Month: January 2017

My colleague Scott Welch has been undertaking some empirical research on this subject during his edit block. (Or should we say, his extended study leave from Quora?)

These are his findings to date:

1. You can edit your profile and your credentials.
2. You can downvote and report.
3. You can view your stats (when it works).
4. You have full read access to all content.
5. You can’t upvote any answers, but you can upvote blog posts.
6. Your name is removed from all Most Viewed Writers lists, not sure if you get this back or not, we will see.
7. This is really interesting: Your *existing* answers and comments get way, way, WAY less visibility. My views dropped from ~20,000 per day to ~6,000 per day.
8. You cannot upvote or downvote any comments, even in blogs.
9. You can delete but not edit your existing answers.
10. You can delete but not edit existing comments.
11. You cannot edit Answer Wikis.
12. You can receive but not send personal messages.
13. No notifications of submissions to your blogs.
14. No @-mention notifications
15. (EDIT) You can still follow questions, mark questions as Answer Later, and bookmark answers.

That’s what I have discovered so far.

Do you mean, Rage against Quora, which has just been deleted?

It was good while it lasted. The rest is speculation.

My experience in studying Elec Eng at Melbourne as an undergrad was 25 years ago, so it would be monstrously unfair of me to answer this question.

I’ll do it anyway.

See how my bio says “former Sessional Lecturer at University of Melbourne”? That was in Linguistics, not Elec Eng. 🙂

That’s on me: I enrolled in Science/Engineering because it had the highest entrance score in the state and because I liked maths, not because I tinkered with a soldering iron. (I actually did get some electronic kits back in the day, but they didn’t maintain my interest.)

But still: Melbourne when I went through was utterly theoretical—and not even Good theoretical; it was much more “shut up and learn the formula” than not. They didn’t push practical anything particularly. Everyone knew that RMIT was where you got that kind of exposure, and that RMIT had the real industry links.

Of course, I got my degree in the middle of the Keating recession, and there weren’t a whole lot of jobs about in Australia in Elec Eng. But almost every one of my peers ended up a programmer instead. Which was the Science bit of their Science/Engineering degree.

Interested to hear if that’s changed.

Literal translation—and for a change, I’m ok with that:

ἅπαξ μόνον βιοῖς.

Hápax mónon bioîs.

Since Rage Against Quora has just been deleted, it will be difficult for this question to be answered.

I tested this on Necrologue. I checked a dozen recent bans, including people I knew had bios.

You are right.

I find this offensive.

As it turns out, I have read Christ Recrucified and Freedom and Death in Greek, and the Last Temptation and Zorba only in English, in Bien’s translation.

I have not read anyone else’s translation, so I can’t answer your A2A fully. The astonishing folksy stylistics of Kazantzakis are not going to come through in English. That’s actually just as well: an attempt to make them come through would be too distracting, as it is in translating Cavafy.

But from memory, Bien’s translation rang true to the spirit of the novels I had read in Greek. I recommend it.

I do it a fair bit. Sometimes to start a conversation, although that tends not to work that well. Sometimes because I’m having a discussion in comments, I’m asked a question, and I think it’s useful to get the answer out there. Less often, because I want to get some information out there of my own accord.

Quora policy says there’s nothing wrong with that, and I don’t think there is either. I own the answers, the community owns the questions. I might as well contribute to the community the questions that prompt good answers out of me.

Myself, I think it really is that people expect everyone to be notified about their comments, when they are new to Quora.

Remember that, with no onboarding, it takes a little while for it to become apparent who gets notified of anything, to begin with. It took me a couple of weeks to realise that my comments three levels down would not be read by the original commenter.

Yeah, what the rest of you good people all said, Robert Todd and Amy Dakin and Humphry Smith. It’s correct; it’s dysfluent; and given the pedagogical context, it’s excusable.

That’s why I love podium-arts.com by our own Ioannis Stratakis. He doesn’t dwell on it and drag it out in his recitations, he just gets on with it. It was a real language, after all.