User talk:JWSchmidt

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Liberation. When we can see the world in more than one way. Duckrabbit

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1 Older Talk
2 More Talk in 2006

[edit] Older Talk

[edit] More Talk in 2006

[edit] This month's winner is RNA interference!

RNA interference
This month's MCB Collaboration of the Month article is RNA interference. Please help to improve this article to featured article status.
Last month's collaboration was proteasome

– Clockwork Soul 14:35, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Do you even know what a Blasian is? A Blasian is just another name for the mid point between Orientals and blacks. The source doesn't have to use the exact same terms we use. That's plagarism__Whatdoyou 23:53, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Blasian is a term in the popular culture that means the genetic midpoint between blacks and Oriental (Black-North East Asian hybrids). The article provides a link to Sforza's gentic chart which clearly shows the genetic distance between blacks and orientals and black and whites, and the mid point between blacks and orientals is almost as distant from blacks as whites are from blacks on the chart.__Whatdoyou 01:04, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Doing something about the ridiculous date autoformatting/linking mess

Dear JW—you may be interested in putting your name to, or at least commenting on this new push to get the developers to create a parallel syntax that separates autoformatting and linking functions. IMV, it would go a long way towards fixing the untidy blueing of trivial chronological items, and would probably calm the nastiness between the anti- and pro-linking factions in the project. The proposal is to retain the existing function, to reduce the risk of objection from pro-linkers. Tony 14:58, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Graphics Lab

I saw your name listed on Wikiproject Illustration or the list of graphic artists, and I thought I'd let you know that a Graphics Lab has been created on EN. Based on the highly successful French and German graphics labs, it seeks to better organise and coordinate our graphic design and photo-editing efforts. Up until now, there has been no common space on EN where users could ask for maps, charts and other SVG files to be created. What's more, the Graphics Lab has discussion boards, tips, tools and links; in sum, a good common workspace. Come help us out! The infrastucture is already in place, and now we need participants. :) --Zantastik talk 02:09, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] WW11

Hey hey,

Would you be able to put together a "New Year"-themed image for episode 11? I haven't seen you in IRC recently, but if you could do this I'd be way grateful. :) Thanks!

Daveydw ee b (^chat/_review!) 05:41, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Immune system

Hi there, could I ask you to have a look over one of the MCB FA candidates? Immune system went into the process in rather a poor shape, but has been improved a lot. Do you have any suggestions or feedback? It's candidacy page is here (link). Thanks. TimVickers 20:56, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] cognitive entities

"Some remarks on an experiment suggesting quantum-like behavior of cognitive entities and formulation of an abstract quantum mechanical formalism to describe cognitive entity and its dynamics" <-- Do you have a copy of this? --JWSchmidt 05:33, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

No, I do not have a version ready to email. However, my son has a paper copy of the full text. --Julia Neumann 07:11, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] This month's MCB Collaboration of the Month article is Peripheral membrane protein!

Peripheral membrane protein
This month's MCB Collaboration of the Month article is Peripheral membrane protein. Please help to improve this article to featured article status.
Last month's collaboration was RNA interference

– Clockwork Soul 18:55, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Anna Nicole Smith / Reactions Section

Thank you for removing the PoV entry I posted of Perez Hiltons' defacing of her photos, although I do feel that that information should be readded later, albeit without a POV (his continuing critiscm of her after her death) - but thank you for removing the part where I had added "mock sadness". If you could also kindly give the section an introduction it would be lovely as well. Peculiar to be doing this all with in less than twelve hours of her death.--Ozgod 03:42, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] FAR notifications

For almost a year, I have personally checked every WP:FAR to make sure the article talk page is noticed, and have made multiple notifications to every WikiProject I can find that may be even remotely related to the featured article. FAR notifications remain on talk pages for at least a month, the period of review, although most run longer. Any time an editor shows an interest in working on article deficiencies and requests an extension, the review period is extended beyond the month. Also, original nominators are notified on their talk pages. In fact, I've been criticized for overnotifying. I'm curious what article you found that was demoted without notification? SandyGeorgia (Talk) 04:11, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

"the article talk page is noticed" <-- by placing a template on a talk page with no edit summary? Wow, that's really "going the extra mile" to give notice! --JWSchmidt 04:50, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure how FAR can force other editors to use edit summaries, but once the article is at FAR, we do our best to make sure everyone involved is notified. I responded here. Regards, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 14:09, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Titration Data

Bling!

