Scientific discipline: add an Earth Sciences option?

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Wed, 07/15/2020 - 08:28 am

I'm not sure I like being classed as 'other' (in the user account settings).

Actually, Earth and Planetary Science could have broader appeal.

July 15, 2020 at 08:30 am - Permalink

Good idea! My PhD is in Geophysics. No computer science degree at all. I wonder how much influence I have...

July 15, 2020 at 09:25 am - Permalink

I don't have a problem adding another option, but where does it end?

Maybe I should just delete that field from the profile. Do people find it useful?

July 15, 2020 at 11:21 am - Permalink

Why have a defined list?  Just have text field and let folks self-identify.

Astrology-Astronomy-Cosmology-Cosmetology - whatever.

Andy

July 15, 2020 at 11:32 am - Permalink

The original point of that question (as I recall) was to get a better idea of the distribution of scientific disciplines our customers identify with. For that purpose, having a free form field is less useful.

What ultimately happened is that for years we were not manually approving accounts, so we ended up with thousands of accounts that were generated programmatically by spammers, and so any statistics we might have would be useless now.

I'm also not sure we can easily change a field from a "pick one choice" to free form. We could delete the old field and add a new field, but then anyone who had previously made a selection would have that lost. I'm sure it's possible to write some code that would do this for us, but doing that would be expensive.

July 15, 2020 at 11:50 am - Permalink

Well, it's not important, so no problem as is. Even though failing to self-identify as multi-disciplinary is nowadays seen as an academic crime, I admit to still finding it enlightening to see which fields fellow Igor users are coming from.

 

July 16, 2020 at 01:54 am - Permalink

I have added "Earth and Planetary Science" for tony and John. Andy, let me know if you want me to add "Cosmetology" so you can use that in your profile :)

Actually, with the pandemic, I have become more of a cosmetologist than I ever expected to be.

July 16, 2020 at 05:21 am - Permalink