Cap'n Refsmmat

Please try the images again -- I think I sorted out the source of that problem.

Looks like it's a recurrence of a problem we had a year or two ago -- a security flaw in IPB letting someone inject code into our templates and direct people to malicious ads. I've cleaned it out, but we're still not sure how it's getting in. I've set something up to detect it if it happens again.

This may be a recurrence of a problem we had a year or two ago. I'll look into it and try to track it down.

I used the email address from your SFN profile. If that's out of date, you can update it and send me a message, and I'll update the email address for your WordPress account.

Many of you are familiar with the SFN Blogs, which we set up back in 2008 to offer a free WordPress blog to every interested SFN member. Some of our bloggers became quite prolific -- swansont reached nearly 5,000 posts, with ajb trailing at nearly 500 -- but the blogging system eventually languished, failing to receive security updates or maintenance. Today, in response to some security issues I feared may be related to our five-year-old (!) WordPress version, I upgraded the blogs system to WordPress 4.4 and migrated our most-active blogs to the latest version. This update brings many new features to WordPress: new themes, an improved dashboard, easier embedding of photos and videos, an improved editor, and much more. Unfortunately, it brings one drawback: we no longer have easy integration with the forums, so running a blog requires a separate account, and there is no longer a Blogs tab to browse the latest blog posts. If you're interested in following SFN followers, you can subscribe to the latest posts by email or by RSS. If you'd like to start a science-related blog, send me a private message and I'll get one set up for you. Enjoy! P.S. The import included the most active and recently updated blogs, but some may have been left out. If I skipped your blog, send me a message and I will import it -- all your content is backed up, so nothing has been lost.

Merged. I've also updated your user title to be "Formerly Transdecimal" to avoid any confusion.

I can merge this account with your old one, yes. Which username would you prefer to keep, Transdecimal or Daecon? Also, welcome back to SFN!

Thanks, that's helpful. I still haven't figured out how the compromise happens, but hopefully I'll find something.

The SFN server doesn't respond to pings, so that wouldn't help. Man-in-the-middle attacks are fairly rare unless you're targeted by the NSA or using dodgy free wifi. The Avast warning sounds like it thinks there's malicious JavaScript on our pages. This is related to the malware warnings we had before. I will try to hunt down the problem further, because apparently it keeps recurring.

The CC0 Public Domain Dedication renounces your copyright. You probably want to use it even if it is a bit long -- it's thoroughly reviewed by lawyers and copyright experts, so it genuinely renounces your copyright interest. If it's too long for marketing, just say that "this software is in the public domain", and include the CC0 logo and a link to the license deed. CC0 is already widely used for this purpose. You probably don't want to invent your own. Corporate attorneys get nervous when they see license terms they've never seen before.

My guess is that the BBCode system is getting confused. As IPB has moved more towards the WYSIWYG editor instead of BBCode, there have been more and more bugs and problems with ordinary BBCode.

I've seen trends like this before. I don't know what to make of it. Maybe the spam robots have a default and don't bother randomizing which forum they post in.

How about requiring that the history forum be about interpretations and meaning of historical events, rather than establishing their existence? Particularly for well-documented events; I'm sure there's a lot to be said about digging up evidence for certain things, but we could close Holocaust denial threads. There's nothing productive to be gained from arguing about the Holocaust's existence on a science forum, where you're certainly not going to convince anyone or produce any evidence that hasn't been produced in great detail elsewhere.

Out of curiosity, what kinds of topics would you discuss in the history forum?

Not necessarily true. The chance of rejecting a false H0 is the power of the test. It depends on how different HA is from H0. If it's not very different, it may be very difficult to tell the difference, so you have a very small chance of rejecting a false null.

