Awarded Answers 05

Took a long time to gather up ten awarded answers this round. I have difficulty finding reasonable questions to address so am lucky if I can locate 3–4 questions in any given day. Too often, the award goes to an answer full of confirmation bias. Ah well, that’s how it goes. It is after all a cross-section of American: our friends and neighbors.

• Would you wear diapers for a trunk full of gold? link
• What is Euro Zone crisis? link
• Contractors vs. Intellectuals link
• What is a wigger? link
• What does “hard living” refer to? link
• Are there any nuclear reactors in Florida, and if so[,] where? link
• What country issued a 100 trillion dollar bill? link
• To name a few or To name but a few? link
• What scale has a raised 4th and a lowered 7th? link
• What is the Alexander Technique? link

As usual, here are my previous sets of awarded answers: 01, 02, 03, and 04. My stats thus far are Questions Asked: 22; Answers Posted: 466; Awarded Answers: 107; and Award to Answer %: 23.0.

Update: Google disabled my Adsense account, so the financial incentive for participation, tiny as it was, just disappeared. So like others before me who have been cut off for a variety of reasons, I’ll just quietly go away, abandoning my profile there, since nothing on the Internet ever really disappears. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

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Awarded Answers 04

I learned something useful about the way WebAnswers works. The site creates much of its own content in the form of robot questions. I knew of this category before but didn’t know how to recognize them. Now I do. So when possible, I avoid answering them for two reasons: the best answer is never awarded and the traffic tends to be minimal. That doesn’t mean the question can’t be legitimate, interesting, or useful or that I might not have a well thought-out answer worth contributing. Nor does it mean that I might not earn some residual income from answering (which is all that I get out of awarded answers for that matter). The biggest reason is that the bot questions are culled from other Internet question-and-answer sites and so are derivative and without authorship. They are at small remove from content farms, which I blogged about here.

What that means for my participation at WebAnswers is that I am finding it harder to locate questions to which I want to contribute an answer. I’ve already steered clear of an inexhaustible stream of questions about medical and legal issues, pregnancy, custody, pets, and favorites. The bot questions (now that I recognize them as such) further reduce my activity potential, which has been more than a little questionable anyway in terms of the reward-to-effort ratio and my association with other regular contributors whose expertise is often unclear despite some impressive numbers.

Nevertheless, these are my latest awarded answers:

• Who has commented about “the bimbo eruption”? To what is he referring? link
• What does POLICE stand for? (abbr) link
• Is it good for your body to run a marathon? link
• Is music essential to life? link
• Is there really such a thing as a victimless crime? link
• How should “economics” be considered and delineated. Is it truly “a discipline” or something else[?] link
• Was the Big Bang loud? link
• How many James Bond movies have been made? link
• Are we living in a simulated reality? link
• Training for marathons is bad for you? link

As usual, my previous sets of awarded answers can be seen here and here and here.

Awarded Answers 03

Awarded answers at WebAnswers trickle in slowly, in part because I don’t bomb the site with answers and in part because many questions go unawarded for long periods of time. My previous sets of awarded answers can be seen here and here.

• Can you tell the time without looking at your watch? link
• Are you for or against the right to bear arms? And if you have a gun have you ever had to use it? link
• Why do people buy gold? link
• Which bank has decided not to charge that offensive debit card fee? link
• Why does mainstream music seem to digress? link
• What makes fireworks create light? link
• Is silver going to be worth more than gold? link
• What are the principles of Post Modernism? link
• Do you remember when there was no internet? link
• Does man have more animal instincts than the power of reason? link

I’m probably making a nuisance of myself, since I often take to task those posing questions for their assumptions embedded in the question. (The usual example of begging the question is the cliché of the attorney asking the witness on the stand, “When did you stop beating your wife?”) For example, I answered a question about when the soul enters the body by denying the existence of a soul. I don’t expect my answer will be at all satisfactory to someone who self-identifies as a Christian, with the doctrinal belief that the soul exists (somewhere, somehow) separate from the body. Could my answer ever in my wildest dreams be the best answer judged by that same person?

Awarded Answers 02

In a previous post, I linked to 17 of my awarded answers at WebAnswers.com. Here are an additional 12:

• What according to you runs the world? link
• Is Hugh Hefner … just a dirty old man? link
• If you stumbled upon a magic lamp and a Genie came out … what would be your three wishes? link
• Will it be a true reality that some day there will be cities built underwater? link
• Did you hear about the new trains which runs [sic] on magnets? link
• What is the name of this movie? link
• Your opinion on unemployment[?] link
• What is a Troy Ounce? link
• Which is Your Favorite James Bond 007 movie? link
• Do law school students take special courses in writing? link
• What is the best western movie ever? link
• Why are ipods so good for listening to music? link

Although my profile says I’ve been awarded 53 answers, I can only see 32, and of those, 13 links are dead and display “Page Not Found” error messages. (That’s a lot of lost awarded answers: more than one-third! I would be concerned if my participation weren’t mostly a distraction for me.) My total answer count is 280, which yields 18.9% in awarded answers. A surprising number of questions I answered remain unawarded to anyone. Senior members have answer counts in the thousands (a handful in the tens of thousands), but I don’t spend enough time there to reach that level of activity any time soon.

Awarded Answers 01

I’ve been on WebAnswers.com for about two months now and have been awarded 22 best answers out of some 175 questions to which I have replied. Inexplicably, 5 have since gone missing. To generate some inbound links and demonstrate the sorts of questions I address, they are listed below (unnumbered, most recent first) with the link to each answer at the end. I’ve added a few missing words or letters to correct for poor English or questions that were cut off because of the two-part display structure.

• Have you ever rented a houseboat, and did you like it? link
• Are you nicer in your [real life or online?] link
• The Associated Press contacted several Book Publishers who said Casey Anthony is too tainted for a book deal. [What do you think?] link
• What is the difference, if any, between information, knowledge and wisdom? link
• Where do we go after we die? link
• Can a member please explain what the social security trust fund is and explain if it really exists or is it a con perpetrated by FDR to fool the sheople? link
• What is the best browser to use on a Mac? link
•  Is [the] mac op[e]rating system is better [than] the xp sp3 in use? link
• The Beginning of Time[: how can time begin?] link
• New unemployment figures for the month of June shows it remains at 9.2%. Only 18,000 jobs were added in June. [Your thoughts?] link
• Why do some people never feel full even though they have eaten to the point of gluttony? link
• What are mirror neurons[?] link
•  Why [are people so] rude? link
• What is your favorite work of Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer? link
• How do I get a patent? link
• Why can parrots talk? We’re talking physiological here. Please explain. link
• It has been argued that some college students fail to achieve what Piaget called “formal operations.” Given what you know about Piaget’s Stages of Development, is it possible for a college student to have not achieved formal operations? Why or why [not?] link

My answer rate falls well below the 10-20 per day recommended by regulars at the site, so my status is low and my library of questions and answers is still limited. As you can see, the subjects range all over the map. I have some minor frustration that many of my other answers are also pretty good but the award went to someone else (or no one). Poke around and have a look.