arboviral

general recent conversations

Discussion on answer by Nosajimiki: W…

Imported from a comment discussion on worldbuilding.stackexcha...

arboviral

Jan 13, 2021 12:54

For example I vaguely remember an excellent short conference talk (British Ecological Society meeting in Liverpool a few years back, I think) on dietary preferences in - geese, i think? - where they choose fat-rich or protein-rich grasses depending on what they need most.

arboviral

Jan 13, 2021 12:54

Actual intelligence only comes into this if it's a conscious choice; it could easily manifest as a subconscious dietary preference such as a craving.

The Restaurant at the End of the Univ…

General discussion for scifi.stackexchange.com, both on-topic ...

arboviral

Dec 5, 2020 19:29

As long as it never comes into contact with a positive dalmatian...

The Biosphere

General discussion for biology.stackexchange.com

arboviral

Jun 26, 2018 07:28

Oh dear. gardening.stackexchange.com/questions/39498/…

arboviral

Jun 7, 2018 08:22

@Chris Ah, I see - thanks for spotting. I'm a little surprised that none of the VtCs added that tag to the question. It also sounds to me like a student picking up on a comment from a teacher and wanting more evidence, rather than being an assignment - I realise that falls under the third category ("A question that addresses a basic biology concept that may seem trivial to biology professionals") but I'm personally unsure that should be in there - that doesn't sound like "homework" to me...

arboviral

Jun 7, 2018 07:42

(sorry, wrong link)

arboviral

Jun 7, 2018 07:42

Q: What effect does taking antibiotics unnecessarily have on future bacterial infections?

I have been told by my biology teacher that you shouldn't take antibiotics unnecessarily because "the body gets used to them" and it reduces the effectiveness of antibiotics against future bacterial infections, which can be dangerous. I can't understand how the body could "get used to" antibioti...

arboviral

Jun 7, 2018 07:42

A bit confused why there are currently 3 votes saying this is off-topic. Anyone want to share their views? It might seem like an obvious answer to a professional but that doesn't make it off-topic, and given its potential to improve understanding of antibiotic resistance I think there's a strong case for keeping it open.

arboviral

Apr 16, 2018 15:44

I don't want the site to get snobby though. Any question I post on a topic outside my own specialism would probably be no 'better' than could be written by a randomly-chosen undergrad.

arboviral

Apr 16, 2018 15:43

@BryanKrause I agree with your second point, but regarding your first we have evidence that moderately large groups of professional biologists are deciding not to join because of current question quality. One solution is to moderate better and close bad questions, but this leaves questions that are very basic and not technically off-topic but deter professional users.

arboviral

Apr 16, 2018 15:40

Aaargh. Flagged this as "too broad", decided "opinion-based" is more accurate, retracted and now apparently I can't re-flag. Can anyone else take a look and see what you think? biology.stackexchange.com/questions/72429/…

arboviral

Apr 3, 2018 09:00

I foresee a lot more of these to come...

arboviral

Apr 3, 2018 09:00

Q: Do antibodies to an arbovirus in a bloodmeal reduce vector competence?

When we conduct mosquito infection studies we typically mix blood and virus rather than using viraemic blood from naturally infected hosts. I'm looking for a paper I read some years ago which demonstrated that virus mixed with blood containing antibodies to that virus (not to mosquito midgut or s...

literature antibody mosquitoes

arboviral

Apr 3, 2018 09:00

Well, I'm sticking to my attempt to ask more technical questions and apparently I'm getting tumbleweed awards now :D

arboviral

Mar 19, 2018 08:49

The number of good questions on the front page last time I checked was actually quite reassuring (that was one).

arboviral

Mar 19, 2018 08:45

(God, I hate myself for writing that, even ironically...)

arboviral

Mar 19, 2018 08:45

@vkehayas Yes, I agree that given the situation we're in, the only way to get where we want is to "be the change we want to see in the world" (if you'll forgive the cat-poster sentiment). The problem is twofold - we have too many bad questions and we don't get enough good questions. I'd agree that the second is probably more severe, so upvoting/editing potentially good questions is even more important.

arboviral

Mar 16, 2018 10:10

Okay, it sounds like the consensus is that a single site works better (and I also agree). What do we do about question quality then? I've started being a bit more ruthless about VtC and downvoting.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 16:49

@terdon Playing devil's advocate again here, but I can see situations arising where the biological aspect doesn't seem relevant to a non-expert, but actually is. The fact that they're blood samples is significant because the haem is inhibiting the reaction, that sort of thing.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 16:48

Unfortunately I don't really see a good solution, which is probably why I'm suggesting multiple bad ones... :D

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 16:47

If Bio.SE was pitched as a public engagement platform (like I said above, rebrand Bio.SE as BioCurious.SE or something) then you might attract a lot more users interested in developing public engagement skills. You'd still end up with a fundamental split between askers and answerers though, which isn't really how SE is supposed to work.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 16:45

