Welcome!

Hello, GromXXVII, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! Mushroom (Talk) 20:40, 20 July 2006 (UTC)Reply

Re: edit

John Seigenthaler, Sr. was an orphan article that got Wikipedia a lot of bad press because basically no one had really looked at the article, until the subject of the article did. If there'd been an inbound link from say, John F. Kennedy, the incorrect claims would have probably just been up for a few hours, instead of a few months. If the reference is too confusing feel free to remove it from the bot's page. --W.marsh 03:59, 3 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

UCF edit

Where did you get your information regarding UCF housing? I'm a UCF student who lives on the campus; when I re-registered for housing for this Fall and Spring, all of the forms clearly stated that the dorms were reserved for freshmen and the AV apartments were reserved for upperclassmen. The website also indicates so. I'm going to leave it with your changes, because I don't think that it actually matters and does not affect the quality of the article, but I just thought that I'd ask what your source of information was. M412k 05:09, 3 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

From my experience with housing. I've lived in Apollo for three years and knew a freshmen living in an AV apartment. They reserve 15% of housing in general for upperclassmen; but where it is makes no difference, that is determined at contact signing.
For the most part they don't advertise that upperclassmen can live in Apollo or Libra: one has to go to housing themselves to request it (except for OSC hall in this past year). The AV apartments are the first units on campus to fill up because they're in highest demand: and for fall generally do so before many people have even gotten to turn in their contact, but occasionally when they have space available freshmen can live there.GromXXVII 13:51, 3 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

Watchlist edit

From your userpage :

I'd love to know how the watchlist works: It appears to only list about 1/10th of the modifications from any given day.

From what I understand about the watchlist, it only appears to list an article once in the list, so if a newer edit occurs to an article already in the list, it will be moved (rather than duplicated) to the head of the list which might explain the low change count. You can turn off listing of edits made by bots and/or your own edits which may also go some way to explaining it.

Additionally, thanks for your input into the God talk page regarding parody religions, but I don't think the debate will go anywhere unless another user joins in, Grace Note seems to want to settle the issue by insulting me (and briefly you), and is apparently renowned for ignoring other peoples point of view and resorting to insults when things arn't going his way (He's also been blocked before for such actions). FalconZero (Talk | contribs) 20:56, 29 August 2006 (UTC)Reply

Questionable edits from new users? edit

A quandary. Here and there you find edits that might be sincere, or a disguised act of vandalism, such as a recent edit on the UCF page with edit summary "grammer" that did nothing but add an out of date, lower than current ranking to the school in the page introduction.

So suspecting it was vandalism I naturally checked the users other contributions. There was another edit on the UF page that played with the wording and made the school sound lesser than it the previous wording.

There have been other cases where the [new or anonymous] user has had several other questionable edits. But what to do? If they’re obviously vandalism it’s easy, go and revert them all. If they’re not so obvious, though, as in this case, I wonder if there is a wikipedia policy? I figured I would Assume good faith that the editor was sincere and not go revert the other questionable edits.

Is there a policy that addresses this quandary? GromXXVII 00:47, 6 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

improper integral edit

You changed the introductory sentence of improper integral to this:

In calculus the term improper integral is used to deal with integrals of functions that could possibly have infinite area, and thus not exist[...]

That makes no sense at all. The integral

 

is often considered an improper integral (though it could be considered a Lebesgue integral instead, nonetheless in finding its value, one usually treats it as an improper integral, i.e., one finds the limit as the upper bound of integration approaches  ). Its value is   The integral

 

is NOT an improper integral. Its value is 1.

What in the world could it mean to say that the first one above "could possibly have infinite area, and thus not exist" but that the second "could not possibly have infinite area"?? Neither of the two could possibly be infinite. What makes the first an improper integral is NOT that it "could possibly not exist", but rather that one treats it as a limit

 

Michael Hardy 16:27, 7 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

I was attempting to explain it without using too many advanced concepts. The latter integral cannot possibly have an infinite area because it is continuous and bounded on a bounded interval – so the integral must exist. The definition of the integral directly implies it must.
The former integrates over an unbounded region, and so without calculation or characterization theorems one cannot know if the integral converges or not.
The word “possibly” is probably not the best, I was thinking in terms of the difference between before it is known if an integral is convergent, and after it is known. GromXXVII 19:26, 7 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Citations edit

I don't agree with your assertion regarding the deletion of "truthful uncited material." My deletions are usually of controversial material that don't have a place in an article without a citation. If it's truthful, then a citation can be easily found. I have also added back info after finding a citation. On the other hand, I've noticed you insisting on keeping info in articles when it can't be backed up, which tends to tick people off and leads to edit wars. 74.249.12.248 16:11, 12 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

That is what the {{fact}} can be used for: when something may need a citation, but you don’t have one at the moment. That allows you to come back to it, or alert others that it needs one (and readers that it is might be questionable). By removing the material: someone else that knows a citation or where to find it won’t even know it needs one! Depending on how common that information is, and how prominent the page is, it might be lost for even months or years in some cases.
If the material actually doesn’t belong on a page, the question of a citation is not an issue, because it shouldn’t be there in the first place even if it is true. I was referring to your deletions of material under the reasoning that it needed a citation – material that many times didn’t seem to be POV or hindering the article. If something is so controversial that it shouldn’t be in the article at all until it is cited, it would be better to move it to the talk page so that it’s not lost, and others can find a citation and/or fix it to a quality to put back in the article. (but at least it won’t be lost in the history)
I not quite sure what you’re talking about regarding me, but I assume you’re talking about the Clemson University page from a few weeks ago. Regarding that, nearly every major university’s page has rankings of some sort on the page and they were being arbitrarily removed. There is controversy as to how accurate those rankings are, but the fact of the matter is that they’re pertinent because they’re used by so many people. GromXXVII 17:54, 12 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

