Archive-Name: aids-faq1
Last-Modified: 10 Nov 1993
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Section 1. Introduction and General Information
Q1.1 What is sci.med.aids?
Q1.2 Discussion topics.
Q1.3 Sci.med.aids distribution.
Q1.4 Subscribing and unsubscribe to sci.med.aids.
Q1.5 What is a moderated newsgroup?
Q1.6 Editorial guidelines.
Q1.7 How do I submit a posting?
Q1.8 The moderators.
Q1.9 Cooperative moderation.
Q1.10 Discussing sci.med.aids moderation policies.
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Question 1.1. What is sci.med.aids?
"sci.med.aids" is a USENET newsgroup which discusses AIDS and HIV. A
gateway forwards articles posted to sci.med.aids to a BITNET listserv
mailing list called AIDS.
Thousands read sci.med.aids, including people with HIV infections,
published authors, researchers, public health officials, and interested
individuals. It is carried in several countries, particularly in the
Americas and Europe.
Sci.med.aids is moderated by a team. When you submit an article to
sci.med.aids, it must be approved by a member of the moderation team.
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Question 1.2. Discussion topics.
Sci.med.aids covers topics of interest to people with AIDS (Acquired
Immune Deficiency Syndrome), their friends, relatives, and loved ones,
AIDS service providers, educators and researchers, and the general public.
Some common topics are
Causes of AIDS and opportunistic infections.
Vaccines for AIDS.
Treatments or cures for AIDS and opportunistic infections.
AIDS prevention and education.
Sci.med.aids carries some regular magazines. Here's a current list:
CDC AIDS Daily Summary
AIDS Treatment News
The Veterans Administration AIDS Info Newsletter
If you have the time to add to this list, we invite you to contribute (if
you obtain copyright permission, of course).
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Question 1.3. Sci.med.aids distribution.
Sci.med.aids is distributed as a USENET newsgroup, where it has
approximately 40,000 readers. At one time USENET was carried primarily at
research and educational institutions, but that is changing; a number of
commercial services now carry USENET.
Here is a breakdown of comparable newsgroups, for the month of September
1993. You can obtain a full list of network traffic by anonymous ftp from
ftp.uu.net:/usenet/news.lists/USENET_Readership_report_for_Sep_93.Z
+-- Estimated total number of people who read the group, worldwide.
| +-- Actual number of readers in sampled population
| | +-- Propagation: how many sites receive this group at all
| | | +-- Recent traffic (messages per month)
| | | | +-- Recent traffic (kilobytes per month)
| | | | | +-- Crossposting percentage
| | | | | | +-- Cost ratio: $US/month/rdr
| | | | | | | +-- Share: % of newsrders
| | | | | | | | who read this group.
V V V V V V V V
39 110000 1700 76% 3845 6418.0 6% 0.07 3.6% soc.motss
77 96000 1420 67% 1885 3541.1 11% 0.04 3.0% alt.drugs
131 81000 1203 80% 1571 4064.6 13% 0.06 2.6% sci.med
231 65000 961 61% 1269 2863.5 6% 0.04 2.0%
alt.politics.homosexuality
558 44000 647 66% 282 760.5 38% 0.02 1.4% talk.politics.drugs
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605 41000 615 78% 383 1556.0 2% 0.05 1.3% sci.med.aids
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724 37000 545 68% 512 1053.6 12% 0.03 1.2% sci.med.nutrition
729 37000 542 77% 53 96.0 12% 0.00 1.2% sci.med.physics
880 32000 481 43% 436 1033.5 8% 0.02 1.0% alt.homosexual
1202 25000 370 41% 326 529.6 9% 0.01 0.8% alt.drugs.caffeine
1320 22000 332 21% 27 62.4 4% 0.00 0.7% alt.sex.homosexual
1343 22000 326 66% 48 89.1 7% 0.00 0.7% sci.med.occupational
1398 21000 314 35% 182 2557.2 0% 0.07 0.7% bit.listserv.gaynet
1412 21000 310 56% 145 510.1 0% 0.02 0.7% sci.med.telemedicine
1425 21000 307 59% 97 353.2 0% 0.02 0.7% sci.med.dentistry
1559 19000 276 48% 99 138.4 8% 0.01 0.6% sci.med.pharmacy
1685 17000 254 42% 235 378.1 0% 0.02 0.5% alt.med.cfs
1888 14000 213 13% 12 29.3 100% 0.00 0.5% clari.news.law.drugs
1916 14000 207 38% 5 19.7 20% 0.00 0.4% bionet.molbio.hiv
2449 3500 52 11% 55 97.5 6% 0.01 0.1% de.sci.medizin
Sci.med.aids is also distributed as electronic mail by the AIDS listserv.
Mail is not as convenient a way to read sci.med.aids as is a newgroup, but
mail is available at more sites (including Compuserve, America Online,
MCImail, ATTmail and many institutions which have Internet gateways).
In additional to these primary distributions, sci.med.aids is
redistributed by various bulletin boards and mail gateways.
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Question 1.4. Subscribing and unsubscribe to sci.med.aids.
The answer to this question depends on your system. You may have to ask
your local system administrator. Here are some guidelines valid on many
systems:
* You may have USENET on your system, especially if you run UNIX or VMS.
Here are some commands to try: "rn", "trn", "xrn", "nn", "tin". If
they work, try joining the newsgroup "sci.med.aids".
That might not work, since some sites limit the newsgroups they receive.
All is not lost: you can get sci.med.aids by e-mail.
* If USENET is not available you can get sci.med.aids by e-mail. Send a
mail message to listserv@rutvm1.rutgers.edu. The message body should
contain just the following command:
subscribe aids <yourname>
Type in your real name (not your e-mail address) instead of <yourname>.
