User talk:David Schaich/Archives/Archive2011

Carole Lieberman

As a contributor to this article, you may be interested to know I have nominated it for deletion. Your comments are welcome at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Carole Lieberman. Robofish (talk) 01:19, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Why was my edit to Technicolor (physics) reverted?

You said that everything in my cited reference is wrong.

Technicolor was proposed in the late 1980s by Kenneth Lane and Estia J. Eichten two Sakurai winning physicists currently working at Fermilab.

I based my sentence on the citation. Are you saying the citation is wrong? Valoem ^talk 14:33, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

At the time I did not bother to check out the New Scientist article you cited, because I knew the information was incorrect whatever its source. Looking at the article now, I see that it does not make the claims you attribute to it. The relevant sentences appear to be: "Just over 20 years ago, Lane, along with Fermilab physicist Estia Eichten, predicted that experiments would see just such a signal. Lane and Eichten were working on a theory known as technicolour".

The important facts to note are that Eichten and Lane did not propose technicolor, they just performed calculations in this pre-existing framework, which was originally proposed in the 1970s by Weinberg and Susskind. Moreover, only Eichten works at Fermilab. Ken is a professor at Boston University with an office four doors down from my own (which New Scientist notes three paragraphs above the sentence I just quoted). While they did receive the Sakurai prize this year (I did say almost every claim was wrong), that was for different work than their research into technicolor, so shouldn't be mentioned in the technicolor article to avoid misleading implications.

Lots of information about the history and development of technicolor is already in the Wikipedia article (with much more reliable citations), so I suggest you read it before making further improvements. And when in doubt, assume that the popular press is wrong (as is usually the case). Cheers, David Schaich ^Talk/_Cont 23:03, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Interesting read, is there anyway we can add a history section to the article? I think the information is fairly important to Technicolor. Valoem ^talk 13:48, 12 April 2011 (UTC)

Well, as I said, the history is already in the article, and sections 2--6 are primarily organized chronologically. The details of the "low-scale technicolor" model that Eichten and Lane started working on in 1989 are mainly given in subsection 7.2 on hadron collider phenomenology, which is probably appropriate since it is a fairly specific realization of the more general technicolor approach. (It is this lack of generality that allows them to make more specific predictions for signals like that recently reported by CDF.) Cheers, David Schaich ^Talk/_Cont 00:47, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Category:Democratic socialist and social democratic parties and organizations in the United States

Hi David,

This strikes me as an unnecessarily overlong Category name. "Democratic Socialist" and "Social Democratic" are two ways of expressing the same concept, I believe, the latter being the historic term and the former being a self-description of some roughly from WWII forward made to distinguish Socialists from Communists in appeals made to a larger public. Ergo, in my opinion, this should be "Social democratic parties and organizations in the United States." Your thoughts?

best regards,

Tim Davenport ////// Corvallis, OR ////// MutantPop@aol.com ////// Carrite (talk) 16:37, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

Hi Tim,

My inclination would be to leave it as it is. I don't think length is a problem, and I think both terms are worth including due to the different ways in which different people interpret them. For example, I know of several people in the SP who would spit blood if they were to be called social democrats, because they consider the term roughly synonymous to neoconservatism. Over the years, I recall long and pointless wrangling on several articles' talk pages over whether given organizations are social democratic/democratic socialist/both/other/etc. Those debates taught me personally not to care too much about terminology, but I think that in the context of Wikipedia, retaining the current category name provides broader consensus over the scope of the category and the articles it includes.

$0.02,

David Schaich ^Talk/_Cont 17:13, 22 November 2011 (UTC)