Talk:Welcome to Citizendium

Welcome to Citizendium

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Archive 1

Created Archive 1, 10:09, 30 May 2009 (UTC) — Caesar Schinas

Why I revised the front page intro a few days ago

I revised the front page intro substantially a few days so thought I should explain my rationale. The former verbiage was seeming sort of like a business that had been around a while yet still rather oddly had its "Grand Opening!" sign up front. That sort of sign works to draw in new customers for a while, but there is another group who will still only drive by and not come in. They want to know "we're still here and we're a growing business who is here to stay, so it's a really good to come in now." It's flowing with a seemingly natural cycle, I suppose. At any rate, that was what I tried to do. Stephen Ewen 06:30, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Slight redesign

I don't like the current layout of the main page; it's too cluttered at the top and it looks silly having the logo twice.
I'd like to change it to something like this or this (sorry about the long header, if you have a low-resolution screen) - what does anyone think of the idea?
Caesar Schinas 11:08, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

I decided to be bold. If people don't like this, we can revert. Caesar Schinas 15:11, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

See here for the old version. Caesar Schinas 15:18, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

I prefer the new version over the old one and think we should go ahead with the redesign - for instance, I like the drop image very much but find it out of place here: adding water to the ocean probably isn't too appropriate an image for an attempt to structure anything, and be it knowledge. --Daniel Mietchen 00:00, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Yes, an improvement, and yes, exit the drop. Ro Thorpe 00:16, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I agree, the drop should go. A nice pic, but not the message we want to send. How about a pic of a *VAST* reading room, such as the LOC or whatever it is in London, or the Bodelian, or whatnot, a *enormous* repository of knowledge? Old-fashioned, sure, and not hip, but appropriate.... Hayford Peirce 02:42, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

When I worked at LOC, there was a very popular cartoon from the New Yorker, with a crowd, pointing Superman-style to a lone figure in the Main Reading Room, shouting "Look! It's a Congressman!"

Hehe. Hayford Peirce 04:17, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

You don't know what vast means, however, until you get accidentally locked in the stacks and the lights are turned out. Trust me. Howard C. Berkowitz 02:45, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

You should read the wonderful 1951-ish novel by Michael Innes called either Operation Pax or The Paper Thunderbolt, where the climatic scene is set in the 30-story-deep underground stacks of the Bodelian.... (imaginary, he says, in a note) Hayford Peirce 04:15, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I like the drop, but perhaps as you say it's not appropriate. It's not very noticeable down at the bottom of the page, anyway. Caesar Schinas 06:26, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I've added code to make the quotation change every month, and added a few more quotations... Not sure if we want them to start again after a year, but it's a start.

Best not to get rid of the drop until images are working again. Caesar Schinas 07:31, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Server restarted

There was some bad RAM in one of our main servers, and it was just replaced. Glad I was around when the server went down, so I could get the Steadfast people on the case. But now (I observe) the images are not showing up. Well...we'll see what's going on there, I don't know when the images will be showing up, but by tomorrow AM I hope. --Larry Sanger 06:21, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I'd just been going to ask if something was wrong with all the images or if it was just me...

When is "tomorrow AM"? How about a GMT time?

Caesar Schinas 06:25, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't live on GMT, I live on Eastern Standard. That is 4 or 5 hours behind GMT, depending on time of year...you can do the math, I trust. :-) --Larry Sanger 01:48, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I can understand that. It's hard for us non-US-people to get our heads around the fact that you have so many different timezones...

Perhaps we should make it a rule that everyone puts their timezone on their userpage? I know some Citizens already do.

Caesar Schinas 06:16, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

No idea about the time zones, but I don't see the images either. Aleksander Stos 07:12, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Splitting out AOTW and NDOTW

I've moved the Article of the Week and the New Draft of the Week to CZ:Article of the Week/current and CZ:New Draft of the Week/current, respectiveyl, and transcluded them onto this page so that this page doesn't have to be edited every time those are updated. Caesar Schinas 07:44, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Pictures

I don't see the pictures on the main page, not with FireFox, Google Chrome nor IE8--Paul Wormer 08:56, 31 May 2009 (UTC) PS: All picture stuff (including LaTex) is screwed up right now.--Paul Wormer 08:58, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Larry is aware of this - see above - but I don't know if anything is being done about it. Caesar Schinas 09:03, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Pictures are appearing for me, as of 13:37 GMT. Anton Sweeney 12:39, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

They actually started working again some time before 12:30 GMT yesterday. Caesar Schinas 13:20, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Update