A complete message might look like this:
To: listserv@rutvm1.rutgers.edu
Subject:
subscribe aids Joe Smith
To unsubscribe, send a message to listserv@rutvm1.rutgers.edu containing
the text
unsubscribe aids
Please unsubscribe before your account expires. The moderators get all
sorts of junk mail if you don't.
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Question 1.5. What is a moderated newsgroup?
A moderated newsgroup is one in which all postings must be approved by a
moderator before being distributed. The purpose of moderation is to
restrict what can appear. Postings which do not adhere to the guidelines
for the group will be rejected.
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Question 1.6. Editorial guidelines.
As with any newsgroup, read sci.med.aids for a few days before posting, to
see if your question has been answered already, and to get a feel for the
tone of the group.
Postings to sci.med.aids should:
* Write on topics directly relevant to AIDS, HIV, or related topics.
* Unconventional medical/research claims must be accompanied by references
to the popular press (i.e., major newspaper, magazine, etc.) or
scientific press (i.e., Science, Nature, Lancet, Scientific American,
Cell, Brain Research, etc.).
We require references for unconventional medical/research claims,
because some therapies carry with them potential danger. Some
unconventional medical/research claims are fallacious. Without this
policy, sci.med.aids would have printed several dangerous and
undocumented therapies by now.
* Political, sociological opinion/analysis articles are acceptable. The
interpretation, and even the existence, of this particular policy
continues to be the subject of internal debate among the moderators.
However, in the past we have printed articles holding both popular and
unpopular opinions on topics like "Quarantining HIV Positives" or "who
did Clinton appoint to the AIDS Task Force."
* Refrain from personally attacking other participants. For example, do
not call someone an 'idiot' or say they are 'biased'. Instead, point
out the flaws in their argument. If you find yourself getting angry at
a poster, and construct a reply, please try to remember this rule.
It is often useful to wait a day to see what other reactions have been
posted before sending something off in anger.
* Send one line "quips" as personal mail to the original submitter, rather
than posting.
* When posing a question to a previous poster, reconsider whether the
question needs to be posted. Perhaps you could ask the question by
e-mail and request a posted response.
* Do not invoke religion.
* Do not break copyright laws. Reprints of articles from other sources
must include a statement of permission to reprint. An exception is made
for abstracts of articles from scientific journals, which are not
usually restricted. If you can't get reprint permission, excerpt or
summarize the article.
* Do not construct an article with more than 20% text from a previous
article, unless it is very old (i.e., months old). The best approach
when constructing a response is to tersely summarize the article to
which you respond, in square brackets. For example,
In article <11233@sci.med.aids>;, Dan Greening wrote:
> [reasons to not include too much of a prior article]
Also, don't forget that many people get this stuff by mail, so
huge inclusions clog hundreds of mailboxes, including mine. Thanks.
* Do not duplicate something which has recently appeared.
The moderators don't always agree on what's acceptable and what's not.
If an article is rejected, you should receive a note from the moderator
saying why. These notes, and other discussions about the running of
sci.med.aids will be distributed on the aids-d mailing list (see Q1.10
`Discussing sci.med.aids moderation policies.').
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Question 1.7. How do I submit a posting?
This depends on the software you are using. On many USENET systems, you
can use the command
postnews
You can also post by sending your article as e-mail to aids@cs.ucla.edu.
Because sci.med.aids is moderated, your submission will not appear
immediately. Sometimes the delay is very short; often it may be 24 hours.
It depends on network delays and how busy the moderators are. A tickler
program reminds us of postings older than 48 hours.
IMPORTANT: Whether you use postnews or e-mail, please format your article
exactly the way you want it to appear in the newsgroup. Because our
moderation software is somewhat unpolished, editing out notes to the
moderators in a posting is quite tedious. If you must communicate
directly with the moderators, send a note to aids-request@cs.ucla.edu.
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Question 1.8. The moderators.
Three people currently moderate sci.med.aids. They are
Phil Miller Professor, Biostatistics, Washington University
Jack Hamilton Interested layperson
Dan Greening Founder sci.med.aids, Director AppWare C++, Novell
Michelle Murrain Health issues researcher, Professor, Hampshire College
Phil and Jack do most of the moderation. Dan repairs the moderation
software. Phil is probably the most liberal moderator, Dan the most
restrictive, Jack in-between. Michelle is new, so it's too early to tell.
Various individuals have been moderators in the past, including
David Dodell Founder, Grand Rounds fidonet echo, Dentist
Steve Dyer Writer, Gay Community News, Software Consultant
Alan Wexelblat Freelance writer, ethicist
Tom Lincoln Informatics Director, USC Medical Center
Craig Werner MD/PhD Student, Albert Einstein School of Medicine
Will Doherty Gay Activist, technical writer Sun Microsystems
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Question 1.9. Cooperative moderation.
Cooperative moderation seeks to limit the burn-out associated with
newsgroup moderation, by sharing the workload among several moderators.
In addition, it provides a more balanced treatment of contentious issues.
An early paper on the sci.med.aids cooperative moderation scheme is
D.R. Greening and A.D. Wexelblat, Experiences with Cooperative Moderation
of a USENET Newsgroup, Proceedings of the 1989 ACM/IEEE Workshop on
Applied Computing.
available by FTP from
cs.ucla.edu:pub/aids.paper.ps.Z
This paper is also available from the UCLA Computer Science Department as
a technical report.
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Question 1.10. Discussing sci.med.aids moderation policies.
A separate mailing list, aids-d, has been set up for the moderators and
for people who interested in how sci.med.aids is run. Most readers will
not be interested in aids-d; its purpose is internal discussion rather
than information dissemination, and most articles on aids-d are examples
of what moderation has filtered out. If you want to subscribe, send email
to aids-d-request@sti.com.
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