User:Male1979

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This is a Wikipedia user page. This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user to whom this page belongs may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Male1979.

Since no-one is perfect, this user reserves the right to completely screw up his or her edits. This user enjoys reading very much. This user contributes using Ubuntu. This user contributes using Vim. This user can code in LaTeX.

[edit] Welcome

I became a contributor on February 1, 2005 after finding repeatedly very useful information there when I was searching some topic. Finding the misspelled name of Anne Treisman, I registered (see below about my user name), and pressed the edit-button [1]. My first non-minor series of edits came about when stumbling over the Adolf Hitler article, which was in a terrible condition. Being unexperienced and bold enough, I thought I would go and save it...
I think I helped improving the article considerately and at the same time I learned a lot about wikipedia and other wikipedians. I since have prefered to stay away from controversial topics – well, that is except for Neural Networks and Nuclear power phase-out ;).
After my article about Scholarpedia was deleted during a short absence I am very hesitant to start new articles.

I enjoy very much the broad spectrum of ideas and the global perspective that can be found in en.wikipedia. I like meeting different people and to try to figure out how they understand the world.

I grew up around Schwetzingen, between Mannheim and Heidelberg. Possibly random particle processes first brought me to

• St. Petersburg, Russia's "Northern capital" - probably the most beautiful city in the world (certainly by far the most beautiful of all the cities that I've ever seen).
• then converged on my decision for Cognitive Science in Osnabrück
  

Frequent entropy changes further brought me to the

• New Bulgarian University in Sofia, postsocialist capital of Bulgaria with fantastic club-scene, where I met many thoughtful and open-minded people.
• the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, capital and geographic center of Turkey, where I observed a lot of surprising cross-cultural differences and communalities and resisted becoming a Muslim (from there I went to Cappadocia, Safranbolu, Mengen, Şanlıurfa (Urfa), Konya, Çanakkale, Istanbul, Side, and I made a visit to Cypris)
• and the Chuo University in Tokyo, Japan, where I was living in Fuchu for one year. In Japan I went to Odawara, Kamakura, Nagano, Yokohama, Nikkō (where the three wise monkeys are), Nara, Kyoto, Kobe, Akashi, Osaka, Nagoya, and also many of the cities and wards in the Tokyo region. I visited more than 50 museums and many many shrines and temples.

Now I am living in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, studying Olfaction.

[edit] Contributions

Usually I start reading somewhere and edit when I find something incorrect or inaccurate or have something to add to the article. Most of my edits consequently constitute minor edits or just expansions of articles. Topics are widespread but currently focus around artificial intelligence and free software. I have made many edits to wikipedia.

My favorites among the articles I contributed to (or which I created) include: (earliest first, recent last)

Ukiyo-e | Irony of Fate | Cognitive architecture | Biological neural networks| Japonism | Unified Theory of Cognition | Yamato-e | Brain implant | Sensory substitution | Nuclear power phase-out | Les Nabis

Here is a list of the articles I started. Sometimes I've only created a stub, sometimes it became more.

Created Articles
Josef Bachmann Isolation tank Anne Treisman List of people in St. Petersburg Irony of Fate Feature integration theory Cognitive architectures Scale-space theory Biological neural networks Copycat (software) Japonism Unified Theory of Cognition Shubun Yamato-e Josetsu Maki-e	Shoen Siebengebirge Shinbutsu Shugo Shinbutsu Bunri Nishiki-e Shingaku Nikolai Kozyrev Berliner Tageblatt Ulk Shinden-zukuri Shingei Brain implant Sensory substitution Chuo University Three wise monkeys Artificial brain National Assembly of Bulgaria	Kairaku-en Die Partei Parallel terraced scan Nuclear power phase-out Nuclear energy policy Kokutai Banya (sauna) Herr Lehmann Nautilus Pompilius Undervud Lufthansa Flight 181 The Star Diaries Marah Durimeh Old Shatterhand (film) Mengen Normal conditions Wikiweise	Hybrid neural network Winner-take-all John R. Anderson Nuclear power in France Nuclear power in Finland Energy policy of Taiwan Nuclear power in the United Kingdom Nuclear technology in the United States Nuclear power in Russia Nuclear power in Bulgaria Nuclear power in Japan Nuclear power in Sweden FreeMat Necrophagy Scholarpedia (was deleted) Fibag scandal Rprop Java Agent DEvelopment framework

Other articles to which I contributed considerably large parts:

Improved articles
Adolf Hitler The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife Hakone, Kanagawa St. Petersburg Sofia Timeline of Middle Eastern History Scale-invariant feature transform Neural Networks ACT-R Amélie Nothomb Georges Rouault ukiyo-e Les Nabis Lyonel Feininger Blumenau	Keiretsu Chinoiserie Joyo kanji Culture of Japan Dietrich Dörner Hakone, Kanagawa List of Japanese learning resources Frankfurter Rundschau Leonor Fini Titanic (magazine) Karl Kraus Muzulman

The article Nuclear power phase-out, which Ben T/C created, has been mentioned on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know? column on August 16, 2005.

