User:SamHB

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Hello, SamHB, and welcome to Conservapedia!

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Math and Science

Shortly after registering at Conservapedia, I saw, in "recent changes", a change by User:CSGuy about Talk:Laplace's equation. Perhaps unwisely, I jumped right in and promised to fix that, adding two more notes there.

But before proceeding with anything, I want to know whether I will be doing the right thing. It seems that CP at one time had, as a major goal, the creation of encyclopedic articles aimed at high-school age (homeschooled and otherwise) students. Looking around, I see four very prolific contributors to this field this back in early 2007 or so:

But they are all gone, and no one seems to be minding the store these days. Is there some policy reason for this? Are articles of this type not something that CP is currently interested in?

I note also that there seems to be some kind of viewpoint that frowns upon complex numbers, as seen by poking around in the various mathematics articles. Is this true? If so, that would be quite unfortunate, because I wouldn't be able to put in the fact, which I consider very educational at the level of ambitious high-school students, that the real and complex components of complex analytic functions satisfy Laplace's equation.

SamHB 20:10, 2 May 2008 (EDT)

IP Proxies

My situation is somewhat similar (but not identical) to Deborah's: I have to use proxies. So, to paraphrase Deborah, Please don't block me.

Now it turns out that I have already been blocked once because of a proxy conflict:

23:40, 4 May 2008 Karajou (Talk | contribs) blocked "AnthonyT (contribs)" with an expiry time of infinite (sock of banned vandals ArnieS, FrankD, SamHB, NormanTebbitt)

If I were more thin-skinned about such things, I would be offended by Karajou referring to me as a vandal, in violation of the civility guideline. Under the circumstances, it appears to be nothing more than an incorrect assumption that the use of proxies constitues vandalism. I have never seen Deborah ever commit vandalism. Nor have I.

I may start a discussion/debate page on this subject, if I ever figure out how to start such pages. The attitude toward IP proxies appears to be badly misguided and outdated, and doesn't seem to be helping Conservapedia at all.

SamHB 14:29, 7 May 2008 (EDT)

Further thoughts on IP blocking, and blocking in general

After a lot of looking through block logs, talk pages, users' contributions, vandal edits, and various controversies, it has become clear that the policy of blocking any appearance of duplicate IP addresses is counterproductive, and a total waste of effort.

In fact, I think the entire blocking policy is being done in a nonproductive way, but that's the subject of a much longer essay in the future. But people might want to ask:

Is the current way sysops operate actually effective in stopping vandalism?

Is arguing over the statistical methodology leading to the conclusion that people in show business have a higher incidence of breast cancer distracting from more productive activities?

Getting back to IP blocks: They are completely counterproductive. Look through the contribution logs of the "vandals" that were accused of being socks of me -- AnthonyT, ArnieS, FrankD, and NormanTebbitt. They never committed vandalism (well, one of them used an off-color word.) Nor did I, nor did Deborah. They are not socks of me. I have no idea who any of them are.

The IP blocking policy is ostensibly in place to prevent people, who have been blocked based on the content of their edits, from evading the block by creating another ("sockpuppet") account and continuing what they were doing. A check of Wikipedia shows that they also have a policy against sockpuppets, but that it is only invoked when there is actual evidence of sockpuppetry. Such evidence is based on content and other factors, not on IP addresses.

Here in the 21st century, people use varied IP addresses for an enormous number of reasons. The internet is used from cell phones, "internet cafes", airports, corporate firewalls, and many other places that make it hard to draw conclusions about a person's identity. Drawing conclusions about who a person is based on the IP address from which they access the internet is just wrong. Anonymity is everywhere. One may not like it (the police and FBI sure don't), but it's a fact of contemporary internet life. Even the apparent policy that one has to use one's own name to create an account at Conservapedia is futile. You can't censor or police the internet!

As if that weren't bad enough in general, there is now a booming business of "anonymizing proxies" designed to get around censorship. These appear to have started as a way of circumventing the Chinese government's attempts to censor the internet. A couple of years ago I could find only about 5 such. There are now thousands, playing cat-and-mouse games with corporations, schools, and anyone else who tries to censor the internet. You can't censor or police the internet!

It appears that what connects me to AnthonyT, ArnieS, FrankD, and NormanTebbitt is that we used the same public proxy at one time or another. You can't censor or police the internet! Banning people for using the same IP address (or for saying things that sysops don't like) bans all the wrong people. Just look around at the block logs.

SamHB 22:36, 14 May 2008 (EDT)

Writing Plans, Writing Assignments, and more Mathematics

(Hi, Andy!)

