Given the new mandated shifts to online learning during the outbreak, I find myself worrying about those students who manage to scrape by in a traditional learning environment with study groups and the help of their peers, let alone the help of university tutoring resources.  The people that are involved in tutoring resources are probably way too busy right now to keep that going with anywhere near the efficacy they did in the before time.  Other than really constraining discussion forums inherent to our LMS's, collaborative tools are sparse.  Given that so many industries, like carriers, publishers, content providers, are bending over backwards to support education (including higher education), I'm wondering if any of the SE products can help with alleviating the lack of student-student interactions.  In the long run, this might open some new markets to SE, and might prove a boon.  In the short run, our students need help to make the second half of this semester a better learning experience, and if SE can make the right tools available, that's a good thing.
120650
There is a gap between the online help available on stack overflow and the offline help of real-world mentors, this is my modest proposal to correct that.   Here is a link to my original article:   Here is the content from said article:   First off, I love Stack Overflow. In the way that only someone who taught himself programming via outdated books, and old-school programming forums can. I think it’s the best way to ask most programming questions on the web, but that doesn’t mean it can’t get better.   Background: Today I just helped my girlfriend  @rubyku signup for a stack overflow account. I did this because she found the exact answer to her question already answered on Stack Overflow and felt the person who answered the question rightfully deserved some recognition. After we got her signed up, we went to give credit where credit is due, and “up vote” the answer, when suddenly we discover wham! we can’t because she doesn’t have enough reputation points. So she closed the window and moved on. While she got the question answered, she didn’t engage with the community and was frustrated by the interaction.  Reputation: On Stack Overflow reputation is measured in points and does two things, it keeps spammers and people trying to game the systems at bay. It also encourages users to provide good answers and ask good questions. I think the reputation system does a great job to accomplish these things, but it inadvertently does something else. It discourages new users from becoming part of the community and engaging since someone who just started can’t fully participate. They first have to ask or answer a question to get reputation.   Solution: Use mentors to merge real life reputation with online reputation, since i’m mentoring someone in person, i should be able to mentor them on Stack Overflow. I can vouch that she isn’t a bot, or a spammer, and I can give her real world motivation and incentive to get involved online and off. It should (could) work like this: I give up some chunk of my reputation to this new Stack Overflow member, and in return I get notified any time they make an action. This allow the mentor to help guide a student’s questions, comments, and up votes as only a real live person can, while giving accountability to student. But why would someone want to be a mentor, give up their points, and be bugged constantly? Besides caring about someone and wanting to see them succeed, there is a greedy reason built in the system. Since a mentor gets notified about any post the student makes, they get first dibs on questions, and in the long run if they are consistently helpful and answer their student’s questions, then their reputation will increase dramatically more than if they had never given up points to become a mentor.   Whether or not Stack Overflow ever implements such a model, we as programmers should always remember that there was a time when we needed help and sometimes an IRC channel or forum post, just wasn’t enough. While many of us are “self taught” programmers the most successful of us had some help along the way. Stack Overflow is a tool to help someone become better at programming, but not THE solution. We need to start bridging the gap between people who care, and people who need help. The more we use technology to bring these two groups of people closer together, the more we all win.
40330
I was wondering if you could tell me about some self-learning resources for linear model theories. My professor has been using "A First Course in Linear Model Theory, Ravishanker and Dey. Publisher: CRC." I found this kinda difficult. My major is mathematics. Thank you so much for your time!
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I received a mail today from Academia.edu (a site I wasn't previously aware of), asking me to confirm that I co-authored a paper with a colleague.  Having looked into it a little it sounds like it might be a useful site - the idea of a "social network for scientists" is one I've seen the need for in the past. However, partly due to bad experiences with the seemingly similar ResearchGate, I'm also skeptical.* Without signing up for an academia.edu account the site doesn't offer much information, so I would like the following information:   What specific features does academia.edu offer to its users? Is it genuinely useful for any of the following purposes (each of which seems genuinely needed)   as a platform for networking with academics for discovering relevant research as an effective system for post-publication peer review for organising references among a small team of people working on a project  Will it send out mails to my colleagues without my express and explicit permission? (I.e. are the mails I received today the result of a deliberate action by my colleague, who is aware that I will be emailed and wishes me to join the site; or are they essentially spam from a social networking site aggressively trying to expand its user base?) It's clear from its  that it's a private, venture-capital funded company. What is its business model?   In short, is this a site that has some genuine utility for academics, or should I just ignore it?  *I've never signed up for ResearchGate but I regularly receive spam from it purporting to be from my colleagues, who aren't aware that it's being sent on their behalf. I would be mortified if my senior colleagues received such mails claiming to be from me, so I won't touch it with a barge pole.
