It’s all based on the median household income. I feel like that isn’t the best representation if the median household is losing purchasing power over time due to wage stagnation, but it’s the definition they went with. From the article:

The report, which crunched the numbers for all 50 states, is based on Pew Research’s definition of middle class: two-thirds to double the median household income.

Edit: Reading is hard and I misunderstood that this post is about promoting lemmy on reddit. I don’t have any experience to contribute with that, but I will leave the rest of my post for posterity.

By self-promotion, do you mean creating content for youtube/a blog/etc. and then posting it to lemmy? If so, then I think that is fine within reason. In the communities I mod, I have allow self-promotion with these guidelines:

• Be an active member of the community on other posts too, not just your own content
• If you post your own content, at least be responsive to questions you might get in the comment section
• Rate limit your self-promotion so that it doesn’t feel spammy (no defined rate, more vibes-based)

I have a couple posters that have posted article or projects that they have created and been fine. I also have a couple people I have ended up banning because they would just post links to their own content and vanish otherwise.

All that said, there is a sizable portion of lemmy that seems to chafe against any kind of corporate-controlled social media. So, there is an inbuilt hostility that can exert an outsized influence in smaller communities.

Just for some background information on how most countries tend to rely on larger, more rigorous regulatory bodies…

I am in the pharma industry (not in vaccines though). Typically the two main regulators that most other countries look to as a reference are either the FDA or the EMA (the EU organization). This usually means that if you can satisfy the requirements of one of these bodies, then it is satisfactory for the other country as well. However, it isn’t universal as each other country will usually have some modifications here and there for whatever reason. The most annoyingly particular ones I have dealt with in the past are China and Japan.

subtitle playback

This is still a little weird. I found that the web client (in a browser) handles this really well with default settings. However, if I try to use the desktop app or a mobile client, I have to force it to burn in the subtitles for them to show up reliably. Fortunately, there are per-client settings for this now:

It’s been a while since I last used LaTeX since I am in industry now, but there is definitely a learning curve. If you are talking about undergrads, then it might be too steep a challenge for most to want to take on unless they plan on pursuing academia long-term. Like others have mentioned, LaTeX is a kind of standard that you see used a lot in academic circles. Some journals also like or support things that are created through tex and will have their own templates to use.

Basically, LaTeX consists of writing in a markup language, like your screenshot, and then running that through a processor that interprets your .tex file and creates the formatted output (usually a pdf). Back in my day, TexnicCenter was the program of choice to write the actual .tex file, but some quick searching and it looks like VSCode with an appropriate extension is probably one of the best/easiest ways to do it now.

The most annoying part of tex is references. I remember being utterly confused by BibTeX when I was trying to get it to work. I am way out of date on what best practices for today might be, but I hope they have improved that process somewhat.

Seconding LaTeX as the gold standard for formatting math/science in written form. Some of my peers in grad school (physics) wrote up their assignments in it (I opted instead for massive reams of handwritten work). However, I did write up my thesis in LaTeX. My university had a LaTeX template for a thesis that took care of the boilerplate formatting, I just had to focus on the content.

I own a Prius (not a PHEV though, just a hybrid) and can corroborate that my mileage goes down significantly in the winter months. It is a combination of a couple factors in my experience.

• Needing to run the engine more to heat things up for defrosting and heating the cabin.
• Related to the above, I tend to idle a lot more in the winter while cleaning ice/snow off the car, letting it warm up, or clearing the driveway.
• Switching to winter tires (Blizzaks) negatively impacts rolling resistance compared to the LRR tires (Ecopias) I use the rest of the year.

I tend to average ~45 mpg in the summer and ~37 mpg in the winter over the past two years.

Starting a new community is an uphill slog. Some tips and observations:

• Make sure to subscribe to the community from several of the large instances so that it is federated there and people viewing the all feed can see it.
• If you haven’t yet, make sure to announce the community in !newcommunities@lemmy.world and/or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
• If you can think of some kind of recurring post series, it is a good structure to provide a steady drip of content. For latin, maybe something like a weekly post about the etymology of a modern word with a latin root?
• In general, posts with a lead image generate much more interaction than non-image, discussion posts. So, the meme-type posts can serve a role to help people discover the community.

