The problem of missing people on the Internet
July 26, 2024 Reading time: 9 minutes
If you are a frequent Internet user, you may notice an interesting phenomenon: a mismatch between your expectations of how many people should be engaged in various issues, and the actual reality. This situation is especially common on social media. For example, I recently joined a Facebook group with about 5 million members, but when I looked at the group's activity, I saw only about 10 people asking questions and making comments.
The same was true for Reddit. Conduct a test: go to Reddit and examine discussions in communities with over 200,000 members, where more than 50 members are online. You will hardly see any comments, and the ones you do see are often generic, like "Aha!" Recently, I tested this by posting a message in the group "MeaningOfLife," which has about 4k members. I was thrilled to receive one comment, but the group seemed completely inactive otherwise.
Next, visit Reddit's main page. You'll likely notice that 100% of the most popular posts are mundane, and honestly, quite silly, such as, "My girlfriend got a terrible haircut and she's crying," which garner thousands of comments and upvotes. While I suspect many of these comments and upvotes are from bots, it still raises questions. Why does this happen? Who is steering our civilization into such a state of being? Programmable bots? But who programmed them?
Publish
February 22, 2024 Reading time: 4 minutes
This portal can be used to post articles and blogs on many topics. This page describes the requirements for submitted articles and how to give your articles the perfect home.
Requirements for ErmisLearn Articles or Blogs
The articles/blogs can contain up to:
- 3 dofollow links to external web sites.
- 3 images (that need to be directly uploaded).
Articles and blogs related to adult or hate content are not allowed. All articles stay permanently (without expiration dates). We strongly suggest to add the author name at the end of the blog (in italic).
How to add an article
There are two methods to add articles to https://ermislearn.org
(1) Method A
Send a DOC/DOCX file with your article to science@jwork.org. Our editors should inform you whether the article is accepted or not. If the blog is accepted, you should pay $30 (see the section "Payments"). Our professional editors will check your article, format it to a clean HTML code, properly extract and upload images to the server. Typically, the article will appear in https://ermislearn.org/articles/ in 1-2 days after the payment.
(2) Method B
You can also add an article yourself if you know how to create articles using the WYSIWYG HTML editor. Note that there is no a direct conversion of the DOC/DOCX document format to a clean HTML, so you need to make sure you can write a good quality HTML, and all images must be directly uploaded to the ErmisLearn server (see the top-right menu).
There are the steps to create an article:
- Login using this page.
- Create a text using ⊕ New content on the left sidebar. Your blog will appear here. Do not forget to categorize your article using "Options" (the top-right menu) and then "Category". After you finished, press "Save" (the top menu). You can also keep your article as a "Draft".
- Inform ermislearn@jwork.org that your article is ready.
You can ask ermislearn@jwork.org for the authorization code needed for registration. We charge $20 for the authorization code. The account is valid for 1 month and then it needs to be renewed.
Even if you put the article yourself, it will be checked by editors. If the blog does satisfy our quality standards, it will be rejected for publication.
The most common mistake when creating articles and blogs is to copy-and-paste DOC/DOCX documents into the WYSIWYG HTML editor. This approach creates badly formatted HTML with many style tags that need to be removed by hand. Normally, blogs should only contain <P>, <H1>, <H2>, <IMG>, <A> tags. Use some automatic tools such as https://www.htmlwasher.com/
Tips: A first indication that your HTML contains too many unnecessary style tags and/or images are not correctly inserted (i.e. they are not uploaded as files to JWork) is the very large read time (shown below the title when you view the article).
Payments:
All payments should be sent via PayPal
Copyrights
ErmisLearn does not own copyright on submitted articles and blogs. They are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.
See also our Disclaimers.
Contact: ermislearn [AT] jwork.org
Disclaimers
February 22, 2024 Reading time: ~1 minute
The information contained herein is subject to change without notice and is not warranted to be error-free. If you find any errors, please report them to us in writing.
Limitation of Liability
In no event and under no legal theory, whether in tort (including negligence), contract, or otherwise, unless required by applicable law (such as deliberate and grossly negligent acts) or agreed to in writing, shall the ErmisLearn team and its contributors be liable for damages, including any direct, indirect, special, incidental, or consequential damages of any character arising as a result of this License or out of the use or inability to use the Work (including but not limited to damages for loss of goodwill, work stoppage, computer failure or malfunction, or any and all other commercial damages or losses).
ErmisLearn has a regular backup. We will do everything possible to restore ErmisLearn in the case of technical problems. Our team shall not be liable for any loss of user's content due to technical problems or edits by the ErmisLearn users.
Contact: science@jwork.org
How to write a book using Google Docs
February 21, 2024 Reading time: 2 minutes
Recently, I've posted some instructions about how to write a book using Google Docs. I just wanted to share my experience with this approach of creating large books. Now I'm writing a new book and I had to learn quite a lot about how to do this in Google Docs.
About
February 21, 2024 Reading time: ~1 minute
Submitted guest articles to the ErmisLearn foundation, supporting decentralizing web access to knowledge-based information and covering educational, academic, scientific, computing and cultural heritage.
We are a small non-profit. We survive on donations and membership fees that go to web services, documentation projects and user support.
Please contact us at science [AT] jwork.org
Statistics and simulation show that wealth is just pure luck
February 21, 2022 Reading time: ~1 minute
A recent article "Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure" published in Advances in Complex Systems Vol. 21, No. 03n04, 1850014 (2018) (arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068) shows that, according the a new computer model of wealth creation, the most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest. The developed computer model accurately reproduces the wealth distribution in the real world. One of the most important conclusions of this simulation is that the wealthiest individuals are not the most talented (although they must have a certain level of talent). They are the luckiest.