		The E=MC² Barnstar
		Thanks for your work on Nuclear energy and trying to keep NPOV alive. Jfingers88 22:34, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Attempt at a Declaration of Bias

My user name Male1979 was chosen by accident when trying to register on a very slow server connection via a badly configured proxy. I was timed-out again and again and subsequently found each name already in use (probably by myself when trying before). So, I came to trying names that I would have never be thought of under normal conditions. I didn't like the name at all at first, however at a second glance it is not that bad at all. As for my biases, my user name expresses clearly two essential ones: I am male and born 1979. Of course, first of all I am human. Born in Germany into a protestant-lutheran family, nurtered with a mix of enlightened philosophy, I later became an atheist for moral reasons, only to become agnostic then existentialist, finally a romantic pragmatist, though I prefer calling myself skeptical instrumentalist. I am a shy extrovert with a disposition towards generalizations. Politically, many of my opinions can be categorized as being European, liberal, and environmentalist (see below). Please take these considerations into account in order to eliminate any possible bias I might have introduced.

[edit] Political and psychological attitudes

On the political compass[2] I am
Economic Left/Right: -8.00
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.97
... but I am not sure as to what that means. You also have to take into account that it was an American test.

I also took a very strange personality test. See [3]

[edit] About wikipedia

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Stub types - to know what stub to put
• Wikipedia:Template messages
• mozilla keywords for wikipedia - to be faster in posting and editing (just don't forget them)
• how to get the (talk) thing next to your signature and help other people save time
• Public domain resources
• Wikipedia:2004_Encyclopedia_topics
• Wikipedia:Five pillars

• User:Angr/Reasons to leave. I strongly support points 2 and 8. I also would like to agree to point 3, but I feel it is too ambitious.
• de:Benutzer:Southpark/Playing Wikipedia Wikipedia as a MMOG. (German)
• Erik Möller's comparison of block frequency

[edit] Toolbox

T O O L B O X Welcome {{welcome}} {{welcomeip}} {{thanks}} Warn {{test0}} {{test}} {{test2}} {{test3}} {{test4}} {{bv}} {{spam}} Block IP Unblock IP Check {{delete}} {{db|...}} {{no source}} {{no license}} Dispute {{POV}} {{disputed}} {{TotallyDisputed}} {{controversial}} Delete {{afd}} {{cfd}} {{ifd}} {{tfd}} {{rfd}} {{mfd}} Change {{wikify}} {{unreferenced}} Others {{Wikibooks}} {{Wikiquote}} {{Wikisource}} {{Wiktionary}}

_{Toolbox adapted from User:FireFox found at User:Tawker. See also Wikipedia:Tools}

[edit] Some popular articles

• The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll
• AFI 100 Years series
• Hitler Has Only Got One Ball
• Infinite monkey theorem
• erototoxin
• cow tipping
• Inherently funny word
• Heavy Metal Umlaut
• Exploding Whale

[edit] External links

• Seth Anthony (2006), Contribution Patterns among Active Wikipedians: Finding and Keeping Content Creators. Wikimania 2006.
• Aaron Swartz (2006), Who Writes Wikipedia?. Raw Thought. This helped me to reconcile the obvious contradiction between Jimbo Wales' statements about the 1500, who are supposedly responsible for all good articles10% of wikipedia users make 80% of all edits on one side, and free software movement group dynamics (cf The Wisdom of Crowds) about boosting article quality on the other side.
• Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Shaul Markovitch (2006), Overcoming the Brittleness Bottleneck using Wikipedia: Enhancing Text Categorization with Encyclopedic Knowledge. Department of Computer Science, Technion—Israel Institute of Technology.

[edit] Licensing

Licensing rights granted to Wikimedia Foundation I grant non-exclusive permission for the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. to relicense my text and media contributions, including any images, audio clips, or video clips, under any copyleft license that it chooses, provided it maintains the free and open spirit of the GFDL. This permission acknowledges that future licensing needs of the Wikimedia projects may need adapting in unforeseen fashions to facilitate other uses, formats, and locations. It is given for as long as this banner remains.

Instead of doing something useful, you are staring at this page since 19:00 Thursday, June 12, 2008 UTC.