STEMsocial Distilled - 7 days before Christmas!

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Surprise surprise, it is Friday night (actually even Saturday for a few minutes), and here is a new distilled of the best STEMsocial content of last week. It is again @lemouth who is writing today, but maybe someone else will take the distilled over for next week as I won't be available on the 24th. I am however whether unsure that anyone will be available (@gentleshaid, will you be?).

Anyways, once again, thanks a lot to all STEMsocial authors of the week for their very nice contributions to our community. For those who do not know what STEMsocial is, please take a look here, or pass by Discord or the Openhive Chat.

In order to select the top posts of the period ranging from last Saturday (11.12) to today (17.12), we considered all best posts found by our curators, and written in English. We then selected those that attracted the largest number of comments that are written neither by the post author, nor by a script or a bot. Moreover, a given author cannot appear twice in the selection.

We encourage everyone to have a look and contribute to the discussion in any of the selected articles, as well as potentially give a follow to selected authors.


Our top choices


Meet the Suicide Pod


The winner of this week is our curator @gentleshaid and his post on a new technology assisting humans to suicide themselves. Whilst the topic may sound a bit weird, or at least interesting, this provides somehow possibly a (fancy) solution to a true first world problem. To fix the bar for this week, I am pleased to write that this blog attracted 13 comments.

Remote Labs with Mixed Reality


With 7 comments, the second post for this week is the one of @juecoree on remote labs. Due to the pandemic, almost all university classes went online, which may be an issue for laboratory classes. This is where virtual reality and augmented reality can help us and play a role. This is deeply discussed in the post, in particular with nice illustrations.

Hunting for the Higgs boson - a story that is far from being over


I am next in the line with my post on the story of the Higgs boson. I browse a journey that connects the theory proposed in the 1964 to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, and I then give some insight on the next steps. The quest of the Higgs boson is indeed far from being over. This post collected 6 comments.

Research diaries #2: Singularities and regularizations


With 6 comments as well, our curator @mathowl shares the bronze medal with me (I appear first as @lemouth starts with an 'l' and @mathowl with an 'm'). In his post on mathematics, @mathowl discusses a bit his own research about how the singularities appearing in equations can be regularised. This then leads to solutions with a much better behaviour.

The refractive power of our natural lenses Part IV (Astigmatism)


Finally, the fifth post of the week has been authored by @rbalzan79, and discusses refraction and astigmatism. With 4 comments, it allows us to have two physics posts in the top 5, which makes me happy! In his post, the author discusses rays of light, refraction and how the latter can impact how we see the world around us. We can not the very comprehensive and homemade illustrations.


All rewards earned are used to fund the STEMsocial project functioning and activities. The author of the distilled, who may be any STEMsocial curator depending on the week, gets 30% of the rewards of this post). If you like what we do, please consider joining our community on HIVE and delegating to the @stemsocial account (85% of the curation rewards are returned), or trailing it.

See you all (hopefully) next week, or next-to-next week depending on Santa!



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26 comments
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Very interesting selection this time. Thanks to the summary I feel more interested in reading some posts.

I am however whether unsure that anyone will be available

I'll be available. Christmas is not for geeks IMO :D

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You are welcome. Note that the selection is fully automated at this stage, as it is based on criteria that can be implemented in a script ;)

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Really? It sounds interesting, but if one of the criteria is the number of comments a post gets, then there is a problem as it seems some people get more comments because they're more popular in the social network. I think that concept gave birth to what is know as "influencer". I think that could be a limitation.

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Influencers? Hmmmm I never thought that way.

In fact, here we always end up with 10 posts, and all of them are usually equally good to be featured. From there, I picked this random criterion to select the 5 top ones. Also, in terms of number of comments, there is not any big difference between those posts.

This being said, I agree that I could make a random selection as well. This may be as good. Should we try this?

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I thought about it and maybe a good comprise would be to take the three best posts and the last two of the list. Another possibility would be to introduce a two-week cool-down period. Anyone featured in a distilled will have to wait 14 days before being allowed to reappear. Personally, I like this second option.

Any thoughts? I also tag @gentleshaid to get his opinion?

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(Edited)

I will also go with the second one. We might, however, encounter a wall in cases where only a handful of the same authors are posting every week. Maybe we can modify the criteria then?

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Definitely. Nothing should be frozen forever. For Friday, I won't change anything as I will be mostly offline this week, for private reasons (some partial vacation in Brussels). But I will implement the new change for next year.

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That's fine, except when there are a few posters around. If that's the case, I guess we'll have to do an exception with the cool-down rule. I agree with making a random selection of the top and the bottom. Since the nominated posts are curated posts, then I think they'll be of sufficient quality to be featured.

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(Edited)

I agree. We can even automatically tune the cool-down period as a function of the number of posts to always guarantee some rotation in the author list and having at least some choice for the 5 nominees.

I will start implementing this for the 2022 distilled.

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Awesome selection. These are enough to spur people on to read.

I should be available to write the distilled for the festive period. Just give me the prompt via discord and I will be good to go.

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Excellent. I will give you access to the template and we will setup details off-chain. Thanks a lot!

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Master crafted piece all in one place. Lovely articles. Indeed the suicide pod by @gentleshaid post is really weird but also interesting to know. Never heard of that.

Physics and mathematics, rules the day 😆, I only wished these concepts are friendly to me. Lol
They will always look very attractive.

The more I try, the more I am thrown off balance. @lemouth and @mathowl , any hope for my type? 😆

Though one day, I will find one that welcomes me well. @rbalzan79 these welcomed me though.

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(Edited)

There is always hope! The problem is more time, I would say. Finally, this also applies to everyone. As soon as we move out our zone of comfort, things may get wild :)

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The suicide pod post is fascinating! Thanks for including this in your digest. I would have missed it, otherwise.

Happy Holidays and good luck in 2022!

Cheers!

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Thanks for passing by, and happy holidays to you as well!

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I have been remiss. A Friday Distilled! This week I had already read two of the posts, and just read the one by @gentleshaid, so I'm up to date. Wonderful selections. I look forward to the edition compiled by @gentleshaid.

Thank you, @lemouth for putting in the work that compiling the magazine demands.

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Thanks for passing by and reading those posts (on behalf of their authors ;) ). This week was really nice in the sense that almost all letters of STEM were used.

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Greetings dear friends, excellent articles can be seen in the report, undoubtedly the academic-scientific content continues to be strengthened.

See you later, have an excellent start of the week.

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Thanks a lot for passing by and the nice comment!

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