Re: Suggesting a Poll

Tonicopm@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Feb 17, 11:00 pm, Angus Rodgers <twir...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Bill Dubuque <w...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I doubt Google Groups star ratings are useful since many experts read
sci.math not through Google Groups but rather with real newsreaders.
But someone with some spare time might investigate how Google Groups
star ratings compare to the CRAP scores tabulated below.

Last year [1] I gathered some crude statistics that may be useful
in this regard. I noticed that there is a fairly strong inverse
correlation between the mathematical quality of one's sci.math
posts and the percentage of one's posts that are "crank bashing".
Below are the statistics, gathered crudely by simply computing the
percentage of posts in the Google Groups sci.math archive that
involve telltale crank-bashing keywords (crank, loon, crackpot...).
This CRAP (CRAnk-bashing Percentage) score is tabulated below.
A '*' denotes a known/suspected professional mathematician/PhD.
Notice almost all the professionals/PhDs have less than 0.4% CRAP,
whereas the high-CRAP offenders exceed such by an order of magnitude.
If nothing else, this might prove useful for constructing killfiles,
"scoring" posts in various newsreaders (e.g. Gnus), etc.

[1]http://google.com/groups?selm=y8zwsjtbxmf.fsf%40nestle.csail.mit.edu

6.5%  72/1100   Tonico, tonio, Tonicopm (Jose Antonio Perez)
4.4   98/2204   tommy1729, amy666
4.1  202/4910   uncle al
3.8   54/1420   galathaea

But galathaea is a crank un-basher, not a crank basher (or indeed a crank).

3.7   67/1790   Larry Hammick
3.2  214/6670  *Chris Hillman
3.0  126/4240   MoeBlee
2.9  178/6220  *Proginoskes (Christopher Heckman)
2.9  110/3790   Denis Feldmann
2.7   35/1300   Angus Rodgers

The ignominy!  I must look into how you compute this, because I
almost never attack anyone for being a crank.  The only crank
I recall really bashing was Mehran Basti, and I used much ruder
words than "crank" when I was bashing him!  I also don't get
bashed for being a crank (although I did for a while when I
first came back to sci.math in 2007).

Does your program distinguish between /uses/ of the telltale
words and /quotations/ from posts containing them?!  If not,
that's a pretty basic error.

2.7  278/10300  Lester Zick
2.1   42/1960   Will Twentyman
2.1   41/1890   Aatu Koskensilta

Huh?  Never was there less of a crank-basher (or crank).

2.0   99/4910   Mensanator
1.8   85/4710   Ross A. Finlayson
1.5  104/6920   Archimedes Plutonium, Ludwig Plutonium

I'm worse than Archimedes Plutonium?  You cut me to the quick.

(Where's James Harris in the list, by the way?)

1.5   13/866    Tim Smith
1.5   15/986   *Chan-Ho Suh
1.4   48/3390   Phil Carmody
1.4   12/877   *Edgar E. Escultura
1.3   46/3630   The Ghost In The Machine
1.2   19/1530   Michael Press
1.2   65/5280  *Pertti Lounesto
0.8   14/2600  *Robert Silverman, Bob Silverman, Pubkeybreaker
0.8  250/29500  Virgil
0.8   59/7790   *** T. Winter
0.8   24/3050  *Daryl McCullough
0.8   74/9580   Bill Taylor
0.8   22/2870  *Torkel Franzen
0.7    6/822   *Alexander Abian
0.7   23/3070   Dann Corbit
0.6   18/2880  *Dave L. Renfro
0.6   37/5880   quasi
0.6   12/2093   John Ramsden,  Owlhoot
0.6   43/7160  *Robin Chapman
0.6  171/29500 *David C. Ullrich
0.5   31/6690  *John Baez
0.5   29/5980  *Gerry Myerson
0.5   16/3030  *Doug Norris
0.4    1/283   *hagen <k...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
0.4    8/2010  *Keith Ramsay
0.4   11/2590  *Matthew P Wiener
0.3   51/16400 *Arturo Magidin
0.3    5/1570  *Derek Holt <ma...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
0.3    7/2280  *Ilias Kastanas
0.3   26/9710  *Peter Nyikos
0.3    3/944   *David Eppstein
0.3    3/1080  *Tal Kubo
0.2    4/1760  *David Bernier
0.2    4/1890  *Bill Dubuque
0.2    9/4160   The World Wide Wade
0.2    9/3690  *Dave Rusin
0.2   11/7050   Dave Seaman
0.2    7/3450  *Lee Rudolph
0.2    6/3310  *Ronald Bruck
0.2    4/2120  *Timothy Murphy
0.2    2/1160  *Ed Hook
0.2    4/1900  *Toby Bartels
0.2    2/1230  *Timothy Y. Chow
0.2    3/1490  *Paul Sperry
0.1    3/5920  *G. A. Edgar
0.1    1/1097  *Mariano Suarez-Alvar
0.1    1/952   *Michael Barr
0.1    5/4800  *Zdislav V. Kovarik
0.1    1/1160  *John Conway
0.1   12/1880  *James Dolan
0.1    1/1210  *Noam Elkies
0.0    0/1180  *Axel Vogt
0.0    0/4860   David Cantrell
0.0    0/1230  *Jannick Asmus
0.0    0/2150  *Peter L. Montgomery
0.0    1/2210  *[Mr.] Lynn Kurtz
0.0    5/13500 *Herman Rubin
0.0    0/1900   Rob Johnson
0.0    1/3070  *William C Waterhouse
0.0    0/2210  *Greg Kuperberg
0.0    0/1090  *Miguel A. Lerma
0.0    0/2190  *D. J. Bernstein
0.0    0/1220  *Edwin Clark  

OK, there's a pattern here, I'll grant you that: all good quality
at the bottom of the list, but what's happened at the top bothers
me - there are anomalies.  (I know that that's special pleading,
but there are.)

Perhaps, if you can spare the time, you might e-mail me with some
indication of how I came to figure so embarrassingly high in the
list of offenders.

I hate witch hunts of any kind, especially when I am fingered as
one of the witches.

Oh, don't worry: Bill loves to do that. Right now., for example,
he made up that list just because he's mad at me for having
stood up against his patronizing and bullying attitude towards me
(and others) in another forum (AA, in fact). That's the reason why,
of course, I lead the list...go figure!

Thanks for reminding me: I should add a scoring component for
"paranoid conspiracy theorists" to my Gnus scoring function!

Never mind him: someone that makes up those kinds of lists must be all
the time reading the posts (otherwise how can he know what's what he
calls bashing or whatever?) and that among thousands of posts.
Boring...and sad and pitiful.

Everyone using a quality newsreader devises analogous scoring functions.
It's the first step in separating the mathematical wheat from the chaff.
Having been an Emacs developer, I can compose such code very quickly.

--BD
.

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