Talk:Air pollution dispersion terminology/Draft

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I was the original sole author of this Wikipedia article

I copied it to here at Citizendium as is with the Wikipedia title ... and will now delete all of the Wikipedia links and certain sections. I will also be making some wording changes. - Milton Beychok 23:08, 25 January 2008 (CST)

Reason why this article may be difficult to understand

This article uses a great number of what may be strange words to readers unfamilar with air pollution dispersion. For example: Lagrangian, Eularian, Cartesian grid, Monin-Obukhov similarity, roughness length, Monin-Obukhov length, absorption, sedimentation, deposition velocity, inversion layers, radioactivity, radionuclides, etc. The infrastructure articles of the various workgroups in Citizendium simply have not yet included articles defining those words as has been done in Wikipedia.

Then there are even much simpler words which have not yet been defined in Citizendium. For example: United States Environmental Protection Agency (or U.S. EPA), United States Department of Energy, natural gas and liquified natural gas (LNG), furnace, flue gas, combustion, turbulence, etc.

If I were to put links ( [[Example]] ) around all such words in this article, it would be virtually a sea of red links ... so I have elected not to do so, but to wait until the Citizendiums infrastructure articles define most of them. If anyone disagree with my choice, please feel free to go through the article and put in red links to your heart's content.

In closing, if I were to browse articles about astrophysics or quantum physics, I would be quite mystified by their terminology. In other words, no one can know everything. It takes detailed study to understand highly technical subjects. - Milton Beychok 23:37, 26 January 2008 (CST)

As I attempt to get more caught up (looks to the skies for editors for other groups), I'm not sure I find this article that hard to understand, except in sufficiently circumscribed areas that I could say "OK, here I need to call in an expert". I've always been an active photographer, and, some years ago, wanted to go beyond the operational understanding of the techniques. So, I joined the Society for Photographic Engineering and Technology, and started reading up on why certain things, such as photosensitized materials and their chemistry, worked. Bought a couple of texts through the professional service, and got a lot more understanding. Then, I reached a little too far, and started reading about how dyes couple light energy to silver complexes. There was a page or so of equations, only interrupted by an apology that the next section would contain some drastic oversimplifications.

At that point, I muttered, OK, I see you are a Bessel function. Let's both back away from the table and no one will get hurt.

Howard - "Yes, we have no bananas" (in this article) and no Bessel functions. I wouldn't recognize a Bessel function if it knocked at my door. Milton Beychok 06:11, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

In this article, some of the terms you raise as specialized seem reasonably core statistical material; I couldn't necessarily derive them, but understand what they do. It may well be, that between some chemical warfare and other emergency work, I've picked up more atmospheric terminology than I thought. The one area where I started to glaze over seemed to be about fluid dynamics, which is an area where I mutter "laminar flow, turbulent flow, and...other stuff." You seem to have defined that area in terms of models that can be treated as black boxes, and I think I know the specialist I would need to look inside.

That, to me, is not hard-to-read material for someone reasonably literate in general science and engineering. Some of the dispersion concepts, at least superficially, come up in radio and radar propagation. So, I regard this as pretty good writing.

As a suggestion only, some of the terms such as line, point, etc., might lend themselves to graphics, but I'm willing to put it up for Approval now. If a physicist (I think) who knew more about fluid dynamics were to cross-check, I'd appreciate it, but I think it's in better shape than you suggest. Howard C. Berkowitz 03:38, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

a catalog?

I wonder if this would be useful as a catalog of Air pollution dispersion modeling? Chris Day 04:23, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Help me picture this, Chris. Would it then be basically a list of terms, which link to short articles? Perhaps with some summary graphics? Howard C. Berkowitz 04:27, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

I was thinking it could live there pretty much as it is now. Obviously some of the subpage info would need to be ported over to the other article. The only reason I mention this is that it seems to be so relevant to that article. Chris Day 04:30, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Oh, now I see. This page, as a separate article, would become a catalog subpage. If the terminology here is principally applicable to that article alone, it makes sense. Since there are other air pollution articles, do any of them link here?Howard C. Berkowitz 05:11, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

I have not looked extensively. I assume Milt can make a call on whether it makes sense or not. Chris Day 05:17, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Response to Howard and Chris

Chris and Howard, the Air pollution dispersion modeling article only discusses the very simplest, most introductory and most basic type of air pollution dispersion modeling and intentionally so. It was meant to appeal to those readers who are complete neophytes to the subject. You might think of it as the "arithmetic" of mathematics ... whereas mathematics goes on to include calculus, differential equations and beyond. In other words, most of us usually learn the basics or the "abc"s before we learn to read.

By contrast, the Air pollution dispersion terminology was intended to serve as an explanation and definition (a sort of expanded dictionary) of the specialized terminology (jargon or argot) that is needed to understand some of the latest, very much more complex air pollution dispersion models listed in the existing Catalogs subpage of the Air pollution dispersion modeling article.