1818
There's no need to  the  that have led to a lack of trust between  of  and . Suffice it to say that astoundingly they continue to assert that  and, instead of apologizing and reinstating Monica have demanded that she go through a process with no transparency, due process, or involvement from the community.   Has the time has come for Stack Exchange, Inc to spin off the community and all the data needed to keep the sites running to a separate non-profit, who would then in turn license the software from the company?  What's in it for the community?   The community can practice self determination for issues from as basic as the number of moderators they have to as fundamental as the policies they enforce. If the company development continues to be unresponsive to the community's needs, the community would be able to develop its own open source software that would meet its needs. They can find their own funding model instead of having ads imposed on them.   What's in it for the company?   Community actions will no longer reflect on the company. Interaction with the community as a customer may come more naturally to current leadership than the present paradigm. They don't have to worry about paying for the community's operating expenses. They can focus on doing one thing well.
92424
It seems clear at this point that MSE is not a useful mechanism for pointing out problems on SE sites and getting resolution for them.  It is useful in some ways. If SE staff ask questions about future actions being undertaken, there is a non-zero chance that they will pay attention to some of those responses and take them into account. While the new site layout still did happen despite lots of people not liking it very much, the powers that be were responsive to specific issues about certain aspects of it. So clearly, if SE staff ask for feedback, there is a non-zero chance that the feedback may matter.  Also, posting bug reports on MSE does sometimes lead to those bugs getting solved, in many cases.  But when it comes to non-bug issues with Stack Exchange as a network, it has become abundantly clear that asking a question on MSE will accomplish nothing. There are many lines of evidence for this.  One of them being that :     Often (and more often recently) I've heard colleagues dismiss meta feedback.   Another line of evidence is a more recent event. There have been dozens of MSE posts about the "Hot Network Questions" list, many of them speaking quite negatively on its effects. These range from issues about how it causes a flood of users due to detecting controversial questions rather than good ones, to having to see a list of question titles that seem... less than professional. Things have occasionally been done, but these have been pretty minor. Regex filters for certain keywords and the like.  However, a few Twitter posts managed to find their ways into the eyes of a SE developer. This user managed to get approval to exclude IPS from the HNQ list, then implement that exclusion, and push it out into the live network.  Within one hour!  Equally rapidly, a post appeared on MSE, .  Now that is what I call an effective communication channel. In a scant few hours, SE company policy on the HNQ shifted visibly and dramatically, from an apparent course of "meh, whatever" to "OMG, we gotta fix/ditch this!"  My overall question is this: what communication channels can we use to get similar response times to user problems? Obviously, all the Meta posts about HNQ's problems had little effect, compared to a few tweets.  So, do SE users need to become more active on Twitter? Who should we be tweeting our issues to in order to get them heard? How should such tweets be composed?  Do SE users need to be making blog posts, and if so, where? What would be the most effective means of catching the attention of SE staff, such that our concerns will be taken seriously?  Note: This question is not about lambasting SE for not listening on Meta. That's a ship that has already sailed. So feel free to take comments on this subject elsewhere. I'm genuinely asking about what the best way to successfully communicate important issues to SE, such that they will actually respond to them.