Well, RAM on the server that was chronically crashing was replaced last night (almost 24 hours ago now). It is possible that bad RAM was the cause of the chronic crashing. If so, we shouldn't see crashes nearly as regularly. Fingers crossed! --Larry Sanger 01:50, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Quotations

I've altered the code slightly so that a pseudo-random quotation is displayed on every page load, though in practice it won't be quite every time due to caching.
There are currently 12 quotations - should we have more?
If anyone adds more, they'll have to change the randomisation code slightly; it needs to know how many quotes there are.
Caesar Schinas 16:51, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Logo

Who else think that this looks much better than this? Caesar Schinas 08:23, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I do. The background needs to be transparent, I think. I use the default skin, and there's an ugly white box around the logo. Anton Sweeney 09:36, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Unfortunately, this can only be changed by someone who can change the files on the server; it's not a setting which can be changed on the wiki. Caesar Schinas 10:25, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

If, by the "default skin", you mean MonoBook... well, it's not the default skin. Pinkwich5, in my screenshots, is. Caesar Schinas 16:15, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

I do, too. --Daniel Mietchen 16:31, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

What are we called?

Looks like we need to decide what our name is. On this page there are at least three different names... We have
Welcome to Citizendium
Write for the Citizendium
Why Citizendium?
Citizendium may be different...
So which should we use? I think Larry has said in the past that it's the Citizendium, but it's not that way in the logo.
If it is that, this page should be renamed Welcome to the Citizendium. (No italics in the pagename...)
Caesar Schinas 15:04, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

And what about Eduzendium? I guess it would have to be the Eduzendium. Caesar Schinas 15:06, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Random citations

I like this feature very much and wonder whether we should use a similar switch to randomly display one of the approved articles. To ensure proper formatting, we may need a dedicated subpage specific to each approved version, or at least an "includeonly" or "onlyinclude" section in the article itself. I just gave "onlyinclude" a try with some non-trivial formatting: {{User:Daniel Mietchen}} now gives

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.

Background

I am a biophysicist focusing on the application of methods from physics to the study of biological structures and processes from a comparative evolutionary perspective, with a current emphasis on applications of brain morphometry (e.g. gyrification and cortical thickness) to the study of schizophrenia.

Other than that, I am actively involved in the emerging field of Science 2.0, in which Web 2.0 tools like wikis or blogs are combined with the scientific method, typically to make the research process or its results more widely and more rapidly accessible as well as more sustainable. I have a special interest in integrating wikis with expert workflows and vice versa. I am an occasional contributor to Wikipedias and related projects, particularly in areas or languages not covered here yet, as well as to Encyclopedia of Earth, Scholarpedia and WikiEducator. More information about me can be found here.

At Citizendium, I am the elected Managing Editor, tasked with deciding on matters for which no clear applicable policy exists. Thematically, my contributions focus on the above-mentioned topics (detailed listing here), and I also contribute to CZ:Eduzendium (e.g. this summer school).

Research areas

Text in this section is transcluded from the respective Citizendium entries and may change when these are edited.

Brain morphometry: The quantitative study of structures in the brain, their differences between individuals, correlations with brain function, and changes of these characteristics over time. [e] (CC) Image: Robert Dahnke Surface-based brain morphometry. Brain morphometry is a subfield of both morphometry and the brain sciences, concerned with the measurement of brain structures and changes thereof during development, aging, learning, disease and evolution. Since autopsy-like dissection is generally impossible on living brains, brain morphometry starts with noninvasive neuroimaging data, typically obtained from magnetic resonance imaging (or MRI for short). These data are born digital, which allows researchers to analyze the brain images further by using advanced mathematical and statistical methods such as shape quantification or multivariate analysis. This allows researchers to quantify anatomical features of the brain in terms of shape, mass, volume (e.g. of the hippocampus, or of the primary versus secondary visual cortex), and to derive more specific information, such as the encephalization quotient, grey matter density and white matter connectivity, gyrification, cortical thickness, or the amount of cerebrospinal fluid. These variables can then be mapped within the brain volume or on the cortical surface, providing a convenient way to assess their pattern and extent over time, across individuals or even between different biological species. The field is rapidly evolving along with neuroimaging techniques — which deliver the underlying data — but also develops in part independently from them, as part of the emerging field of neuroinformatics, which is concerned with developing and adapting algorithms to analyze those data. (Read more...)

Schizophrenia: A mental disorder characterized by impaired perception of the individual's environment. [e] Schizophrenia1 is a mental disorder characterized by patterns of disordered thought, language, motor, and social function. Males typically develop symptoms in their late teens and early 20s, while females exhibit a later onset, usually in the mid-20s to early 30s. More variations in onset and symptomology may exist across gender, age, and culture, although these factors have not been clearly deliniated. During the acute stage of schizophrenia, the primary symptom is a break from reality in which individuals experience thoughts, perceptions and beliefs that are considered strange and bizarre by the general population. Despite common and popular perception, the multiple personalities and dissociative characteristics associated with dissociative identity disorder are in no way related to schizophrenia, and the two are completely separate disorders. The specific cause of schizophrenia is largely unknown, although several neurotransmitters and brain structures are hypothesized to play a role in the disorder. Descriptions of schizophrenia reach back into ancient times, although the word schizophrenia has only been recently used. In 1887, German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin described the symptoms of schziophrenia as the single disorder dementia praecox. Even at that time, he showed considerable foresight by advancing the notion that the disorder was caused by organic pathology, which he predicted was damage or death of cells in the cerebral cortex. This prediction is supported as part of the cause, while more structural abnormalities are considered in the causes section. He was not, however, the first person to describe or classify schizophrenic behaviour, but he was the first to unify it into a broad, overarching colllection of signs and symptoms. Earlier in 1871, Ewald Hecker, another German psychiatrist, described hebephrenia, a classification that continues to this day as the disorganized schizophrenia subtype. The 10th edition of the World Health Organization's International Classification of Disease continues with a hebephrenic schizophrenia subtype. Schizophrenia has existed as a diagnostic category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual since the first edition, although its description and presumed causes have changed over the years. The diagostic criteria is more narrow since the creation of similar and related disorders such as schizotypal personality disorder. The word schizophrenia was introduced in 1908 by psychologist Eugen Bleuler in his work Dementia Praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien (Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias). He used the word schizophrenia to emphasize the split (schiz) of mental processes within the mind. (Read more...)

Music perception: The study of the neural mechanisms involved in people perceiving rhythms, melodies, harmonies and other musical features. [e] Processing a highly structured and complex pattern of sensory input as a unified percept of "music" is probably one of the most elaborate features of the human brain. In recent years, attempts have been made to investigate the neural substrates of music perception in the brain. Though progress has been made with the use of rather simplified musical stimuli, understanding how music is perceived and how it may elicit intense sensations is far from being understood. Theoretical models of music perception are facing the big challenge to explain a vast variety of different aspects which are connected to music, ranging from temporal pattern analysis such as metre and rhythm analysis, over syntactic analysis, as for example processing of harmonic sequences, to more abstract concepts like semantics of music and interplay between listeners' expectations and suspense. It was tried to give some of these aspects a neural foundation which will be discussed below. A modular framework of music perception in the brain, after Koelsch et al. and Peretz et al. Several authors have proposed a modular framework for music perception . After Fodor, mental "modules" have to fulfil certain conditions, among the most important ones of which are the concepts of information encapsulation and domain-specificity. Information encapsulation means that a (neural) system is performing a specific information-processing task and is doing so independent of the activities of other modules. Domain-specificity means that the module is reacting only to specific aspects of a sensory modality. Fodor defines further conditions for a mental module like rapidity of operation, automaticity, neural specificity and innateness that have been debated with respect to the validity for music-processing modules. However, there is evidence from various complementary approaches that music is processed independently from e.g. language and that there is not even a single module for music itself, but rather sub-systems for different relevant tasks. Evidence for spatial modularity comes mainly from brain lesion studies where patients show selective neurological impairments. Peretz and colleagues list several cases in a meta-study in which patients were not able to recognize musical tunes but were completely unaffected in recognizing spoken language. Such "amusia" can be innate or acquired, for example after a stroke. On the other hand, there are cases of verbal agnosia where the patients can still recognize tunes and seem to have an unaffected sensation of music. Brain lesion studies also revealed selective impairments for more specialized tasks such as rhythm detection or harmonical judgements. The idea of modularity has also been strongly supported by the use of modern brain-imaging techniques like PET and fMRI. In these studies, participants usually perform music-related tasks (detecting changes in rhythm or out-of-key notes). The obtained brain activations are then compared to a reference task, so one is able to detect brain regions which were especially active for a particular task. Using a similar paradigm, Platel and colleagues have found distinct brain regions for semantic, pitch, rhythm and timbre processing . To find out the dependencies between different neural modules, brain imaging techniques with a high temporal resolution are usually used. These are e.g. EEG and MEG which can reveal the delay between stimulus onset and the processing of specific features. These studies showed for example that pitch height is detected within 10-100 ms after stimulus onset, while irregularities in harmonic sequences elicit an enhanced brain response 200 ms after stimulus presentation. Another method to investigate the information flow between the modules in the brain is TMS. In principle, also DTI or fMRI observations with causality analysis can reveal those interdependencies. (Read more...)

Research publications

For full publication list, go here.

• D. Mietchen; C. Gaser (2009), "Computational morphometry for detecting changes in brain structure due to development, aging, learning, disease and evolution", Frontiers in Neuroinformatics 3: 25, DOI:10.3389/neuro.11.025.2009

Drafted in part here at Citizendium's brain morphometry and gyrification articles.

• Mietchen, D., Manz, B., Volke, F., Storey, K. B. (2008), "In Vivo Assessment of Cold Adaptation in Insect Larvae by Magnetic resonance imaging and Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy", PLoS ONE 3: e3826, DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0003826

• Mietchen, D.; Aberhan, M.; Manz, B.; Hampe, O.; Mohr, B.; Neumann, C.; Volke, F. (2008), "Three-dimensional Magnetic resonance imaging of fossils across taxa", Biogeosciences 5: 25–41

• Koelsch, S.; Remppis, A.; Sammler, D.; Jentschke, S.; Mietchen, D.; Fritz, T.; Bonnemeier, H.; Siebel, W. A. (2007), "A cardiac signature of emotionality", European Journal of Neuroscience 26 (11): 3328–3338, DOI:10.1111/j.1460-9568.2007.05889.x
• Koelsch, S.; Jentschke, S.; Sammler, D.; Mietchen, D. (2007), "Untangling syntactic and sensory processing: an ERP study of music perception", Psychophysiology 44 (3): 476–490, DOI:10.1111/j.1469-8986.2007.00517.x
• Lee, S. C.; Mietchen, D.; Cho, J. H.; Kim, Y. S.; Kim, C.; Hong, K. S.; Lee, C.; Kang, D.; Lee, W.; Cheong, C. (2007), "In vivo magnetic resonance microscopy of differentiation in Xenopus laevis embryos from the first cleavage onwards", Differentiation 75 (1): 84–92, DOI:10.1111/j.1432-0436.2006.00114.x

• Lee, Seung-Cheol; Cho, Jee-Hyun; Mietchen, Daniel; Kim, Young-Sook; Hong, Kwan Soo; Lee, Chulhyun; Kang, Dongmin; Park, Ki Deok; Choi, Byong-Seok; Cheong, Chaejoon (2006), "Subcellular In Vivo 1H MR Spectroscopy of Xenopus laevis Oocytes", Biophysical Journal 90 (5): 1797–1803, DOI:10.1529/biophysj.105.073502
• Müller, W. E. G.; Kaluzhnaya, O. V.; Belikov, S. I.; Rothenberger, M.; Schröder, H. C.; Reiber, A.; Kaandorp, J. A.; Manz, B.; Mietchen, D.; Volke, F. (2006), "Magnetic resonance imaging of the siliceous skeleton of the demosponge Lubomirskia baicalensis", Journal of Structural Biology 153 (1): 31–41, DOI:10.1016/j.jsb.2005.09.008
• Mietchen, D.; Keupp, H.; Manz, B.; Volke, F., "Non-invasive diagnostics in fossils – Magnetic resonance imaging of pathological belemnites", Biogeosciences 2: 133-140

• Mietchen, D.; Jakobi, J. W.; Richter, H. P. (2005), "Cortex reorganization of Xenopus laevis eggs in strong static magnetic fields", Biomagn Res Technol 3: 2, DOI:10.1186/1477-044X-3-2
• Mietchen, Daniel; Schnelle, Thomas; Mülller, Torsten; Hagedorn, Rolf; Fuhr, Günter (2002), "Automated dielectric single cell spectroscopy - temperature dependence of electrorotation", Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics 35 (11): 1258–1270, DOI:10.1088/0022-3727/35/11/324

References

Such a procedure now also facilitates, via {{Winner}}, the formatting of suitable parts of an article for inclusion into the Welcome page as the CZ:Article of the Week or CZ:New Draft of the Week. --Daniel Mietchen 04:00, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

You mean just show a random approved article instead on the AOTW? Perhaps... but a lot of our AOTWs aren't approved articles at present. Caesar Schinas 06:35, 7 June 2009 (UTC)