It is my understanding that one is supposed to submit a "writing plan". I don't know where one submits it, so I'm putting mine here. It is also my understanding that sysops may give "writing assignments". I don't know how that is done, but feel free to put it here. Yes, here, on my user page, not the talk page. I give my permission for people to discuss things with me here.

Part of the writing plan was given above, relating to Laplace's equation. I still await instructions on that. There are a few more things I have noticed recently, relating to math. As before, I come at this from the standpoint of creating educational articles accessible to Junior-High or High-School-age people, whatever their actual educational circumstances.

The mathematical series article, even after a sysop corrected one spelling error, still has 15 more, and 3 grammatical errors, and many statements that I question the mathematical correctness/appropriateness of. It doesn't explain how the geometric series formula works, it doesn't define alternating series correctly, and it doesn't explain their convergence criterion. These are all things that should be accessible to the target audience.
I agree more with Andy than with DanielB on the fight over the fundamental theorem of calculus, but DanielB does have some good points. It could use more work.
The gradient article is just wrong. Using the word "gradient" as a loose synonym for "derivative" is wrong. The gradient is a vector operation. This may not be accessible to our entire target audience, but it will be accessible to some, and we should explain it properly.

SamHB 22:23, 21 June 2008 (EDT)

You have good ideas, and we welcome educational contributions. My objection to DanielB's edits are to the extent they remove information that may be useful to a student.--Aschlafly 23:40, 21 June 2008 (EDT)

My attempt to contact Andy

The following email was sent to DeanS, while I was blocked, on July 8, 2008. I do not know whether it was ever forwarded to Andy. I apologize for the unpleasant tone of this—one says things in private email that one might not say publicly. But it appears not to have gotten through, so here it is.

[Start of email]

Dean:

Please send this to Andy. He has his mail disabled. Sorry to bother you with this, but that seems to be the way it's gotta be. I'm blocked.

Andy:

The question has come up in the "Can you contact me privately?" section of your talk page (from Jinxmchue) about the legitimacy of some rather technical edits that have been made recently. He admits to having had only "Calculus in my junior year of high school", and wants more expert advice.

Well, I can provide that advice. But I've been blocked by Ed Poor. So you're going to have to wait for a month.

In the space of 6 days, Ed Poor (with a little help from Karajou) has decimated the ranks of people trying to help out with math and science articles. (Actually, worse than decimated, if one takes the true meaning of the word. "Devastated" would be a better term.)

It appears to be quite rare for 6 experts of the caliber of

Mathoreilly
DanielB
LemonPeel
SamHB (myself)
Fantasia
Wandering

to be trying to help Conservapedia at the same time, but this was the lucky state of CP recently. CP had an opportunity to make great progress in this area. Admittedly, not everything was polished very well at the time of the disaster, but these were good people. I, for one, am proud of my suggestion of "advanced" templates for these articles. I thought we could actually make an educational resource that people could find their way around in, and derive great enrichment from. Not all people would get the same enrichment, of course, but with articles carefully written by experts and appropriately graded, we could do a good job.

But Ed has destroyed all that. And destroyed it amidst claims of "I have taught SAT math and I earned AP credit for calculus" and "I have a year of high school physics and a year of college physics". Those boasts are ludicrous relative to the people he was blocking! Those people were real experts! Ed needs to defer to them, and make constructive comments on their efforts, and on how well those efforts are succeeding relative to his understanding. People like these don't come by very often!

Now there are lots of things that I would object to about some of these people's contributions, and I understand that some of them have been blocked for other infractions. And some (including myself) may have been less deferential than we should have been. I don't have time to track down all the details, and I'm not going to defend all of them. But I can say that:

Mathoreilly and LemonPeel really seem to know their stuff.
I do too, of course :-)
While I've had some problems with DanielB (you may recall my discussing them with you several days ago), he also seems to know his stuff reasonably well. And he did create the templates that I had suggested. He also admitted that they may not be perfect, and he solicited suggestions. I can make those suggestions. But not for a month.

If you care about the status of Conservapedia as an educational resource, you should do this:

Get Ed to back down. I realize that you place great value on sysop loyalty, but he is being way too destructive.
Restore the following pages that Ed has deleted: Natural logarithm and Radioactivity. I can tell you that those are topics that high school students can understand when presented correctly, as they were in my high school. We can fix them. But I need to see them. Just deleting them is simply destructive of Conservapedia's aims.

It would also be good to get an explanation from Karajou of his infinite block of Mathoreilly: "(Inserting false information: Mathoreilly needs to learn his math back in grade school, and UCLA needs to give him his money back until he does.)" This seems unduly abusive. I can't find the false information, though admittedly there is a lot to look through. I may have missed something. Perhaps he can help me out. Also, I wonder if he could provide the source of his claim that Mathoreilly needs to re-learn grade-school math, or what the UCLA reference was about. Neither of those statements is consistent with my information. And the loss of Mathoreilly is a singular disaster.

