Informal Peer Review And Feedback Activity On Steemstem - Things Are Feeling Healthier

Steemstem as a small community within the larger Steemit ecosystem is dedicated to creating quality STEM content on this platform.

A few months ago the curators posted an exhortation to reboot and improve Steemstem in this post here.

Since then, the community's involvement seems to have gotten much better. I have a few anecdotes about this improvement that I want to communicate in this post.

Peak Oil And The Impact On Population

Last week I wrote a post on a postulated impact that peak oil may have on the global population in this post here: Peak Oil And The Impact On Global Population. I may have drifted off into the pessimistic side a bit too far in this one but that's okay because:

The next day user nonzerosum posted an excellent counter-argument to my post Peak Meat As One of Many Reactions To Peak Oil in which he provided data that much of humanity's arable land is dedicated to producing meat which is an inefficient way to produce food calories. If a peak oil scenario does hit the world then we will be able to convert more land over to crop production and less to meat production which would mitigate the impact. This is a piece of data I did not know about and is a great example of peer feedback on Steemstem.

Someone Actually Wrote A Program For Me

In my post Kill Time With Recreational Math: Let's Travel To Alpha Centauri! I used a very large Excel spreadsheet to calculate how long it would take to get to Alpha Centauri in a 1 g spaceship.

The next day user terrylovejoy actually wrote a program in Python to replicate and confirm my results in this post here: Travel Time to Alpha Centauri - Python Program.

How cool is that?

Since then I have installed Python 3.6 saved Terry's code in "alpha_centauri.py" and ran it to get an answer of 4.85396681763964 years which compares favourably with my spreadsheet. I changed the time_increment from 1000 seconds to 100 seconds just to see the effect of a smaller time increment and get basically the same answer. I changed the distance to 100 x 2 = 200 light years and I get an answer of 10.349737910313467 years (ship time) to go 200 light years.

_{Procrastilearner (CC BY-SA 3.0 license)}

So this feedback has prompted me to finally get around to installing and learning Python, which has been on my to do list for years. I am glad that I have added it to my day-to-day toolkit for performing small calcs.

Things Don't Suck. They Blow.

Yesterday I wrote a post about how the force of suction is fictitious and fluids can only push (Things Don't Suck. They Blow.). In a comment LeMouth pointed out that this pushing force only works up to 10 metres or so. Damn! I knew that and should have incorporated that tidbit into my post to communicate even more science to the Steemstem readers.

What Kicked It Off For Me and The Result

It all got kickstarted about 4 months ago with user kryzsec's helpful comment that I should cite my sources if I was going to post on steemstem: "Also your images are improperly sourced, like legally you are liable with the picture of the Delorean." Since then I have learned all about creative commons (CC0, CC1, CC2, CC3 and CC4), public domain and fair use and I now stringently get my images from CC and PD sources and cite them all with the proper methods.

Support in Return

So now, to help support Steemstem I tend to go through the New posts in Steemstem and look for users with low reputations and do one of two things:

1.If the post is not appropriate to Steemstem then I post this comment:

Good article but I don't think that this post actually belongs in Steemstem. STEM is Science Technology Engineering and Math. Looking forward to any topics you may want to write about on that in the future.

This helps to keep junk out of the Steemstem tag. Sometimes I like to give them a small upvote to take the sting off of the comment.

2.If the post was good, appropriate to Steemstem and cited sources properly but is looking as if no one gave it any love then I give them an upvote and occasionally resteem it for improved visibility. My following is still small but every little bit helps.

A little upvote goes a long way to keeping new contributors encouraged and posting in the future. If new users don't stay with Steemit then the platform will eventually die so it is in the community's interest to help those with lower reps along up the ladder.

Useful And Interesting Websites

Finally, commenters will sometimes let me know about useful websites or programs that could be of interest.

Black Hole Sun

In my post about a Black Hole Sun user alexdory let me know about a cool app called Universe Sandbox 2. Now I can simulate black holes and other things astronomy related and rely less on my imagination.

Homophily - The Reason The Internet Is Full Of Drama

In my post about echo chambers and how it is creating a super dramatic internet here user toddrjohnson let me know about website Econtalk. Now I have a whole new world of source materials for ideas to post about. Thanks man.

Closing Words

Steemstem is an encouraging oasis within the larger Steemit ecosystem.

The community seems to be getting healthier and more active and the comments threads also seem to be getting better and occasionally they even take on a life of their own.

Who knows maybe a year from now Steemstem will be as active as one of the STEM subreddits.

Thank you for reading my post.