Month: April 2017

This was pointed out to me by a correspondent who wishes not to draw undue attention to themselves as an Insurgent. That’s my job, apparently.

Lightboxes. A feature I’ve yet to see anyone like.

Except….

… for advertisers.

Lightboxes are a feature alright, not a bug.

Question now is: were they a feature motivated primary by helping Quora users pay more focussed attention to a “story”?

… Or to the ad underneath the “story”?

Michael Kiprovski

Account deactivation by Michael Kiprovski on Profile and football updates

My experience to Duke Skibbington’s is so utterly different, I’m all… “are you sure you’re Greek?” But of course, he’s 3rd generation, and I’m 1.5th generation. (2nd generation, but spent childhood in Greece.)

It is of course to do with assimilation, which is to do with the timespan your family has been in Australia, and with intermarriage out of the ethnic group.

• Aboriginal Australians who were part of the Stolen Generations underwent forced assimilation; they don’t know any of their indigenous language, to their distress. Aboriginal Australians still living a traditional lifestyle in the country’s north are likelier to have held on to their language.
• There have been Asians in Australia since the Gold Rush; those Asian Australians are unlikely to have retained their language across 6 generations. The Asian Australians I went to high school with and am still in contact with are 2nd generation; they don’t look like passing their language on.
• Second generation Greeks were known in the 90s to be outliers in how much stronger their retention of Greek was than for other ethnic groups (even though their Greek, as I experienced, was not so much conversational as a secrecy language). But now that we’re in the 3rd generation, their Greek is gone, as Duke reports (and I know other such Greek-Australians).

To the extent that the major wave of Asian migration into Australia was in the 70s–90s, and the major wave of (non-British) European migration into Australia was in the 50s–70s, European–Australians are on aggregate one generation ahead in assimilation. That’s the most one can say.

I’m still extremely liberal about comments. If you engage at all, I’ll upvote. If you’re not adding value (and I have a low threshold for that), I’ll ignore you. If you attack me, I’ll still ignore you. If you’re being abusive or stupid, I’ll downvote you. I think the times I’ve reported or deleted comments on my answers in the 1.5 years I’ve been here, can be counted on a hand or two.

But I do avoid controversies (that don’t involve Quora itself). I’ve gotten away with liberality in comments, because I’ve been avoiding conflict in general; I’ve gotten just two BNBR warnings in my time here.

I will cc comments a lot to people who should know of them, through @-mention. Unfortunately, @-mention has been only sporadically functional for months. (The lightbox ads aren’t though!)

I loathe BNBR for its vagueness and subjectivity. I appreciate BNBR for its encouraging a culture of civility.

BNBR can be used to prosecute nerd rage (as OP explains it: aggressive snarkiness), since such snark is Not Nice. After all, BNBR is used to prosecute banter, which is meta-Nice, because moderators think it will discourage civility.

OTOH, there are plenty of snarksters here, particularly high-profile users castigating vices; and I don’t see snark being systematically nipped in the bud here before it escalates into outright BNBR violations. (I’m not sure I would either.)

You pose an interesting question: is BNBR the only thing that averts feral snark? No. The culture of the site ultimately is what averts misbehaviour. And since OP was curious about practice in other fora: if the fora are small enough to have an organic culture, that culture can self-moderate pretty well. In bigger fora like Quora, you need to build the culture by policing it. BNBR has done that here, but BNBR would be nowhere unless a critical mass of users bought into it, and policed it themselves, through reporting and downvoting.

That’s misbehaviour in general; trolling, for example, is here but is much less prominent than elsewhere. But feral snark? Much more borderline, much harder to extirpate, and much harder to get community buy-in that it must be stamped out than for trolling. And I just don’t see it is being prosecuted as aggressively. (And I’d rather it not be, precisely because it’s much harder to.)

In Australia, in pubs, we yell “Taxi!”

The premise is that the glass or plate was dropped by someone drunk, who therefore will be needing a taxi, as they are in no state to drive themselves home.

The question details ask for a meticulous and specific answer (though the question itself is neither).

The original 24 letter alphabet used for Latin did not even encompass the sounds of its daughter languages, let alone the sounds of other languages. Centuries of often messy digraph and diacritic solutions ensued.

But any language using a Latin alphabet as its script or as a scholarly transliteration of its script has, by definition, come up with a workable means of representing its phonemic inventory using Latin letters and diacritics.

And any phonemic alphabet or Abjad or syllabary that has needed to represent new sounds has found ways of doing so. That includes extensions of Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew script.

A key restriction for those script is that they are normally only called on to represent the phonemic inventory of a language, and not the more detailed distinctions of its phonetic inventory.

