feature.

@Buffy The discussions we had here and here on the creation of a “canonical question” tag were more towards to avoid it (I didn’t notice it was created), even though the consensus is not overwhelming. I’m inclined towards sticking to the outcome of those meta discussions and burninate the tag altogether.

@drfrogsplat I declined your flag but you might have flagged the wrong answer.

@ephe There are plenty of successful and well-regarded researchers who didn't go to "top" schools (whatever it really means), so don't be obsessed with university rankings because they can lead to bitter disappointment. It's much more important to find a good group with a knowledgeable and supportive supervisor.

@ConGovDeIn Academia is not specific to STEM, and in particular we don't advise on specific career paths (e.g. on what someone has to study to fill certain gaps or to get into a certain field).

@ConGovDeIn Which site? Academia or CS Educators? CS educators is concerned with computer science education.

Hi @ConGovDeIn That is too field specific for this site. Maybe you can ask in chat at cseducators.stackexchange.com

For instance, if I look at my country, there are totally twisted career advancement and university funding processes based on publication counts, as I explained a bit here. This kind of processes, which are usually conceived with the idea of making the hiring process more "systematic" and "scientific", possibly fighting nepotism, are fertile ground for frauds.

@BryanKrause Well, I've always thought that the only defense against this type of behaviour is that of lowering, by a fair amount, the importance that the academic world gives to publication record and awards (which I'd remove entirely) for hiring and career advancement.

@user4539917 In any place, if one feels perpetually exhausted, there's something wrong going on...

@Buffy Many thanks for the work on the tags!

@Buffy What about "Replace with a more specific tag when appropriate"?

@Buffy Looks mostly good to me. I just find a bit unclear the part "Note that a more specific tag might be more appropriate": should it be intended to suggest a user to add another, complementary tag or to use another tag altogether, in place of the minority one, in specific cases?

@Buffy At the beginning of my career I attended a few conferences and schools on gravitation and relativity, and now I'm more in contact with those working in mesoscopic physics. My impression is that, regardless of the subfield, they are less of an outlier than mathematicians when it comes to publishing (though those working in general relativity are outliers for anything else :-p ).

@Buffy The outcome of that discussion is a bit inconclusive about the faith of the tag minority, and that's why I haven't yet made any synonym.

There was also this old discussion: academia.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1176/20058

@Buffy About the tag minority, I wrote in January a suggestion here, but there wasn't any feedback about it.

Done.

@Buffy I'll make the change.

But the approach is different: even though you know that there can be difficulties, you plan the work so that you can have a certain publication output (in fact, we frequently declare the number of papers that we shall be publishing when asking for funding), deciding alternative routes in case of issues. Instead, having collaborated with a couple of mathematicians, I have the impression that mathematicians are not used to set goals with deadlines, even when these are feasible.

@Buffy It's not really like that. In many cases you have to conceive a methodology, and its implementation can pose outstanding difficulties (something that those who suggest to make perform simulations only frequently do not understand). For instance, many people outside my field do not understand what it means to bang your head for months trying to understand the reason of a discrepancy at the level of 10^-7, or even less, between two experiments (when it shouldn't be there).

@Buffy I agree that having a tag without description for two questions should be avoided, but classifying control theory under electrical engineering is a bit of a stretch. As I explained here, control theory is a very broad and interdisciplinary subject. I'd probably use the tag enginnering, which is broader.

I’m freezing this room because the discussion has become inproductive with personal attacks.

I’m freezing this room because the discussion has become inproductive.

@DavidCarlisle @Skillmon Got it, thanks!

Hi all. I vaguely recall that there was a discussion/answer on this site saying that font-size environments like \begin{small}... \end{small} should be avoided, but I couldn't find it anymore. Is this true and does anyone recall where the answer is?

@NickAlexeev It’s likely used to trim the phase margin without changing the transresistance of the amplifier. In fact, if you calculate the DC loop gain for that configuration, you’d obtain the same of an amplifier with a 1.1 kΩ transresistance, even though the actual transresistance would be 1 kΩ. For the high-frequency part, the behaviour depends on the capacitance values, whether they are chosen to match the inverse resistance ratio or not.

In fact, this kind of atomic frequency standard is called a passive standard because the atomic resonator does not generate any signal, it’s just used as a frequency discriminator.

the rf frequency, at around 6.8 GHz is generated from that of the local oscillator, which is typically a quartz oscillator, by means of a frequency synthesizer like a PLL.

The dip is deeper when the rf is perfectly centered on the hyperfine transition. A frequency control loop then exploits this phenomenon to steer the frequency of a local oscillator to lock the rf frequency to the hyperfine transition.

@antimony It works in a different way. The gas doesn’t emit any rf signal. Without any rf the gas atoms are optically pumped by the lasers in a state in which they become transparent to the light. When rf is applied, the gas atoms flip their state and the gas becomes opaque to the laser light, such that one observes a dip into a detector’s signal.

A frequency control loop then locks the synthesized frequency to the Rb hyperfine transition.