@canadianer The thing is, there is still a place for questions from the general public about biology, and there is still a duty on professional scientists to support that (literally, in the UK; if you are in receipt of BBSRC funding you're supposed to do a minimum of 2 days of public engagement a year, STEM ambassadors have CPD requirements, etc). I'd prefer Bio.SE to become more like a permanent AMA than close entirely.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 16:41

@terdon Wait, so you think thermocycler problems are a good example of something which should be on-topic, or off-topic? It sounds like the latter, but I'd expect that a (properly-researched) question on this sort of thing is pretty much the only sort of question a professional biologist would need to ask the community about via the SE format.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:20

Does that not exclude e.g. the occasional questions we get about debugging odd PCR results etc, though? (Mostly just playing devil's advocate; I think we could work it out...)

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:19

Maybe after a proper meta discussion/poll

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:19

Can we edit that into the site description/tour somewhere?

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:18

We'd need better filtering, certainly. And that technically wouldn't cover stats (according to most statisticians I know)

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:16

Er, 2, not 23 :D

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:16

Ah, now that might work!

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:16

Almost every question I can think of these days that I can't trivially answer myself is straddling 23 or more SEs.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:15

Or whether ABC-SMC or ABC-MCMC is a better Bayesian fitter for insect population models?

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:15

Not a great example, but just to illustrate.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:15

But what about if you're asking whether a gamma distribution or a poisson distribution is the best way to describe the extrinsic incubation period of an arbovirus? That's equal parts stats and biology.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:14

@terdon I do some retraining every few years before they shoo me out of the lab. :)

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:13

We're not being consistent. Either the EcolEvolMeth should never have been closed, or Bioinformatics should never have been approved.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:13

I still don't think we have a clear line here. And I'm not clear on what the "biology part of bioinformatics" is. If we're excluding methods, then why? We don't exclude mol biol methods, even though most are more accurately chemistry or physics. We don't exclude mathematical modelling. We supposedly cover ecology & evolutionary methods (I misremembered the proposal, but my question about it is here: biology.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3421/…)

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:10

Not disagreeing with any of this, obviously.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:10

Most of what I do that isn't meetings or management, as a Biology PI, is programming these days.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:08

Biologists also do "things like using software, installing" that @Terdon mentions above.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:06

Well, okay, it's 6th. Polydactyly required.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:06

That really isn't about the biology.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:06

@terdon In the first handful I get "https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/65225/alternatives-to-ncbi-blast-du‌ring-us-government-shutdowns"

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:04

@terdon " any argument that you can make for some aspects of Bioinformatics not being within site scope could apply equally well to ecological statistics, really)" still applies too.

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:04

@terdon The existence of 810 questions tagged bioinformatics would seem to contradict that. biology.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bioinformatics

arboviral

Mar 14, 2018 09:02

@canadianer Actually I think the most pressing problem then becomes the explicit overlap - the scope of any special-field site would fall completely within Biology.SE, which is grounds for closure of a proposal. This is what finished off the ecological statistics proposal. (I still don't really know how Bioinformatics.SE got through - any argument that you can make for some aspects of Bioinformatics not being within site scope could apply equally well to ecological statistics, really).

arboviral

Mar 13, 2018 16:49

However, the closest we've come is the ecological statistics one mentioned above (which might actually have been BES's Quantitative Ecology, now I think about it) and they had a discussion and decided they wanted their own separate one - again, because of perceived question quality. I would have liked to persuade them to join Bio.SE instead, but when the proposal was closed they decided not to bother engaging.

arboviral

Mar 13, 2018 16:49

@BryanKrause The only way we could (I suspect) would be to be 'adopted' by one or more SIGs (Special Interest Groups) of scientific societies. For example, I sit on the committee of one of the BES ones (britishecologicalsociety.org/membership-community/…).

arboviral

Mar 13, 2018 16:41

The other problem is that we're (almost) all professionals in different fields - I may want to ask a 'trivial' question about an area outside my field. Hmm. Maybe we just try better policing, and maybe each try to submit technical questions more frequently (even if it's unlikely anyone else can answer them better). Then, once we have a decent body of unanswered questions of professional quality, we can maybe point colleagues at the site :)

arboviral

Mar 13, 2018 14:33

@Chris Personally, I would expect telling someone their question was "trivial" would be seen as a criticism (see also english.stackexchange.com/questions/410583/…). I think we need a more neutral-sounding term if we're going to go down this route.

Discussion on answer by Najib Idrissi…

Imported from a comment discussion on academia.stackexchange.c...

arboviral

May 15, 2018 12:29

Already +1'd this, but maybe worth adding why the fact that the others present were "mostly conference attendees and all, except one other woman, white middle-aged men" is also important.