51117
I suppose you all have read  unpopular answer. People have responded critically and sarcastically towards SE's declaration that they "will not be answering any questions or comments about that going forward". Assume SE will hold firmly onto their declaration, all current situations (License change, fired mods, CoC mess) will remain permanently under the status quo, and the community's voice will be constantly ignored, possibly with radical ones removed. It's like we're no longer able to change, or even affect whatever SE's heads have decided or are going to decide.  A harsh comparison for SE is against Hong Kong, where so far only 1 out of 5 demands has been fulfilled and the remaining ones seemingly unreachable. While HK citizens can subvert the government, we most likely won't since SE is a commercial company after all. I've seen attempts to replicate the functionality on a new website (I assert I saw that in a user profile but can't find it now), but I'm not positive towards its future of building another community. What are our next steps at the current situation?  If I must say - I would unwillingly say that we proceed as usual - but I guess many won't accept this "solution".
67744
For several years we've had advertising solely on technology-related sites. But many of our sites aren't about technology at all, so we haven't sold ads for them. Traditionally, that hasn't been a hardship since Stack Exchange sites have required only a small investment from the company to set up and keep live.  However, as we've continued to grow, the resources needed to maintain our network have also increased. Thanks entirely to the efforts of the network's communities, we have become an amazing resource on the Internet.  Generating revenue from non-technology sites will enable us to dedicate more resources to meeting your needs so this is good news!     The test has been in effect since May 21, 2019, and our advertising team will be monitoring to see how ads are performing. We don't know how many ads will run on each site, we're testing different solutions. It could be just a few or a bit more. In either case, these ads will be carefully vetted and we'll be keeping watch to continue to provide good content.  If you see any ads that are inappropriate or have any questions about this experiment, please let me know by starting a new question and tagging it with . This is a work in progress and we are expecting a time of learning and refinement as we move forward.  A few things to be aware of:    We've received reports about ads that redirect, and those have been removed.  We've also received reports about ads that are spammy and those too have been removed.   If you wish to report an advertisement, please take a screenshot of the ad and paste the URL (if possible) along with the site where you saw it to a comment or answer.  I'll report it to the ads team and we can track it down to investigate. Some of the network sites will show more ads than others. This is not due to reduced ad privileges (which don't exist right now for the network) but rather to inventory allowances.  This is an experiment that will take us to about the end of the year.  As such, we're learning about what advertiser networks will work for us and which can offer the quality of ads that we desire. I ask for your patience and understanding during this testing period.   Due to an already existing agreement, MathOverflow will not be getting ads and is not a part of this experiment.    Thank you for your help in reporting what you see and for forgiving us of the mess as we do some remodeling!
78182
I ask a lot of question on SO, so this recommendation/idea comes from that experience. I'm not really sure how this would fit in with the current structure of SE.   Oftentimes after asking a question, maybe after an hour or so, I end up finding the answer I needed somewhere. And it comes time for me to answer the most difficult question of all: do I delete this question, or do I keep it in case someone answers and others may benefit from it. The problem is, if I don't delete it and no one answers, my acceptance rate goes down. So usually I'll just delete it.  However, sometimes I fear that someone is typing a really really long answer to my question since itäs only been an hour, and so I imagine the nightmare that person experiences when they find out their essay will be gone to waste. Overall, this never-to-be-seen-again answer could have benefitted many people had the question remained.  Since SE has gone "live-happy" lately, where answers and comments refresh live, I thought it might be interesting if the original asker of the question (or anyone else for that matter) could see how many people are currently responding to the question (just count, not necessary to display their names). This way, if I know someone is replying, I won't delete the question, and others can benefit from it.
61900
It is important to know that I have requested about 7/8 letters per professors ( 3 total ). I have told them that I was conscious that it was a lot of letters to write so I was content with a general letter for most of the schools I wanted to get in and maybe one letter that was a bit more personalized for the school they felt I would have the highest chances of admission.  The nearest deadline is 10 days away. I have asked about this in late January and I haven't gotten anything yet.  I asked for an update in early March and the profs were either working on it or were being bottlenecked by the administration. But since then I got nothing.  The deadlines are approaching quickly and I hope you understand how stressed I feel about this. Would it be too petty to ask for a second update?  I need at least 3 letters, and I have only asked to 4 professors, one of which didn't answer so I think he doesn't want to write me one (for a reason I ignore). I may have made a mistake and should've asked more professors, that's on me. The point is I don't want to upset because if at least one of them decides that I am too annoying I can already cross half of the schools I wanted off the list.