Fantastic, thanks! I haven’t made announcements yet about the new community, but hoping to do that some time this week when I get a chance.

I haven’t been able to post as much this past week compared to normal, but things have been going ok:

• !anime@ani.social is actually kind of booming right now with the start of a new season of shows. I have seen lots of first-time commenters chiming in on episode threads. It actually hit ~300 users/day at one point over the weekend.
• !manga@ani.social has been calm but active. There are a handful of other fairly reliable posters that have been able to keep things going while I have been away.

The not as active ones:

• !nokotan@ani.social - I inherited this community when the previous moderator had to step away for an extended period of time. The nokotan community in general is very meme-heavy, and I just don’t really know how to engage with that very well. There is only so much non-meme content about the series. So, I am going to try to binge-read the manga and start posting chapter discussion threads when new chapters are released. I just need to find the time to do that.
• !gundam@ani.social - This is another kind of special case. The current, most active Gundam community is !gundam@possumpat.io. However, that instance announced that they are shutting down later this month. The current users over there were interested in setting up a new community but there wasn’t anybody that wanted to moderate. So, I offered my help in that respect. It just started this past week, so there isn’t much there yet, but I am going to try to keep posting any Gundam-related content I find over there.

You must have taken Nokotan’s loss pretty hard. /s

Good luck finding new mods and I am hoping that you are able to come back before Dan Da Dan season 2 this summer.

It also depends on the community a lot. The anime community on lemmy (!anime@ani.social, shameless plug) has been super chill overall. I think it’s in large part due to the lemmy userbase skewing older than your average social media user.

Recently, in !anime@ani.social, I configured the episode discussion bot to create posts using the poster art of the show rather than just an empty discussion post as a bit of an experiment about the effect of images. I don’t have hard analytics to dig into, but I have noticed that the episode discussion threads have garnered significantly more votes when they have images, and a small increase in comments. Though, the additional comments are usually just wandering folks instead of people that stick around and engage.

I still don’t let fanart in either the main anime nor manga community because it would too quickly spiral out of control. There is simply too much fanart in existence for these things. Instead, I limit it to official art only, which usually means teasers/posters/trailers. In the manga community, there is a bit of a special case in that I do allow fanart of a series if it was done by a different published author (not just some random pixiv user). This happens sometimes when a series ends and you get other authors drawing commemorative art for it.

I work in pharma, regularly writing and filing things with the FDA (and other agencies), and this has been a topic of conversation at work. The good news for people is that the EMA is still a thing in the EU. So, at least the large pharma companies (like the one I work for), are likely to not really change much about their quality control/processes/etc. because we will still need to conform to the EMA guidelines which are typically in line with the current FDA (sometimes more strict, sometimes less so). The real quality concern would be smaller companies that only file for products in the US. They would only need to meet whatever new FDA guidelines come into effect (if they even do, changing stuff like GMP guidance is extremely complicated and time consuming) since the US is their only market.

We celebrated a one year birthday for both !anime@ani.social and !manga@ani.social. Over the past year we have grown from nothing to being (in my biased opinion), the best place on the fediverse to discuss anime and manga. It has been a lot of work, but they are both active enough now that I can do something like go on vacation for a couple days and they will keep going in my absence (including other mods that will manage things).

I made a series of birthday-themed anime clips to celebrate. If you are interested, here they are:

• Will You Come to My Birthday Party? - Gundam Wing (post on ani.social)
• Celebrating a Birthday with Yunyun - Konosuba (post on ani.social)
• Exchanging Birthday Presents - Azumanga Daioh (post on ani.social)
• Surprise! Happy Birthday! Let’s Have Some Cake - Nichijou (post on ani.social)
• Bonus - Backup Cake - Nichijou

As somebody that mods other communities on ani.social, lemmy has a sizeable portion of its userbase that browses by All rather than by Subscribed. Lemmy also has a sizeable portion of users that are extremely hostile to anything anime or anime-adjacent (just see the lemmy.ml defederation drama from last year for example). So, random downvotes on active posts happen a lot since each new comment pushes that post to the top of the feed when sorted by Active. The important part is the engagement from your community members. One person commenting is worth >100 random up/down votes for keeping a community going.