Sam.

[End of email]

An Open Letter to Ed Poor

Ed:

I hope you are well rested from your month-long vacation from people trying to improve CP's math and science educational articles.

Dare we say "save CP as an educational resource"? That characterization is quite apt, because the educational articles in this area have fallen into a deplorable state of disrepair, and the powers that be seem to be badly neglecting this important part of CP's mission.

I can assure you that I am well-rested. I have spent the month in deep and somber reflection and contemplation of my actions, as one is supposed to do when blocked. I have also surveyed the devastation, and have come up with a large number of examples of really bad writing, a few of which I have listed in the next section. Some of the bad writing was introduced quite recently (within the last month, while I was blocked and couldn't do anything) and was not reverted or repaired. It would seem that there are no active CP contributors who are qualified or motivated (I don't know which) to maintain these articles. Because of this, the quality of the math and science articles has actually declined over the last month, in addition to the problems that occurred (integration, derivative, integral, gradient, manifold, radioactivity. etc) in the days leading up to that. This is not what "building an encyclopedia" or "making substantive contributions" should mean.

One of the things I did in the last month was to check the state of educational knowledge of the relationship between "radiation" and "radioactivity", an issue that you seem to have been perplexed by here. The McGraw-Hill Children's Dictionary (ISBN 1-57768-298-X) is a resource that I would judge to be aimed at 10-year-olds, at least 6 years younger than what I think CP's target audience should be. The blurb on the back cover indicates a target audience of "elementary school through middle school". I believe that means 8- to 13-year-olds.

Their entry for radioactivity is:

The giving off of energy as a result of the decay of unstable atoms.

Uranium has a high level of radioactivity.

Their entry for radiation is:

The waves of energy sent out by sources of heat or light, or by a radioactive material.

She wore a hat to protect her skin from the radiation of the sun.

Many people are concerned about radiation from nuclear waste.

And yet the changes that you made to the page indicated that you didn't want to deal with the topic even at that introductory level. Furthermore, you made it impossible for anyone else to deal with it, by deleting the page and by blocking people. As a result, CP's page on radioactivity is not even up to the standards of the McGraw-Hill Children's Dictionary. And everyone is afraid to touch it, as though the page itself were radioactive.

In addition to the pages that were damaged by your actions of about a month ago, some more pages have deteriorated in the last month, of which I will list some below. This would not have happened if you had not driven away so many good contributors:

Mathoreilly
DanielB
LemonPeel
myself
Fantasia
Wandering

I have had to watch helplessly as pages were subject to inept edits.

(By the way, I'm not endorsing everything that these people did. But they were good people with good ideas, They deserved better treatment.)

It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken (with apologies to Frank Perdue)

Writing educational math and science articles, even at the elementary school level, requires an enormous amount of expertise, knowledge, and skill. Just knowing the subject matter at the level being taught isn't enough. One must know how to present it in a way that is both pedagogically correct for the intended audience and meticulously correct on the facts. The example below regarding "center" is a very simple example of getting it wrong.

Conservapedia had a particular influx of real experts about a month ago, and they were all driven away.

Articles that need improvement

Center—"a point that, on average, the points of the shape are equidistant from"? If you take the average of a set of measurements, you will get just one number. Of course the result will all be the same! This is muddled thinking. A correct definition is a little more complicated, but not too much so.

Eigenvector and Eigenvalue—Believe it or not, these concepts can be explained in a sensible, albeit elementary way, to ambitious high school students.

Quantum mechanics—More difficult to do well, but we really can do a lot better, if you let people work on it.

There are a number of others; I won't bore you with the details. One of them was edited by someone with impressive status at CP, in a manner that seems to me to be parody, or, at the very least, not serious.

Restoring material

So what do I want from you? Ideally, I'd like you to apologize for your actions, unblock the remaining people, and indicate that you (and others) will obtain an expert consensus before deleting edits or blocking accounts in the future. But if this is not something that you are able to do, I will understand.

But I really would like you to make available the material that you deleted from Radioactivity and natural logarithm. It seems that you not only reverted the entire contents of these pages, but you deleted the entire edit history (and, ine case, the entire page), so that no one can see the former content. Please make that former content available, either by restoring the former history and then editing the current content on top of that, or by making the former content available elsewhere. Here on my user page, my talk page, your page, a subpage of something, email; anywhere. That way, I may be able to make a good decision how to proceed.

Whether I will actually do anything is another matter. If I'm going to be blocked and/or have my work deleted, there's really no point, is there?

SamHB 19:59, 5 August 2008 (EDT)