"If H0 were true, we would get this sort of data less than 5% of the time. But we got it. H0 must be wrong." You can think of it as nearly a proof by contradiction. If [math]p = 0[/math] exactly, then it is a proof by contradiction: if H0 were true, we would never get this data, but we did, so H0 must be false. Another way to phrase it is "Either we're very lucky and got unlikely results, or H0 is wrong." At some point you're more willing to reject the null than assume you have incredible luck.

The probability of type II error depends on the size of the true effect, so you can't calculate it. You can, however, calculate it for different assumed sizes of true effect, so you could say "If the true effect is this big, then I have a 50% chance of detecting it."

If [math]p < 0.72[/math] but we fail to reject, I wouldn't consider that a type II error. That's intentional, since we're testing for the alternative that [math]p > 0.72[/math]. A one-tailed test would specifically try not to reject when [math]p < 0.72[/math]. The statistician does not know the probability that H0 is false; that's not what a p value is. That's not the typical practice. If the sample is inconclusive, we "accept" (fail to reject) H0. We don't have the choice to reject it -- we have no evidence to justify the choice. Significance testing is designed to avoid rejecting H0 unless we're really sure. When the evidence is inconclusive, we don't reject. I think you're making this much more complicated than it needs to be by interpreting "fail to reject" as "I could accept or reject." That's not the case. "Accept" and "fail to reject" are synonymous, and if you fail to reject, you don't have any choice of what to do. You fail to reject. You're done.

Failing to reject H0 does not mean that [math]p \neq 0.72[/math]; it means p could be 0.72. If you reject H0, yes, it could be that the proportion is smaller than 0.72. But you'd use a one-sided hypothesis test which only rejects when [math]p > 0.72[/math]. I don't understand your reasoning here. Are you suggesting that the statistician sees a statistically insignificant result, and hence fails to reject H0, the null might be true or false and hence the statistician might decide to reject? Because that's not how testing is done. I can't tell if you're trying to distinguish between "accepts H0" and "fails to reject H0". They're synonymous, though the latter is a better description. Yeah, I think they got mixed up here. Typically you'd make the hypotheses as they describe them, so the alternative hypothesis represents an unacceptable level of lead. When you reject the null, you know something is wrong with the water.

What didn't they like about MathJax? My guess is that double spaces in your equations get replaced with non-breaking spaces, which mess with LaTeX. I can probably adjust the code to strip them out. edit: should be fixed now: [latex](\partial_{\mu}\phi - e A_{\mu}\phi)(\partial^{\mu}\phi - e A^{\mu}\phi) + m^2 \phi^2[/latex] [latex](\partial_{\mu}\phi - e A_{\mu}\phi)(\partial^{\mu}\phi - e A^{\mu}\phi) + m^2 \phi^2[/latex]

You could, but why not let people post new threads? It's easier to spot thread titles that interest you than it is to read through a long Q&A thread to find things you can answer.

I think the key is that there is a common understanding of physics. Everyone has an intuitive understanding of the laws of motion, and everyone's heard about stars and gravity and so on. So when they start reading about relativity and quantum mechanics and find that their intuition is completely wrong, their instinct is to say "Aha! Physics is all wrong!" instead of developing new intuition. Whereas if I read about some counterintuitive result in chemistry or cellular biology, I'd just think "oh, neat", because it's not counterintuitive to me -- I have no intuition for the field anyway! I can't say "no, that can't be right, it violates all common sense" because ordinary common sense doesn't have anything to say about those fields. (At least to non-experts.) But common sense does say that special relativity is absurd.

You make links using BBCode: http://www.scienceforums.net/index.php?&app=forums&module=extras&section=legends&do=bbcode (or the buttons in the editor toolbar)

Feel free to talk about sports in the Lounge, or sports-related science in physiology or Other Sciences.

The software can't actually tell whether you're currently looking at a thread -- it just knows when you first opened the page. So if someone starts writing a reply, wanders off to get some coffee, and comes back twenty or thirty minutes later to finish it off, the forum will think they're "offline" because they haven't loaded any new pages in a while. But they're still there, writing a post.