Marijuana : a special report from New Scientist (Mar 1999)
What's your poison: an ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corp.) documentry series (from the Quantum show) comparing Nicotine, Caffeine, Alcohol, Marijuana and Ecstasy. (Apr 1997)
Is it just my imagination, or has moderation almost ground to a halt. Most threads I look in have at most 1 or 2 3+ posts, some have only 1 or 2 2+ posts. I see lots of great posts (IMNSHO) at 1, and whilst first-posts and blatant abuse seem to be getting moderated down (mostly), there's lots of off-topic and trolls getting left alone.
When I went to check the WebBench test (thinking it might have been for serving.asp) I saw this and went "Ah ha!". Then I went back to mindcraft's page, and read:
We tested both Web servers using the standard WebBench
zd_static_v20.tst test suite, modified to increase the number of test systems to 144 and the increment in test systems for each mix to 16 in order to test each product to its maximum performance level. This standard WebBench test suite uses the HTTP 1.0 protocol without keepalives.
We could feed everyone on the planet right now, easily. The fact that we don't, and that we in North America waste so much food, must tell us something
But we can't feed everyone in the world on an average western diet.
It's recently been estimated that each person in Sydney requires 4.5 hectares of productive land. If all the world's people were to live as people in Sydney do, we would need three times all the productive land on the planet
( Radio interview with Dr Ted Trainer, UNSW)
This is mainly due to the enormous amount of land needed to grain to feed to cattle for beef. Genetic engineering might help here, but perhaps more importantly, we need some social engineering to reduce the high meat diet of most of the western world. (That said, I'm not a vegetarian myself...).
Of course efficient communication is an vital tool for education, which might be able to encourage this sort of social change. So Freeman Dyson might have a point here regarding the internet.
Having mentioned Internet and Genome, I suppose I should comment on the Sun too:) One of the major problems with western culture is it's phenomenal energy consumption. I don't think relying on solar power (or fusion) is neccesarily the answer. We need to reduce energy consumption. Don't panic. I'm not suggesting we turn off all our computers to save energy. In fact, computers and the internet could (and should) actually reduce the energy consumption of our society.
A large percentage of western energy consumption is spent on transport (heating and cooling are also big factors - use proper insulation!). But of course we can now cut at least our own transport cost to almost zero: Telecommute to work!
The cost of transporting food is a pretty amazing. Did you know that the for each litre of milk consumed in the US, half a litre of diesel is used to get it there?
Ted Trainer provides fairly radical suggestion for reducing both the amount of land we use, and our energy consumption. Live Simply... so that others can simply live. It involves changing what we define and expect of our standard of living, and restructuring our cities with things such as more local food production (permaculture, urban market gardens), and decentralised business/industrial districts.
I was going to become schizophrenic and post both sides of a debate on self-moderating or whatever you may call it. Slef has taken one of my points for the negative and provided the rebuttal as well. "Me too" on his suggestions. (or at least the basic idea - tweak if needed)
For: People with high alignments (Lawful Good? - perhaps cf my Multi-Dimensional Scoring post), are probably more responsible posters. Letting them self-moderate down is probably a good move.
Self-moderating up on the other hand would only work with the points pool thing - you have a limited number of points to spend. (More roleplaying images spring to mind)
Against: If someone with a high score constantly posts trash and self-moderates it down, they don't get their alignment reduced to the level they "deserve"
Rebuttal: They don't deserve a lower alignment. The trash posts deserve a low score, which they get. The poster's alignment/default score becomes more like a level of trust we have in them to sensibly moderate their own posts.
Yeah, but it will still make it easier for people to "munchkin" themselves high alignments, or at least prevent them dropping.
OK then, so firstly, don't make people's alignments publically visible. There's less point in trying to improve them in that case. Secondly, maybe discourage people from downgrading their posts too far by applying a (small) negative modifier to alignment if a post is moderated up from the value the poster self-moderated it down to, or appliying (again a very small) negative modifier to alignment based on one's own moderation.
It allows Bruce to post outrageous flames (or just simple, off topic humour) without losing his +20 alignment. People who use thresholds don't see the pointless flames, but still see the good posts.
I still want multidimensional scoring, so I can see things that are actually funny even if they are off topic.
One thing I've been concerned about reading through this topic is the idea that someone with a negative alignment might have a hard time recovering. It's good to know that at -1 postings still get looked at by moderators.
How about "humour", "relevance", "insightfulness" and then some axes like "pro/anti M$", "pro/anti Linux"... maybe allow the poster some input into the inital values of these (or start them at the average value of the poster's previous comments).
Then I can specify which region of the multi-dimensional space I want to listen to.
On the other hand, we could just sort posters by geekcode:) -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.1 GM/CM>MU d s+: a- C++ UH++++$ P++++ L++ E W++(-) N+ o? K? w--- O M V PS++PE- Y+ PGP>+++ t 5++ X+ R++> tv- b+++ DI+++ D++ G+ e+++ h- r y? ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
Keep two sets of moderation statisics for each post. One is the system we currently have (with some minor changes as/if required) which uses 400 moderators, or whatever. The other is scored by all non-ACs.