4326
Stack Overflow is great resource to learn. For both someone asking a question and answering a question. Posing a question let you reflect on your problem. A lot of the questions started are never submitted because the act of posing a question helps solving it. Answering a question helps to stretch your knowledge bit by bit. You may answer questions directly but sometimes you know only 75% of the answer. Now you have to stretch your knowledge a bit to be able to answer it and you'll learn something on the way.  This is the positive side of Stack Overflow; on the other hand Stack Overflow is not good enough for systematic learning: I want to learn more about X!. You'll find something about everything, but it's not efficient. The knowledge that is in Stack Overflow is not refined in a way to allow this.  This is unavoidable for a site that wants to help users with immediate answers to their problems. The knowledge amassed is only a by-product of this process. Nonetheless it can be put to another use with some extra effort.  This is the basic idea:  Select and revise Stack Overflow questions and answers to allow efficient learning.  Stack Overflow question and answers cannot replace text books, articles or blogs, but can provide exercises for a given topic. We learn by application of the ideas presented in these other formats. If you dust off your  there are always exercises after all the theory. The exercise part is where the learning starts by reflections. Before that it's just following a beaten path: "Oh yes it's this and that and O(n)".  Given some effort it is possible extract high quality exercises from Stack Overflow:   Select good questions (probably &lt; 20% for this purpose) Select the best answers  Assign some grade of difficulty (to create some order) Add additional tags (when the tags are missing or to not fit into the structure of the anthology) Optional - Revise the question and answer Optional - Add missing questions and answers   The biggest advantage is that the posed questions are real world problems. This is a big factor to motivate learning.  There could be some feedback into Stack Overflow in later steps. Stack Overflow is really complicated enough but some form of quality improvements may be desirable. Wikipedia added some quality improvement measures later in the project after it gained a critical mass. It may be nice to see high quality content highlighted in Stack Overflow, but it is not essential to the anthology idea.  The best way to start and see if this idea works is to take a tag with few questions (less than 1000) and categorise all of these questions. The target would be to extract ~100 questions. Some software is needed to support this. Development could start with a limited set of edit tools to select questions, answers and add tags. For learners a page to browse the anthology with direct links to Stack Overflow is enough to get started.  Is this a bad idea or would you like to work on this project?
4922
I teach engineering at a community college in the US. I currently have a student with very poor hygiene. He stinks pretty badly, has obviously greasy hair, doesn’t change his clothes frequently, and I usually seat him in the back of the room (during exams and labs, when I have power over seating arrangements) so I don’t have to smell his (relatively strong) body odor.  This student has also spoken with a colleague of mine about his low self-esteem. He’s worried that he isn’t making friends, and doesn’t know if the people he hangs out with are hanging out with him because they want something from him (help with classwork) or because they are truly friends.   In my opinion, this student follows me around like a puppy, and he tries too hard to impress people (students and faculty alike). I am a young-ish female faculty member and I try to create very large boundaries, especially with my male students. As an example, he frequently finds the need to explain to me (in way too much detail) why he gets questions wrong on exams (I don’t care, and I don’t need to know, which I’ve told him several times with no success).  So, I would like to mention to this student that his hygiene is off-putting and isn’t helping him out in the friends department. However, because he already follows me around like a puppy dog, I don’t want to encourage any more interaction from him. Additionally, it frankly embarrasses me to have to bring up hygiene issues with somebody in their late teens / early twenties. How can I bring this issue up while still maintaining my boundary as a female faculty member who doesn’t want her male students following her around and asking her for advice all the time?  I was hoping that I would be finished up with this student by now, but I am the only professor who teaches Electrical Engineering courses, so I can’t recommend that he take classes with someone else, or ask another colleague to discuss this with him. He will be taking another of my courses next semester and I don’t personally know any of his other intended professors for next semester to ask them to bring it up.
