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All of the trend lines on this site are positive except one: story submissions. After an initial surge, they have been gradually declining despite users and page views climbing. Tonight the submission queue ran dry. Janrinok and I could go scrounging, as we sometimes do, but this needs to be addressed.
We have around four thousand registered users, and who knows how may AC's reading along. We can do better.
I challenge each of you to submit stories on a regular basis, at whatever frequency you find comfortable. Really, if even half of us submitted a story once a week, we would have more than we could ever use. Once a day, once a week, once a month, whatever you can handle, send it in.
Bookmark this link: http://soylentnews.org/submit.pl - use it. Give us so many stories that we can select the cream of the crop and stun you with how amazing our community is. Make it happen.
I'm going to leave this story on top for a while, and see what is waiting for us when I get to work in the morning. Wow me, please.
This is our news site. There are others like it, but this one is ours. Its success is in your hands.
[UPDATE: We have received, in less than 12 hours, more submissions than we had the whole rest of the weekend. THANK YOU SO MUCH, and please, keep them coming. Even one story a month matters. Let the party re-commence. :) ]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Monday March 24 2014, @12:06PM
"I see a notable trend from the editors to accept "tech news" but to reject hard-science type stories"
I'll second that. An intentional aversion to primary sources.
Want some stories? Autopost anything that hits astrobites or Aaronson's quantum blog. Could troll arxiv.org all day and post interesting papers.
Generally speaking, we're not stupid here. We don't need a simple clearly written paper to be misinterpreted by a BBC journalist trying to rewrite it for the general 3rd grade public. Yes astrobites is a re-interpretation but its not a journalist reinterpretation. You want to talk about Rosetta, well just talk about the Rosetta probe, don't need a BBC journalist's permission to do so. There's many other examples of "requiring" a journalist's "permission" to discuss the news.
Soooooo how bout that
http://astrobites.org/2014/03/24/examining-martian -water-with-hydrogen-isotopes/ [astrobites.org]
Basically hydrogen isotope ratio on Mars varies because the light isotopes blow out of the atmosphere. There's a pretty interesting section on error analysis, where UV light and other sources of water screw up the ratio. But there "should be" a heck of a lot more water on Mars than there seems to be, which is interesting. So either there's a lot of water we haven't found, or somethings making it disappear that we haven't figured out.
I'd have to think a bit about how this applies to any terraforming ideas. Or even just colonization. Or did they just screw up on the analysis? One thing I didn't like about KSR's scifi trilogy was the portrayal of a terraformed Mars having an ocean and being green. Its looking a lot more like a terraformed mars would look a lot like saudi arabia or perhaps a cold desert.
(Score: 1) by bill_mcgonigle on Tuesday March 25 2014, @03:06PM
I'd love to see submissions of papers, if the submitter takes the time to write a decent summary. It should at least cover the abstract, clarify any terms not well-known to non-specialists and point out any interesting bits that aren't in the abstract.
That would be a great service, maybe even a story category that some non-genereal-community members might choose look at exclusively with an RSS feed.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 25 2014, @04:27PM
astrobites, but not for astronomy.
If anyone knows of something like astrobites for CS that would be very interesting.
In my infinite spare time I've occasionally considered shamelessly copying the astrobites "business model" for other scientific fields.