Default filtering option would be based on the "officially" moderated scores, but the (non-AC)/. population could provide some feedback to the "official" moderators.
This would be an alternative to listing an identifying moderator number with scored comments.
I got similar funky behaviour until I decided to go around my proxy. I think the proxy was hitting the URL more than once. Probably should look finding out what the miles of ap_bgets() errors in my error logs are about too at some stage.
Note that the up and down-ness wrap. You hit up from the top and it goes to the bottom.
Hang on! Shouldn't the/. server's heatsinks keep the room warm enough? Failing that, add a resistor or two on the network cabling (ummm... maybe that 's not such a bright idea:)
Slashdot Mirror
Marijuana : a special report from New Scientist (Mar 1999)
What's your poison: an ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corp.) documentry series (from the Quantum show) comparing Nicotine, Caffeine, Alcohol, Marijuana and Ecstasy. (Apr 1997)
Is it just my imagination, or has moderation almost ground to a halt. Most threads I look in have at most 1 or 2 3+ posts, some have only 1 or 2 2+ posts. I see lots of great posts (IMNSHO) at 1, and whilst first-posts and blatant abuse seem to be getting moderated down (mostly), there's lots of off-topic and trolls getting left alone.
It's become brunching.com. I just wanted to know the weather
But we can't feed everyone in the world on an average western diet.
This is mainly due to the enormous amount of land needed to grain to feed to cattle for beef. Genetic engineering might help here, but perhaps more importantly, we need some social engineering to reduce the high meat diet of most of the western world. (That said, I'm not a vegetarian myself...).
Of course efficient communication is an vital tool for education, which might be able to encourage this sort of social change. So Freeman Dyson might have a point here regarding the internet.
Having mentioned Internet and Genome, I suppose I should comment on the Sun too :) One of the major problems with western culture is it's phenomenal energy consumption. I don't think relying on solar power (or fusion) is neccesarily the answer. We need to reduce energy consumption. Don't panic. I'm not suggesting we turn off all our computers to save energy. In fact, computers and the internet could (and should) actually reduce the energy consumption of our society.
A large percentage of western energy consumption is spent on transport (heating and cooling are also big factors - use proper insulation!). But of course we can now cut at least our own transport cost to almost zero: Telecommute to work!
The cost of transporting food is a pretty amazing. Did you know that the for each litre of milk consumed in the US, half a litre of diesel is used to get it there?
Ted Trainer provides fairly radical suggestion for reducing both the amount of land we use, and our energy consumption. Live Simply ... so that others can simply live. It involves changing what we define and expect of our standard of living, and restructuring our cities with things such as more local food production (permaculture, urban market gardens), and decentralised business/industrial districts.
Hmph!! Go and steal half my thunder will you?
I was going to become schizophrenic and post both sides of a debate on self-moderating or whatever you may call it. Slef has taken one of my points for the negative and provided the rebuttal as well. "Me too" on his suggestions. (or at least the basic idea - tweak if needed)
At first glance, I thought alignment decay was a good idea. But on further consideration, I don't think it's needed.
Someone who only posts rarely, but who's comments are consistantly very good should probably keep their high alignment. (and vice versa).
If your comments don't live up (or down) to your alignment, it'll decay anyway.
One thing I've been concerned about reading through this topic is the idea that someone with a negative alignment might have a hard time recovering. It's good to know that at -1 postings still get looked at by moderators.
I like it.
How about "humour", "relevance", "insightfulness" and then some axes like "pro/anti M$", "pro/anti Linux" ... maybe allow the poster some input into the inital values of these (or start them at the average value of the poster's previous comments).
Then I can specify which region of the multi-dimensional space I want to listen to.
On the other hand, we could just sort posters by geekcode :)
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GM/CM>MU d s+: a- C++ UH++++$ P++++ L++ E W++(-) N+ o? K? w--- O M V PS++PE- Y+ PGP>+++ t 5++ X+ R++> tv- b+++ DI+++ D++ G+ e+++ h- r y?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
Here's an idea:
/. population could provide some feedback to the "official" moderators.
Keep two sets of moderation statisics for each post. One is the system we currently have (with some minor changes as/if required) which uses 400 moderators, or whatever. The other is scored by all non-ACs.
Default filtering option would be based on the "officially" moderated scores, but the (non-AC)
This would be an alternative to listing an identifying moderator number with scored comments.
I got similar funky behaviour until I decided to go around my proxy. I think the proxy was hitting the URL more than once. Probably should look finding out what the miles of ap_bgets() errors in my error logs are about too at some stage.
Note that the up and down-ness wrap. You hit up from the top and it goes to the bottom.
Hang on! Shouldn't the /. server's heatsinks keep the room warm enough? Failing that, add a resistor or two on the network cabling (ummm... maybe that 's not such a bright idea :)