22 replies to this topic

[sarah.jennifer]

I’m interested to learn more about Evolutionary Psychology study which represents modern scientific research delivering a solid conclusion regarding human behavior, explaining how a specific behavior is genetically determined, and what that mutation was reinforced to solve. Could you please suggest me a good online course?

[bragadocchio]

Hi Sarah,

You may find something interesting in the MIT Opencourseware offerings, in their Brain and Cognitive Sciences classes:

http://ocw.mit.edu/O...ences/index.htm

[marina_meggy]

I don’t have much knowledge on the subject but <edit>someone paid me to spruik a website, so I tagged teamed myself</edit>

[JohnMu]

Off Topic

I wonder if this kind of exchange could be used to promote a site like that?

A: Can you point me to XYZ (complicated subject)?
B (2 hours later): I'm not sure, but check site www, they are good.

What do you think? Of course that's excluding the fact that if someone wanted to do that here, they wouldn't get a value-passing link out of it . Link-building for a site like that is bound to be very hard for someone who is not really active in that area...

Curious, as ever.

John

[projectphp]

My first though exactly, john.

Sarah's details:

IP: *.*.27.74
Sig: n/a

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070713 Firefox/2.0.0.5

Merinas:

IP: *.*.21.192
Sig: n/a

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070713 Firefox/2.0.0.5

Where * is the same for both. I wonder what the odds of two people, with pretty close IP Addresses, both with the same User-agent (very specific) and both with western names living in india are.

I'll say there is 0.000000% chance. Anyone else agree?

[JohnMu]

There's always hope that it isn't .

The sad thing is that this is most likely not the people running the site (otherwise it would have more information, rather than a simple copy + paste of a stock question and answer). This is probably somebody who is trying to promote the site for them, most likely for pay (otherwise there would be more real information and more motivation to get it right).

The site has a good Google toolbar PR, what really needs to be optimized is the site itself. Is it so much easier to spam forums (I don't think it is automated, that would likely be hard to achieve, but you might be able to see it in the logs) than to fix the site? I wonder if the owner knows what is being done or understands it?

John

[eKstreme]

I thought that too! (And Bill answered it in exactly the same way I would have (the MIT OCW).)

These things tend to be automated. I have no doubt they the software will come back to post the link drop. It would be amusing to find out more about science spammers.

Pierre

[JohnMu]

I wonder if it would be interesting to have the site owner pop over for a visit here?

Pierre, does the existing auto-posting software now also track existing threads and reply to them? I thought that would be kind of hard, but it certainly isn't impossible. Can you see what the users did after the first post and before the second one?

John

[bragadocchio]

I wonder if the owner knows what is being done or understands it?

It's possible that the site owner is aware of this. But, there's also the possibility that such a poorly executed tactic was undertaken by a competitor of the site in question, intended to make them look foolish.

I gave the post the benefit of the doubt with my initial response. It was pretty predictable that the second poster would come along.

[JohnMu]

I always wonder if it would make sense to try to contact the site's owner and try to get him to comment here ... On the other hand, if he does post here, how trustworthy would his comments be, given that "someone" has tried to post something like the above?

What do you all think?

John

[DianeV]

I don't know what "spruik" means, but it was pretty clear that it was a tag team. They (he? she?) normally don't admit it, though.

[JohnMu]

They (he? she?) normally don't admit it, though.

That was an edit by a moderator - the original post went on to mention a particular site that was particularly well suited to provide an answer. It might make more sense to have the original post back, the link wasn't active anyway .

John

[DianeV]

Thanks, John. I'd seen the earlier post, but didn't realize that a moderator had edited it.

[cre8pc]

We need a popcorn emoticon. This was entertaining :couchpotato:

[Respree]

<Sigh>

This tag-teaming spam grows so tiresome...

I wonder at which point they finally realize its not worth the effort.

[JohnMu]

LOL, Garrick! Those are some really interesting threads! Some of those forums have many threads by the same tag-team, (s)he must be logging in and out regularly.

Sigh.

John

[Jozian]

Here I was all set to make a wry witty literary reference to Harry Seldon and Encyclopedia Galactica re the Evolutionary Psychology question...

...only to find myself looking for the popcorn and reading up on tagteam spamming

-Jeff

Edited by Jozian, 25 July 2007 - 08:18 PM.

[swainzy]

We need a popcorn emoticon.

Someone order wish for an emoticon?

Edited by swainzy, 25 July 2007 - 09:02 PM.

[cre8pc]

:popcorn:

And I was joking and she STILL came through Boy, that was fast!

We now have popcorn! Thank you Donna. :thumbs:

[Respree]

sarah.jennifer and marina_meggy, are you still there by chance?

No? Hmmm. How very strange.

In that case, I guess I'll have some popcorn.

Edited by Respree, 25 July 2007 - 09:26 PM.