91780
We've been talking a lot about the efficacy of community self-evaluations lately, both internally on the Community Team and out in the open . Lots of ideas were tossed around, but the underlying theme of these discussions has been that site self-evaluations are not useful in their current form. The review queue format hampers discussion, the meta thread posted by the Community user is trivially ignored, and the sample question size is far too small to be useful, but big enough to be non-trivial for participants. They also don't provide much in the way of useful information to community managers behind the scenes.  So we're going to shut them down this week, and we'll be using the time it saves us to digest the ideas y'all have thrown out in the previous discussions and figure out where to go from here.   I'll be going over the previous threads with a fine-toothed comb to try and suss out what worked well and what was broken and determine a more useful mechanism - if one is required at all. I'd also welcome continued suggestions from the communities about how to continue capturing what the evals accidentally did right - encouraging communities to stop and examine how they're doing at somewhat regular intervals.   So: if you have ideas on how to get communities to monitor their own Q&amp;A quality and get a little introspective, feel free to sound off in the answers.  Update: with a creative application of per-site feature toggles, we've shut down evaluations except on a handful of sites where they're currently running. Once those evaluations run their course, no new ones will be started anywhere on the network.
4140
on Ask Different.  We've been working hard on ways to help improve the experience of new users, and one of the best ways to do that is to help teach them the basics about how our sites work before they run afoul of them.  This will improve their odds of having a good first experience, speed up how quickly they can become contributing members of community, and head off the frustrations they sometimes have as a result of crashing into one of the many things that make us... different.  So We've just rolled out the first version of our new "quick start" guide. It's designed to help teach new users the absolute minimum they need to know to get started and have a good experience. How we're different from discussion boards, the basics of rep, what you can do right off the bat, why some questions aren't allowed, etc.  We spent a LOT of time on trying to get to the absolute minimum length that will still cover the key things new users need to know to be successful, but if you have feedback, please share it.
37075
Historically our beta site has discouraged self-answered questions. The site has been running for 6 years (3 questions/day, 98% answered, 3 ½ answers/question, and very few questions are closed). The topic of the site can be a bit &quot;&quot; (like Parenting, or amateur History), sometimes opinionated, and not entirely dry and technical like Stack Overflow. We have discouraged self-answered questions -- because, as one of the moderators says,  I'm strongly opposed to giving green light to quasi-questions posted with the sole intent to share an opinion, an unsolicited teaching, rambling, philosophical musings etc. [...] self-answering [might be] utilized to take advantage of the SE platform to push unsolicited info at the audience [...] I'm not convinced we should greenlight a random newbie getting on the proverbial soap box [...]. How are we to decide who is allowed to get on the box and who's not? I suppose the main issue here is community self-moderation or rather the lack thereof.  My experience of other SE sites has been that self-answering isn't an important feature -- that the large majority of topics, and of the most upvoted answers, are all people answering other people's questions. So IMO if the community votes it wants to avoid people using self-answered questions to preach on the topic of their own choice (i.e. by posting a rhetorical question and self-answering), then that's fair enough -- i.e. it's not a huge diversion from SE's core mission as a Q&amp;A site. I'm aware that SE also usually  and hopes its sites may become like Wikis (which IMO is fair enough when the subject matter is like SO's). My fear is that self-answered questions may be:  Mostly summaries of or references to material already available online elsewhere A bit spammy (e.g. a summary of something on the OP's blog or YouTube channel) Someone might flood the site with unlimited self-answered topics It can be preachy -- users who disagree in their answers within one topic might use further self-answered questions to continue their disagreement into other topics People (or trolls) might post extremist, unorthodox, unwelcome, controversial views on topics of their own choosing.  Someone recently argued though that &quot;experts&quot; want to be able to post self-answered topics and won't frequent the site if they are not allowed to.  What's your experience (and on which site)?  Are self-answered topics a problem, a distinct category, difficult to control or to quality-control?  How do you (do you even) prevent people posting the kinds of low-quality or problematic content which I listed above)? What implements the prevention -- is it the community, the moderators, or some site-specific policies about what content is welcome?  Do self-answered questions seem a bit spammy sometimes?  says,  Always solve the asker's problem. A good answer should at minimum allow the person whose question you're answering to solve their problem. Not all questions can be answered this way, but if you don't think you can write up a complete solution then you're better off looking for a different question.  ... but a problem with self-answered questions is that there isn't even an asker -- the post is unsolicited, it's not cooperative like answering someone else's question.    Historically when someone posts a question in order to self-answer it, a moderator says, &quot;That's not really conventional on this site, this is a Q&amp;A site which is preferably for answering other people's questions&quot;. So we've had little experience with allowing self-answered questions -- and having to quality-control or moderate them. How does a site cope with the various kinds of problem listed above, without deprecating all self-answered questions categorically?