Don’t overthink it. I bend the rules in my communities quite often. The case that happens most often is somebody posting a duplicate of a news story. However, it is usually one or more days later and the new post usually picks up some comments from new people that didn’t comment on the previous post. I often let those slide. As long as people are trying to constructively engage in the community, then I give people the benefit of the doubt.

That style does work well for presentations

I honestly prefer presentations to writing for the reasons you pointed out. I have never been too nervous when it comes to public speaking, and I feel much more able to convey my point through a more conversational style. However, my presentation style (specifically slide design) has had to change a lot over the course of my career.

When I was in grad school, my preferred method of presentation was to have a slide with a single graph/image/diagram on it and then verbally talk through all the things I wanted to convey for that slide. It allowed me tons of flexibility, kept the slides from becoming cluttered and distracting, and created a more conversational atmosphere as people felt more empowered to ask questions as I was going (this also helps keep the audience engaged).

However, as I moved into a professional setting, I had a mentor sit me down and tell me how great my presentations were, but they were not really effective in a corporate setting like this one (global company, split across timezones, etc). The simple reason being that the slides I was making were being shared to others who couldn’t make it to my presentation and a good chunk of the actual audience of the presentation only ever got to see the slides, without the benefit of my talking to help them understand. So, this has led me to move more towards including text on my slides. I basically have to ask myself if there is enough information on this slide to understand things without my explaining it, but without anything extra to make it confusing.

Since the pandemic, I have also had to change things up a bit to make presentations more amenable to presenting via Teams/Zoom. This means things like removing videos, complex animation, or any audio. It just doesn’t work reliably enough through screen sharing and if you can find a way around it, then it makes everybody’s life easier.

Speaking of tangents, this has been a long one, but I care a lot about effective communication and specifically presentations. So many people are so bad at giving a good presentation, and I find it frustrating personally, when I have to sit through so many.

I actually agree with you about math education and math texts. It is really bad at conveying understanding and my math-heavy courses were the toughest for me (E&M in grad school was awful). Too often math textbooks simply present things and leave the proof as an exercise for the reader, or they will lean too far the other way and present formal proofs for everything. Either way is not helpful for developing an intuitive understanding of what is going on.

The things that helped me develop communication skills the most were simply doing it a lot followed by having some good mentors that I found to be good communicators. My grad school advisor was great at communicating physics and one of my early bosses in industry was an excellent presenter. So, I would often bounce either writing or slides off of them for feedback.

I am guilty of writing walls of text as comments, but I try to stick to my lane. You can see my most recent wall of text about freeze dryers as an example. There are a few things that I think need to come together to create a good, high-effort post:

• Passion - If you don’t care, you aren’t going to spend the time to write about something
• Knowledge - For some topics this may be less required, but I tend to create walls of text about technical issues. I have a PhD in physics, so that gives me a pretty good foundation of knowledge to work from in this regard
• Writing Ability - You need to be able to write effectively to make a wall of text worthwhile. This is a skill that gets better the more you do it.

The other thing I tend to do when writing a high-effort post is I actually proofread it before making it. I try to cut out unneeded tangents, reword things that might be confusing, or supplement things that aren’t motivated enough.

For me personally, this doesn’t take me too long to do since I have been writing and presenting about extremely technical topics for about two decades at this point. Like I mentioned above, informative writing is a skill that gets better with practice. So, doing it regularly as a significant part of my job as well as providing feedback to others on their writing/presentations, has provided me with tons of practice to improve these things.

If you want some formal guidance on scientific writing/presentations specifically, two books I have found informative (mostly on presentations) have been:

• The Craft of Scientific Presentations by Michael Alley
• slide:ology - The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte