User talk:Skittleys/Archive Jan-Jul 08

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Greetings from WikiProject Medicine!

Welcome to WikiProject Medicine!

I noticed you recently added yourself to our Participants' list, and I wanted to welcome you to our project. Our goal is to facilitate collaboration on medicine-related articles, and everyone is welcome to join (regardless of medical qualifications!). Here are some suggested activities:

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask at the project talk page, or feel free to ask me on {{#if: 

 | [[User talk:{{{1}}}|my talk page]]

Would you be willing to do me the favor of editing my biographical page? My name is Leon Fresco. If you look at my original page I tried to post (which was flagged for understandable autobiographical concerns) you will see it was very detailed and all supported by objective sources (so that can at least be a start). If you have any questions, please contact me. I would be happy to edit any page you would like me to edit in return. Many thanks. Leonfresco73 (talk) 11:35, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Again, welcome!  --Steven Fruitsmaak (Reply) 21:16, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Ref Desk

"If I have offended you, feel free to let me know. However, whether you were offended or not, do NOT post biased drivel as a response to my inquiry!" Well, Since you specifically asked, this line here is pretty insulting. You're implying that someone might knowingly and intentionally post "biased drivel" on the misguided premise that people would want to read it unless they specify otherwise? You might as well specify that you're only looking for correct answers and would prefer it if nobody posted incorrect ones.. (Replied here on your Talk page instead of on the ref desk because I can not offer any insight on your actual question. Sorry.)APL (talk) 19:16, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I'm a bit confused about what you're saying here: "...the misguided premise that people would want to read it unless they specify otherwise?" In any case, what I was suggesting is that I don't want someone to post "Eventualists are stupid" or "Inclusionists have no faith" or anything of the sort. I believe preferring no one posts incorrect answers is a given, but saying as much implies people provide answers they know are incorrect. The "biased drivel" I was referring to doesn't fall under that category either way. Biased opinions—all opinions, really—are neither incorrect nor correct. I am pointing out that they are irrelevant and have no place in the discussion. You would think that would also be a given, but it happens all too often. Thanks for providing feedback though! :) Skittleys (talk) 19:30, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Template talk:Film archiving

Hey, don't know what exactly you did with the archive bot parameters, but it really didn't work. Any ideas? Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 07:51, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Hmmmmm...I'm obviously checking this out too late, but the diff between my edit and the next (the MiszaBot run) makes it actually look like it worked! I'm not saying you're wrong, since the edit summary says it moved it to dev/null, I'm just trying to figure out what it DID end up looking like because I'm not able to see it! :/
In any case, whether it's because I'd posted something on the MiszaBot II talk page before—when I was trying to determine whether the changes DID work, I posted a little request for the page to display when the next autorun would take place—or whether Misza13 was informed through an error log that pages were archived in dev/null, but Misza the human being stepped in. :)
In my defense...all my new parameters and whatnot did make it work...I just never noticed the bit about it having to be on separate lines! Big oops. But after the interventions, it finally works
—Skittleys (talk) 15:38, 13 July 2008 (UTC)
What happened was that it cut out the qualifying threads, but they were never pasted anywhere, as far as I could tell. The archive page only existed after my reversion and Misza's re-edit. Anyway, just thought you'd want to know in case you do any further work on editing archiving parameters. All's well that ends well... Girolamo Savonarola (talk) 19:18, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

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Random page from a namespace already exists, e.g. Special:Random/User talk. From a category doesn't, although it's a somewhat requested feature; I don't think it would be impossible to do by script for relatively small categories (although for large categories like Category:Living people it would be impractical). Try putting a request in on WP:US/R. --ais523 20:55, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Template for deletion

You did not properly complete the TfD nomination by following Step II at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion ("How to use this page" section). I have speedy-deleted the template (after orphaning) under criterion WP:CSD#G7 in agreement that it is redundant with {{wiktionary}} and is not (no longer) needed. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 23:51, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

You're correct, I did not properly complete the nomination—though not in the implied way—and I'm sorry. I created a long explanation for the "reasons" section and it appeared that everything was proper; I was then distracted by a co-worker and later proceeded to paste the "notification" on your talk page and continue about my business without realising I hadn't ever pressed "Save"! Thank you for agreeing, though, and making the deletion process much easier. :) — Skittleys (talk) 17:00, 18 July 2008 (UTC)
You're welcome. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 23:32, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Copy-edit request

Hello, I noticed your name at WP:PRV, and I wondered whether you would be interested in copy-editing List of Naruto characters. It's the last step before it can be nominated at WP:FLC. Cheers, Sephiroth BCR (Converse) 04:59, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Bailiff

Why did you remove "bailiff" from "Category - Legal Occupations"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Lanyon (talk • contribs) 01:20, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

I removed it because it was already further categorised under Law enforcement workers, a subcategory of Legal occupations. As per WP:SUBCAT, articles should be placed in the most specific category and, unless it fits one of the special criteria, not be duplicated in a parent. —Skittleys (talk) 01:29, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you.--Lanyon (talk) 01:33, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

User:68.236.155.144

I saw your note on User:68.236.155.144's talk page. Basically, this is an anonymous editor who has been going around stirring up revert wars for their own sake. The user is also active as User:68.236.155.72 and User:68.236.154.239. I've been having all kinds of problems with this individual.

It might be best to wait a day or two and see if this individual gets bored and moves on. If the pattern continues, it might be best to report it to an admin. Iamcuriousblue (talk) 05:49, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Ah, I'd been wondering if it was something like that, but there were only a couple of edits on that account. Thanks for the tip! — Skittleys (talk) 05:57, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

I reverted my edit on Coroner back to your version, it was a mistake and it's been corrected. Thanks for the heads up. 68.236.153.125 (talk) 18:24, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Check the edit history on Coroner and you'll see. 68.236.153.125 (talk) 03:00, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

In need of copyediting

Hi. I currently have the article Insane Clown Posse up as a featured article candidate, and it needs some copyediting work. Could you help out? (Ibaranoff24 (talk) 02:28, 27 July 2008 (UTC))

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politely requesting help with a biography

Dear Skittleys, I am a very basic beginner to wikipedia. I want to submit to Wikipedia a biography of Michael Fellows, originator of the field of Parameterized Complexity, which has become a very powerful tool in computational biology and other areas. I am good friends with Mike and have access to all of his papers. I have written the following, but would appreciate advice before trying to put it on the Wikipedia because I do not know all the details of wikipedia and am not that great of a writer. Kind regards, walternmi

Michael Ralph Fellows (born June 15, 1952 in Upland, California) is Professor and Chief Scientist in the Parameterized Complexity Research Unit at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Fellows is recognized as the founder of Parameterized Complexity, an emerging complexity framework that uses structure in hard problems for the design and analysis of algorithms for their solution. Parameterized Complexity has strong connections to algorithms engineering, and is increasingly important in other fields as diverse as Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, and Bioinformatics. In 2007, Fellows was awarded a von Humboldt Research Award for his leadership and development of the field. In 1999, he married Frances Novak Rosamond, also a scientist, who shares his love of mathematics and adventure.

Fellows is well known for his innovative science communication, started when he began volunteering at his daughter Hannah’s elementary school. His books Computer Science Unplugged! (written with Tim Bell and Ian Witten, and [www.ccs3.lanl.gov/mega-math This is MEGA-Mathematics!] (with Nancy Casey, convey intractability, s, cryptography and other sophisticated concepts. The materials are used in Family Math, featured on Google's education website and at SIGCSE (2007 and 2008) are the focus of Computer Science education research at Carnegie Mellon headed by CS Distinguished Career Professor Lenore Blum. Unplugged! has been translated into Swedish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, has two mirror websites and more translations underway, and has won several science popularization awards, and are being featured in the 2008 British Fraraday Christmas Lectures. Fellows believes that working with kids raises new research questions as well as crystallizes the ones we are trying to communicate {cite{Fe93,FK92,BFWK03}. One of his favorite Kurt Vonnegut jokes is: If you can’t explain it to a fourth grader, then you probably don’t know what you are talking about.

An avid interest in politics was inpired by his mother Betty, long a leader in the California League of Women Voters, and a love of literature and movies is shared with his son, Max. Fellows wrote a series of passon plays about mathematics which were presented at the Victoria Fringe Festival and at NCTM at Asilimar in 1999, during which he received an honorary appointment to the University of Victoria Department of Religious Studies.

Mike Fellows received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego in1985, and his M.A., Mathematics, also from UCSD in 1982. He has taught in the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia and has three passports. During the Vietnam War, he became first in his class in Special Forces Para-Rescue. He chose to serve in Alaska, and then made a moral decision to desert the military. He has made a video and would like to make a movie of this harrowing, sometimes humorous experience.

In 2007, he became one of the first Fellows of the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University, UK. He has been an Associate Editor for the Journal of Computer and Systems Sciences since 2004, and in 2008 was Guest Editor for a special double issue of The Computer Journal with 15 surveys on Parameterized Complexity. He is a member of the Steering Committee for the conference series International Workshop on Parameterized and Exact Computation, proceedings published by Springer in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. He has published over 150 scientific articles and three books and is a popular speaker.

Below are Mike Fellows’ thoughts about the origins and development of Parameterized Complexity, taken from the Australian Federation Fellowship proposal of 2008.

Looking back, the seeds of parameterized complexity, and my ideas about looking deeply into the structure of a problem to find features that can be used to classify and hopefully solve it, were already present in my graduate school work and first papers where I investigated problems about graphs that live ``topologically inside other graphs, meaning that the shape of the graph can be found, with edges stretched in order to fit (GRAPH TOPOLOGICAL CONTAINMENT). My first paper pushing the frontiers of the graphs H for which linear time algorithms for this problem are known was with Paul Kaschube, published in the journal Linear and Multilinear Algorithms in 1991.

The spectacular breakthrough of Robertson and Seymour solving Wagner's Conjecture was in 1985, the year I finished my Ph.D., so naturally I was strongly drawn to the new graph minors theory. At Washington State University as a new Assistant Professor in 1985, I began to work with Michael Langston, still one of my primary collaborators. The first discoveries occured in 1985-86: 

(1) We found surprising ways to use the new graph minors theory.

We showed that a problem about matrices could be mapped to a problem about graphs, where the minors machinery can be applied. We proved that for every fixed k, the k-Gate Matrix Layout problem can be solved in polynomial time. The proof is [[nonconstructive proof| nonconstructive], a very surprising thing at the time (to have nonconstructive proofs of the {\it existence} of [[polynomial time| polynomial time algorithms]. Our paper, ``Nonconstructive Proofs of Polynomial Time Complexity was sent to the journal Information Processing Letters and quickly became a highly-cited paper, as the profound consequences for theoretcial computer science of the graph minors theory began to unfold. 

(2) We wrote our first joint National Science Foundation  proposal emphasizing the importance of fixed parameters in

assessing real-world computational complexity. The idea of systematically looking for mathematical toolkits for both the {\it positive task} of designing what are now called FPT algorithms, and the {\it negative task} of showing when this is impossible, was first written down in a sequel NSF proposal (jointly with Langston) in 1987 (also funded).

The subject of graph minors was sensational, but also controversial. Nowadays it is understood that results using graph minors are very general, very powerful --- but not necessarily efficient in particular applications. Langston and I continued our investigations in seminal papers at FOCS 1989 and STOC 1989. We gave two different ways of constructivizing the nonconstructive consequences of graph minors, one using ``Myhill-Nerode style methods for computing obstruction sets, and the other based on robust self-reduction. These two methods allow constructivization of almost all known graph minors applications in algorithmics.

Also in 1989, I worked out the crucial reduction of $k$-{\sc Independent Set} to $2k$-{\sc Dominating Set}, and worked out the definitions of $W[t]$ and $W[P]$ and much of the normalization machinery for $W[t]$. Some of this work was presented in a paper at FOCS 1989, coauthored with K. Abrahamson, J. Ellis and M. Mata, where the emphasis in terms of concrete applications had more to do with $W[P]$ under what is now understood to be an awkward, but pioneering, definitional framework.

I met Rod Downey in 1990, and we began a long partnership exploring the research program of parameterized complexity, and resolved to write a series of numbered papers to fold into a monograph: a prescient vision of how our work would develop. The first important summary of the new theory was presented at (now called) the Computational Complexity Conference: CCCin 1992. Springer published the Downey-Fellows monograph {\it Parameterized Complexity} in 1999. As the theory developed many coauthors and collaborators made fundamental contributions. Now essentially anyone doing research in theoretical computer science knows something about this successful, well-funded, still rapidly advancing branch of theoretical science. I have continued to lead the development of the field internationally, with pathbreaking research ideas and directions, programmatic surveys, organizational efforts, and inspiration and mentoring of young researchers.

Recent technical and programmatic advances I have contributed include (see DBLP Michael Fellows: $\bullet$ Major initial results on the parameterized analysis of PTASs and the popularization of the issue in major plenary talks and surveys, starting with ISAAC 2001. \\ $\bullet$ Breakthrough approaches to obtaining $O^{*}(2^{O(k)})$ FPT algorithms. \\ $\bullet$ The widely applicable technique of {\it crown rule} kernelization, and many concrete applications. \\ $\bullet$ The subprograms of FPT-optimality and XP-optimality and the complexity class M[1]. \\ $\bullet$ The articulation of iterative compression as a general systematic technique in FPT. \\ $\bullet$ Systematic connections between linear kernelization and constant-factor P-time approximation. \\ $\bullet$ The program of regarding FPT as all about P-time extremal structure theory, and novel approaches to algorithmically exploiting this structure theory.