If the IPA counts as an extension of the Latin alphabet, then most phonetic variation is provided for as well, and the remainder can be stabbed at with diacritics. This does not deal with the gradiation of all possible sounds that can come out of a mouth, because the IPA is not a spectrogram. But it does deal with the variation in sound that can be usefully perceived by a linguist.

The IPA in turn is only concerned with sounds that can occur in non-pathological speech. But if the IPA counts as an extension to the Latin alphabet, so do the Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for disordered speech.

The Magister’s comment to Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do you find Thucydides hard to read in Greek?

https://www.quora.com/Do-you-fin…

I feel your pain. I am sorry to report that’s just Thucydides talkin’, too. Try reading Pericles’ famous speech if you want to develop trichotillomania.

I understood the word, and now, you will too:

Trichotillomania – Wikipedia:

Trichotillomania (TTM), also known as hair pulling disorder, is an impulse control disorder characterised by a long term urge that results in the pulling out of one’s hair. This occurs to such a degree that hair loss can be seen. Efforts to stop pulling hair typically fail. Hair removal may occur anywhere; however, the head and around the eyes are most common. The hair pulling is to such a degree that it results in distress.

The disorder may run in families. It occurs more commonly in those with obsessive compulsive disorder. Episodes of pulling may be triggered by anxiety. People usually acknowledge that they pull their hair. On examination broken hairs may be seen. Other conditions that may present similarly include body dysmorphic disorder, however in that condition people remove hair to try to improve what they see as a problem in how they look.

Treatment is typically with cognitive behavioral therapy. The medication clomipramine may also be helpful. It is estimated to affect one to four percent of people. Trichotillomania most commonly begins in childhood. Women are more commonly affected than men. The name was created by François Henri Hallopeau in 1889, from the Greek θρίξ/τριχ- thrix meaning “hair”, τίλλειν tíllein meaning “to pull”, and μανία mania meaning “madness”.

I find the fact that medicos abbreviate it as TTM adorable.

I plan on retaining my full hair of head for a while longer…

Pericles’ Funeral Oration – Wikipedia

No, don’t you dare.

Thucydides’ Greek is notoriously difficult, but the language of Pericles Funeral Oration is considered by many to be the most difficult and virtuosic passage in the History of the Peloponnesian War.

I mean it!

Οἱ μὲν πολλοὶ τῶν ἐνθάδε ἤδη εἰρηκότων ἐπαινοῦσι τὸν προσθέντα τῷ νόμῳ τὸν λόγον τόνδε, ὡς καλὸν ἐπὶ τοῖς ἐκ τῶν πολέμων θαπτομένοις ἀγορεύεσθαι αὐτόν. ἐμοὶ δὲ ἀρκοῦν ἂν ἐδόκει εἶναι ἀνδρῶν ἀγαθῶν ἔργῳ γενομένων ἔργῳ καὶ δηλοῦσθαι τὰς τιμάς, οἷα καὶ νῦν περὶ τὸν τάφον τόνδε δημοσίᾳ παρασκευασθέντα ὁρᾶτε, καὶ μὴ ἐν ἑνὶ ἀνδρὶ πολλῶν ἀρετὰς κινδυνεύεσθαι εὖ τε καὶ χεῖρον εἰπόντι πιστευθῆναι.

AAAAARGH!!!

(Actual shots of TTM are actually pretty disturbing…)

The time frame for appeals, we are told, is two weeks. See e.g.

• Sierra Spaulding’s answer to How long does it take for Quora to un-collapse an answer?
• McKayla Kennedy’s answer to How long do Quora moderators take to respond to appeals and reported issues?
• Laura Hale’s answer to How long does Quora take to respond to an appeal to anonymity suspension?
• Laura Hale’s answer to How long should I expect to wait for a response from Quora moderation?

Any unbans I have seen have been within that timeframe.

Brooke was banned two weeks ago.

I doubt it.

In Greece, it’s not particularly difficult to find all the works of Kazantzakis in any middling bookstore; and bless you for mentioning the Terza Rimas, that I have a lot of affection for.

In the Anglosphere, a university with a Modern Greek teaching program will have them. A university that used to have a Modern Greek teaching program, like the University of Melbourne, will have banished them to storage.

From Nikos Kazantzakis – Wikipedia, I see a lot of translations of the more obscure works have appeared in very obscure places—literary journals in the 1970s, limited edition runs of 140. Neither Julian nor the Terza Rimas have been translated, although the Terza Rima I use as one of my email .sigs has been:

• Christ (poetry), translated by Kimon Friar, “Journal of Hellenic Diaspora” (JHD) 10, No. 4 (Winter 1983), pp. 47–51 (60).

You can download that issue at: Issues 1-2, 3, 4