Those graphs look very nice, nothing like my amateur Excel crap. Personally I like the one with horizontal gridlines, but I'd defer if there are many other graphs on WP w/o lines for the sake of consistency. The data on the graph strikes a good balance between simplicity (not too much data & numbers) but still showing the important features. I'd capitalize "ml" to "mL" but other than that it's all good.

The pKa was determined by taking the equivalence volume, dividing it in half, then reading back the pH from the volume. e.g.: Part A (Trial 1), Veq was determined to be at about Vt = 10.05 mL, where the large spike in the slope occurred. 0.5 Veq = 5.025 mL. Reading backwards, the pH at that Vt was 4.69 (linearly interpolated between the nearest two points if need be), which is the estimated value of pKa. On the second trial the estimated value was 4.73 (The true value is 4.76). Quick justification why it works:

The Henderson-Hasselbalch equation:

$\textrm{pH} = \textrm{pK}_{a}+ \log_{10} \frac{[\textrm{A}^-]}{[\textrm{HA}]}$

At 0.5 Veq, half the acid is neutralized, so the concentration of acid, HA (which is assumed to not disassociate to any significant degree), is equal to the amount of neutralized acid NaA (which fully disassociates into the A- ion). So [A-] = [HA], therefore [A-]/[HA] = 1, log 1 = 0, and finally pH = pKa.

Slope data columns are what I used to objectively determine the inflection points, but there was still a degree of estimation because of the noise in the data, which gets worse with more and more complex calculations.

How to plot the derivatives is the $64bil question, because the data becomes quite noisy. For the actual article, the technical bits I don't think are that important, so the ones that are worse could be left off; the oxalic acid titration on lab7a.xls looked to be the best. Trying to visualize this in my head...but it would be best if the lines don't cross for clarity's sake, maybe on the same grid, just stretched apart? The slope plots don't have that much meaning by themselves outside of trying to find the equivalence points, so they should be kept in the same image and aligned at least.

Thanks again,

-- atropos235 ✄ (blah blah, my past) 05:41, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Replying here because of the request for comment at WP:CHM :) There is an accepted way to calculate the first and second derivatives if your data paints are equally spaced, which gives the value of the derivative of a (smoothed) polynomial curve with the coefficients optimised by a "least-squares" criterion. I will dig out the reference, but it is very easy to apply to raw data in an Excel spreadsheet. In France, we teach students to look for the second derivative (where it cuts the axis), not the maximum of the first: the French solution is better if you are doing everything by hand, as you eliminate the error in estimating the maximum, but is not used by automatic machines as the gain in accuracy with very small additions is negligeable.

As for the aesthetic considerations, I prefer as few grid lines visible as possible, just to give my opinion :)

Thanks for all your work on this topic, Physchim62 (talk) 18:02, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

My data is too noisy to easily see the second derivative zero, so I had to resort to using the max of the first. Trying to fit the curve as is to a polynomial plot in excel proved pretty pointless, the fitted line was not even close to the curve. I would have liked to determine an ideal equation to fit the data to with Maple or the like, but deriving the equation was too complex for me; you make it sound easy, can some simple transform (log?) of the data make it fit a polynomial? -- atropos235 ✄ (blah blah, my past) 05:41, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

The necessary coefficients are given in Savitzky, A.; Goloy, M. J. E. (1964). "Smoothing and Differentiation of Data by Simplified Least Squares Procedures" Anal. Chem. 36:1527–39; along with the formal derivation. Unfortunately, I don't currently have access to a copy of this article :( The procedure is very easy to put in place once you have an Excel file of the data points. Physchim62 (talk) 18:00, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Credentials

Hi!

I see you've been asking some questions about the process by which another user was able to verify my real-life identity and that the person concerned (the real-life me) has a PhD. He and I could be colluding on a hoax, of course, but if you trust him the method we used is otherwise pretty watertight, so I'll just describe it again - I wrote to him with my email that I use for Wikipedia business, giving him a fair bit of detail about me. That took him to my page at my university, which provided him with information about my qualifications and also gave a totally different email address for people to write to in order to contact me. He wrote to me at that address, and I wrote back confirming that I edit here as "Metamagician3000".

