User:Dfass

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Well, hello there. My name is David Fass, and I am an occasional Wikipedia contributor. When I am not busy making Wikipedia articles, I spend my time trying to be the best postdoc that I can possibly be. My long term goals are to have a job.

Wikipedia:Babel

en	This user is a native speaker of English.

he-1

משתמש זה מסוגל לתרום ברמה בסיסית של עברית.

^_^

This user watches anime.

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Slowly in progress	Also slowly in progress
~~Category Utility~~ ~~Rough set~~ Version space ~~Attribute-value system~~ ~~Granular computing~~ Rule induction Hypothesis Theory	Conceptual clustering Concept learning Generic views Functional decomposition Rabbinic literature Achai Gaon ~~Nahum M. Sarna~~ Jewish skeptics Jewish heretics Isaac Halevy Isadore Twersky Isaac Breuer Aquila Aggadah Great Assembly Jewish Asceticism

[edit] Other Interesting Facts About Me

Sorry, there are no other interesting facts about me, but here are some user-boxes:

忍者	This user lives by his/her own Way of The Ninja.

@	This user can be reached by email.

This user has a website, which can be found here.

MATLAB-2

This user is an intermediate MATLAB programmer.

IEEE

This user is a member of the IEEE.

This user is of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.

This user is a psychologist.

RU	This user attends or has attended Rutgers University.

PhD

This user has a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Psychology.

[edit] Jewish Encyclopedia Articles

I am adding a bunch of articles from the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, now in the public domain. Although I occasionally ask myself whether this is worthwhile (since they are already online at Jewish Encyclopedia), I can make the following arguments in favor of this activity:

It's fun.
I'm learning a lot, and my estimation of classical and modern Jewish scholarship has already increased about a thousand-fold.
It is possible to cross-link articles much more thoroughly (e.g., to people, countries, events, institutions, etc.) in Wikipedia than in any other online venue.
There is the hope that articles which need updating will eventually be updated, as more people read them. Presumably, the articles at Jewish Encyclopedia will be forever frozen in their 1906 glory. (But they are indeed glorious, many of them.)
Wikipedia has vastly better search capability than does the online Jewish Encyclopedia. I figure if it takes me 15 minutes to find an article in Jewish Encyclopedia (and I've been doing this regularly!), then for all intents and purposes that article cannot yet be said to exist online, so by adding it to Wikipedia I am really giving it its first online life.
The Jewish Encyclopedia is for some reason situated on a very fragile server, and it is often found to be inaccessible. By contrast, downtime on Wikipedia is infrequent and generally limited to the early-morning hours (say, 1am–5am ET), as far as I can discern.
Wikipedians will add many Redirects to the article using variant spellings of Hebrew names and Hebrew book titles. This will dramatically increase the article's accessibility. The Jewish Encyclopedia uses a scholarly transliteration style with spellings that no-one would ever guess, using accented letters (like ḥ and ṭ) that are essentially untypable and unsearchable.
Wikipedia articles can employ Hebrew text which is machine searchable, thus making these Hebrew terms visible to Google search, for example.
Lastly, but not leastly, I need these articles for my Jewish Intellectual Timeline to link to. So there.