Axiom of choice edit

Regarding the edit summary in this edit, the axiom of choice is equivalent to the well-ordering theorem. In ZFC, every set is well-ordered. This includes the real numbers and the ground set of any vector space. It is true that we don't know a well-ordering of the real numbers. If we could prove the existence of a well-ordering of the real numbers without using the (nonconstructive) well-ordering theorem, then choice would not be independent of ZF. Michael Slone (talk) 02:53, 9 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Good point, my mistake. Though the supposed proof still seems to hinge on countability. Perhaps I’m thinking too sequentially, but the statement Create the subset of all elements not linearly dependent on their predecessors seems to require enumerating the vectors. In particular because without enumerating the vectors it’s not clear if that’s possible. Might be able to do it with transfinite induction, but I currently am not familiar enough with it to do so. GromXXVII (talk) 13:47, 9 December 2007 (UTC)Reply
That proof did use an implicit transfinite induction. You may prefer the following proof, which uses Zorn's lemma to avoid transfinite induction. Fix a vector space and consider the poset of linearly independent sets in that vector space ordered by inclusion. Since an arbitrary union of nested linearly independent sets is linearly independent, chains in this poset are bounded above. By Zorn's lemma, there exists a maximal linearly independent set. Maximality implies that the set is a basis. Michael Slone (talk) 15:15, 9 December 2007 (UTC)Reply

Best evidence edit

Genetic evidence is usually taken as the gold standard these days, and has been used in many instances to correct trees built using all other types of evidence. See, for example, this. I'm probably somewhat biased in this regard, though, coming from the molecular end of the evolutionary spectrum.

I agree the section needs references and a lot of other work, but that's what we do here, eh. Graft | talk 04:09, 16 May 2008 (UTC)Reply

Thanks! edit

  The Reference Desk Barnstar
Thanks for helping me on the Mathematics Reference Desk! --Ye Olde Luke (talk) 17:15, 31 July 2008 (UTC)Reply

Invite for any followup, I'm self-banned from the refdesk edit

If you have any other questions on interest rates, you can drop them off at my talk page. I'll never give you an answer without looking right at my book while typing. The best way to solve for interest rates is to convert everything to continuously compounded effective interest, and then plug-n-chug a formula to convert the continuously compound effective interest into a different form. Imagine if there are 20 types of interest rates. If you do it my way, there are only 40 formulas (20 that convert to natural exponential growth, and their 20 inverse functions) rather than figuring out a formula to convert APR to EAR and the other possible combinations of 20*19 possible pairings.

Additionally, you'll rarely find people knowledgeable in finance who like working through proofs, so I can use the LaTeX markup and wp:math symbols. Especially a day like today. Merriyl lynch didn't bust because of "the financial crisis" its because they have an inferior business model refuted by well accepted theory called Efficient market hypothesis. The industry of finance and specifically the market sector of securities investment is ridiculously unscientific. A trader who had a seat on the NYSE talked about the importance of "gut instinct" to my extracurricular club I was in and told a story of making 30% ROI in 8 hours, by speculating his clients money in volatile futures securities! He genuinely believed in numerology and technical analysis That's why I hate revisiting finance, but oh well, I ran smack face first into it, while trying to check on the status of a physics proof that I asked the day before yesterday. Sentriclecub (talk) 00:29, 16 September 2008 (UTC)Reply

Wikipedia's Expert Peer Review process (or lack of such)for Science related articles edit

Hi - I posted the section with the same name on my talk page. Could you take part in discussion ?

User: Shotwell suggested (on my talk page) "I would endorse a WP:EXPERTADVICE page that outlined the wikipedia policies and goals for researchers in a way that enticed them to edit here in an appropriate fashion. Perhaps a well-maintained list of expert editors with institutional affiliation would facilitate this sort of highly informal review process. I don't think anyone would object to a well-maintained list of highly-qualified researchers with institutional affiliation (but then again, everyone seems to object to something)."

We could start with that if you would agree ... - could you help to push his idea through Wikipedia bureaucracy ? Cheers, Apovolot (talk) 18:05, 1 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

I really have very little knowledge of what or how most of the Wikipedia bureaucracy works. I just edit articles when I can and they can be improved. I have little desire at the moment to be involved in debating policies – especially ones I am not familiar with. GromXXVII (talk) 00:23, 2 November 2008 (UTC)Reply

WikiProject University of Central Florida edit

 
University of Central Florida

As a current or past contributor to a related article, I thought I'd let you know about WikiProject University of Central Florida, a collaborative effort to improve Wikipedia's coverage of the University of Central Florida. If you would like to participate, you can visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks and related articles. Thank you and Go Knights!

--Scpmarlins (talk) 18:38, 4 August 2009 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom elections are now open! edit

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:07, 23 November 2015 (UTC)Reply