Eventually, CZ will have articles including other jargons that will use some of the same words to have different meanings. For example, mathematicians will have entirely different definitions of "point, line and area sources" than do air dispersion modelers. Scientists working in the fields of light, noise, and radio waves will each also have definitions of "point, line and area sources" that differ from the mathematicians and from the air dispersion mdelers. Words like "Lagrangian" and "Eularian" in this article will also have different meanings in different disciplines. That is what happened in Wikipedia and it led to some rather nasty confrontations as to whose jargon was to be the dominant one. So when I wrote this article, I intentionally chose the title to specify that it was about the jargon used by air dispersion modelers ... hopefully, to avoid future confrontations such as occurred in Wikipedia.

The above was my long-winded way of saying that I believe this article should remain a stand-alone article ... it should not by hidden away as a catalog subpage. It serves to provide links for defining words in the articles such as AERMOD air pollution dispersion model, CALPUFF air pollution dispersion model, the aforementioned list of complex models in the Catalogs subpage of Air pollution dispersion modeling, and the many other articles that I (or others) will eventually write on each of the multitude of complex air pollution dispersion models.

Howard, if you wish to nominate this article for approval, I have no objection. But I would object to its being relegated to a Catalogs subpage. Milton Beychok 05:20, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

That's fine with me. I was just floating the idea in case you had not thought about the option. Chris Day 05:23, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

I think we are in agreement. Let me make a suggestion to preempt the sort of nastiness that Milt describes. I'm sure when I'm thinking of a point or line from a laser or highly directional microwave antenna, it indeed is different, even though some of the same terms are used. To put it mildly, some of the electronic counter-countermeasures people, who want to make their beams unpredictable, are now using electronically scanned phased arrays that, roughly, behave as points in one respect, but are really more planar arrays composed of small point antennas.

Due to that, I would suggest creating a disambiguation page, now, for each one of those terms that you know will have discipline-specific meanings. Howard C. Berkowitz 05:30, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

That was exactly what I want to avoid ... the great amount of work involved in disambiguating each of the very many specialized words in the article. Instead, when I want to link the words "point source" (for example), I simply link to this article. That is how we finally halted the confrontation in WP.

If you will look at my user page, I have already written 20 or so articles involving air pollutions dispersion modeling and they have all been very thoroughly "networked" via word links and "Related Articles" subpages. I did that because when we finally implement Chris's idea of sub-workgroups, I hope to possible establish a sub-workgroup devoted to air pollution dispersion modeling. Milton Beychok 05:50, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm. (puts on programmer hat, although not a currently active programmer, that could change). I agree it's annoying at best, although I've gotten more into the habit of doing it. I can, however, think of several software approaches that could remove much of the work. For several reasons, I'm going to have to get current in some more recent languages; my last heavy work was in C, with lighter, more recent Perl.

This is probably a question for Chris. I'm guessing that anything triggered by trying to create a article will need to be native MetaWiki, not template, true? What's the language(s) used? I'm thinking of an automatic search on title creation, which at least does some wildcarded searches for existing both non-disambiguated and disambiguated use, and, if there is conflict, pops up a front end to disambiguation. Yes, I see a number of nontrivial issues, such as the term existing for a discipline but not being in an article. There might be an article creation option for semi-automatic creation of a disambiguation page or adding to an existing one.

Of course, unless we improve membership and participation, this is all moot. I'm quite worried about what I see as declining activity by existing members and a paucity of new members. Howard C. Berkowitz 15:08, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

It's not as simple as adding a parenthetical word like (military), (chemistry), (physics) or (baseball). It would have to be a cumbersome phrase like (air pollution dispersion). That is why, after much thought, I chose to link the discipline-related words (i.e.,jargon) simply back to this Air pollution dispersion terminology article. Other disciplines could also do the same thing, if they wished, by creating their own terminology articles. One might think of this as an alternative to disambiguation articles. There is often more than way to do most anything.

As for the declining activity, I too am worried. Milton Beychok 16:43, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

When it comes to really programming I really am clueless. You might want to ask Jitse Niesen, he wrote the program for the subpagination bot that went through and added subpages to all the articles.

I agree the path to critical mass is looking steeper and that is a shame as I think this model is a good one. I was looking at the wikigenes wiki (run by the journal Nature Genetics, as far as I can tell) and they are giving credit for articles/pages, something I believe most academics will require before joining enmasse. Click the link to the article by Hoffmann titled "A wiki for the life sciences where authorship matters"

I think the idea of terminology articles is a good one. They can give more that a definition and relate the terms to each other more clearly. Chris Day 16:49, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Bessel function

Milton said:

I wouldn't recognize a Bessel function if it knocked at my door.

Nothing mysterious about Bessel functions, the first ones are:

${\frac {\sin r}{r}}\quad {\hbox{and}}\quad {\frac {\cos r}{r}}\quad {\hbox{with}}\quad 0<r<\infty$

--Paul Wormer 08:26, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Paul. I was just having a bit of levity with Howard. Bessel functions are something I only have a dim memory of from my university days. Milton Beychok 09:48, 14 January 2009 (UTC)