Parameterized Algorithmics is a new and compelling framework for the design and analysis of algorithms for hard problems. In addition to new conceptual approaches and technical solutions, I strongly believe that the program (and computer science generally) has a mission to be useful---to practitioners, to the other sciences, to other theory builders---to make a real difference in the real world of real people. There are now about 25 research groups worldwide engaged in funded parameterized algorithmics projects.

Implementations of FPT algorithms are leading to practical applications in areas as diverse as Alcoholism, Neuroscience and Stress, Allergy and Complex Diseases, Cancer, Gene Regulatory Networks, Low Dose Radiation Research, North Sea Ecosystems, Proteomics, Biomarkers and Data Integration, Type 1 Diabetes, and throughout combinatorial computing in bioinformatics. The first monograph for the field, based on a series of our foundational papers, {\it Parameterized Complexity} (coauthored with R. Downey) was published by Springer in 1999. Two new books were published in 2006: {\it An Invitation to Fixed Parameter Algorithms} by R. Niedermeier (Oxford), and {\it Parameterized Complexity Theory} by G. Flum and M. Grohe (Springer). The 2008 special double-issue of The Computer Journal contains 15 survey articles on Parameterized Complexity, plus a Book Review and Forward by the Guest Editors. Waltnmi (talk) 22:08, 27 July 2008 (UTC)walternmi

I can't do too much work on this at the moment, but I thought I'd point out some general things.

First, I am wondering if you are planning to include this entire article any time soon. I've noticed you have created the page and only put part of it. In my opinion, that was a very good idea. The remainder is unclear, improperly formatted and potentially controversial. I'll try to explain that soon, but we'll see; I'd rather concentrate on the current version.

The biggest problem here is not technically within your article, but 6 simple words posted right here on my talk page. "I am good friends with Mike..." You may have a Conflict of interest. You should read the entire guideline, but I have posted the most relevant part here:

Close relationships
Friedrich Engels would have had difficulty editing the Karl Marx article, because he was a close friend, follower and collaborator of Marx.[2] Any situation where strong relationships can develop may trigger a conflict of interest. Conflict of interest can be personal, religious, political, academic, financial, and legal. It is not determined by area, but is created by relationships that involve a high level of personal commitment to, involvement with, or dependence upon, a person, subject, idea, tradition, or organization.
Closeness to a subject does not mean you're incapable of being neutral, but it may incline you towards some bias. Be guided by the advice of other editors. If editors on a talk page suggest in good faith that you may have a conflict of interest, try to identify and minimize your biases, and consider withdrawing from editing the article. As a rule of thumb, the more involvement you have with a topic in real life, the more careful you should be with our core content policies — Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, Wikipedia:No original research, and Wikipedia:Verifiability — when editing in that area.
The definition of "too close" in this context is governed by common sense. An article about a little-known band should preferably not be written by a band member or the manager. However, an expert on climate change is welcome to contribute to articles on that subject, even if that editor is deeply committed to the subject.

You have remained somewhat neutral, and for that I commend you. I'll go into a bit more detail on the troublesome bits later.

Familiarize yourself with the Five Pillars of Wikipedia. Especially note the NPOV and Verifiability rules. I've covered most of the NPOV issue above, but have yet to touch on verifiability. I decided this was the second biggest problem instead of the biggest, but many editors would choose otherwise.

You need to cite your information. Notwithstanding the conflict of interest, editors will be all over this article, asking for citations and removing bits and pieces. In fact, right now, it's very possible that it will be put up for deletion—I myself have been debating whether to do exactly that, and I'm usually an anti-deletionist! It is not enough to say that you have the references, as you did on Bugalugs' page. It does not matter that you have read them. It does not matter if a simple Google search will provide billions of references. It does not matter if you have obtained this information in a friendly chat—in fact, this leads right back to the COI issue. It does not matter if you believe it to be "common knowledge". "Verifiability, not truth". You need to type up a bibliography of those articles IMMEDIATELY. This should be done in a separate section called "References" and in a proper citation style. Interestingly, I have never found any policy or guideline referring to the use of another Wikipedia article as a source. I would stay away from this as much as possible, though, since many articles are unreliable. One way to determine article reliability is to visit its "talk page" and view the article's ranking on the "quality" scale. Were it me, I would never cite a stub-, start- or C-class article (visit the previously-referenced page to learn what these are!), and would even stay away from B-class articles. Also, there's plenty of information in the current version of the your article that absolutely could not have been collected from any of his papers. This information needs to be either removed or cited in reliable sources. Note that YOU are a WP:primary source, and those should (almost) never be used!

I have run out of time here, but let me point out some other policies and guidelines you must read:

I may add more information as time permits. — Skittleys (talk) 18:32, 31 July 2008 (UTC)


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