I think that lots of people associated with universities - grad students, post-docs, academics, whatever - could do exactly the same. The only inconvenience is that they will need to have a separate email address for their Wikipedia business from the one they use for university inquiries, but that would be common, and besides it's easy to go and get a free account for Wikipedia stuff. This exercise should reassure them that they can use Jimbo's proposal without compromising their identities. They can also get more detail verified if they want (e.g. the field of their research), as long as that amount of detail is available on their university's site. I wasn't especially interested in doing that, and this wasn't really about me, but was just a test of the system. I guess I'll keep that nice PhD box, now I've gone to the trouble of getting it there, but you won't see me big-noting myself about it.

I hope this clears things up. Whether doing this sort of thing is a good idea is still debatable, of course. The place to debate it is the talk page for Jimbo's proposal (I can't recall whether you're already one of the people taking part there).

All the best, Metamagician3000 12:25, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Archimedes Plutonium

Hi, could you please take a look at this section of my talk page, and also at Special:Contributions/216.16.55.28. I've stepped into something I know nothing about, simply through reverting vandalism on Jimmy Wales. Someone else turned up at my talk page and pointed out that Archimedes Plutonium might be objecting to the link you added to the talk page, though in fact his vandalism started before that. I'm rushing out in a few minutes, but perhaps you might consider removing that link if it violates WP:BLP. I can't find the link in the article anyway, so I don't really know what the IP is complaining about. Cheers. ElinorD (talk) 12:00, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your comments at the AfD. I'd be very happy (having voted 'weak keep' myself) if the AfD turned out as delete for the reasons you state. You may be interested in this as well; I'd be curious to know what you think of that. Regards, --Keesiewonder ^talk 17:05, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your note. Sounds like you are even more frustrated than I am ... Please let me know if you think of a way I can help somehow. You may have noticed the 'out of the blue' note right above your post on my talk page from Buburuza. I have to say the first thing that crossed my mind when I read that was it was another impersonator or some such of the same person. Keesiewonder ^talk 20:56, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Your note

Hi JWSchmidt, I don't think that I was actively involved in any 'dispute' on these policy pages, in any case not since Jimbo's recent intervention. I did periodically support stability, as I believe that having core content policies change routinely while editors are editing is counterproductive in principle. The issue is simply that Jimbo stated that he accepts that WP:ATT is a canonical policy that incorporates WP:RS, WP:NOR and WP:V, but he preferred to see those component pages remain in some explanatory capacity, while tracking ATT in substance, and to have a straw poll to get more community input about the concept. There was a request made on the ATT Talk to protect the pages while this process is being sorted out, and after verifying that they were indeed being modified, even as the poll was being drafted, I agreed with the need for stability and protected them. If any admin feels differently, they can reverse me. Crum375 16:11, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] CRICK

John, please see: http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/testing/html/mss0660a.html#abstract

for all his personal papers; I am sure that there is some ccntent here that could be used to improve the article; this repositary of his personal papers is not very well known by the way. Assuming he used it, not even Matt Ridley credits it in his book; I do wonder if he used it?

regards, Martin

ps 2007 is going to be be a good year for books: biographies of Perutz and Crick [2#) and now another book by Watson is scheduled for September publication by Random House... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 84.71.198.244 (talk) 12:49, 23 March 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Undernet

UMWELTSFORSCHUNG

Dear JWSurf,

Various motifs, transgressions which are occurring on the Undernet philosophy projects

1. Skept`s #philosophy project continues as populistic trash. It is the most pronounced failure since Owens #camp and Johngurus #philosophicus.

2. the #philosophy2 project has been negated in toto.

3. the new project of relevance is #phenomenology - it appears unrelenting.

4. Kruto has gone insane as star emperor, and must be suspended in toto.

5. #philosophicus project is a failure.

Taking these theses together, your BIG RING project has never been more compelling. #PHENOMENOLOGY supports an effort under your aegis to revive the BIG RING in toto.

Thanks for the "blast from the past". Somehow I had gotten in the habit of imagining that Undernet was lost in one great and final netsplit. Good luck with your philosophical efforts! --JWSchmidt 19:38, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Dar JWSurf,

what are your thoughts about re-starting the Big Ring project? For those unfamiliar with the objective, it was intended as a re-design of the UNDERNET philosophy projects qua comprehensive space: #philosophy, #philosophy2, #aporia, #vernunft, #philosophicus, #wittgenstein.

Regards, Fabio Damascus Jr.

I'm totally out of the Undernet loop and I will not have time to get back into it. I wish you luck with any efforts you make towards supporting IRC discussions with website resources. --JWSchmidt 22:58, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

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