6875
I am trying to find some database tutorials,books and similar, since I have started this course in college, and received some material, but it is really hard to manage through all the info on the net. I searched through the questions on the site but didn't find any. Thankfull for all your input.
120680
Less than a month ago, there was some settling of the . It's obvious that there was not a lot of approval from the community on the course of action chosen by SE, or .  Today, we are seeing a new wave of SE actions targeted on work with the community: firing / letting go / agreeing to separate (the actual term is unknown and can remain unknown forever) two very knowledgeable and very trusted community managers:  and :    about suddenly being in need of new job  indicating he is no longer with the company   and  – meta posts from the community   The following change in SE staff happened shortly after this event:    left his position as a Community Manager (but explicitly said that "I made this decision in December and it's not correlated with the recent CM team changes". Jon wants to apply for the moderator diamond back and continue participating). His  indicates that his decision to leave was connected to the incident with firing Monica.   The following moderators resigned shortly after this event:   resigned:  resigned:  (explicitly stating that firing CMs was the final straw) resigned:  (explicitly stating that firing CMs was the final straw) resigned:  (explicitly stating that firing CMs and the lack of resolution with Monica were the final straws) resigned and deleting accounts:  resigned:  resigned:  and  (irreconcilable view on the role of the community and SE policies) resigned:  resigned:  (Shog and Robert were the last nail and final straw) resigned:  resigned:  (explicitly stating that firing CMs and the  were the final straws) resigned:  resigned:  resigned:  (explicitly connecting the resignation with firing CMs and the preceding  events) resigned:  (explicitly connecting the resignation with firing CMs and the preceding events) resigned:  (explicitly connecting the resignation with firing CMs and the preceding events)   The following moderators suspended their activity shortly after this event:   suspended activity:  and  (explicitly links the suspension with firing CMs and preceding sad events, has since )   Timeline:  2020-01-13: Firing (for the lack of better term) of community managers Shog9 and Robert Cartaino. Shorty   2020-01-15: George Stocker starts a  to thank Shog9 for cultivating Stack Overflow  2020-01-16: Official policy on   . Rendered inactive on 2020-02-10.  2020-02-10:  on handling  posts. While the previously introduced 24-hour policy (see item above) is rendered inactive, the new policy covers a much wider range of cases when and why the post can be un or deemed unable to be   2020-02-20: Teresa Dietrich, the new Head of Product and Community, has posted a  (and response, of sorts) to the community.  At the bare minimum, as a result:    does not have any active moderators (Shog9 and Robert were moderating it)  does not have any active moderators (Robert was moderating it)  does not have any active moderators (one mod last seen Oct 2019)  has only one active moderator left  has only one active moderator left  has only one active moderator left  has only one moderator left  has only one moderator left     I wonder:   if there is any plan on the SE's side to actually be involved in the building of the community who is now responsible for community building and interaction of community/moderators with developers and upper management if the remaining CM team will be re-staffed since it is already heavily understaffed in my opinion if there is an intent from the company to at least thank the CMs that served Stack Exchange many-many years, even if it is a dry lawyer-written "thank you"   I am devastated. Both as an SE user and as an SE moderator.
89010
On Software Engineering I've been adding a message along these lines to old(ish) questions that have enough answers to be CW if they start getting new answers.     Please read all of the existing answers before posting yours. The question is relatively old and has a reasonable number of answers already. There is a good chance that your answer has already been posted.   I know most people don't read dialogs and just click "OK" to get through them, but if we can stop a few people adding to such questions then it's got to be good right?  The age of the question and the number of existing answers required that trigger this message can be configurable.