Hi Steemians! To improve post quality control of scientific content I made these curation owls. If you write a hard science post you will be awarded owls if you excel in the corresponding category. Check over here if you want to find out more about the criteria for each owl. In this post I want to explain in detail for what kind of content these owls are meant for, how to call the curation owls, how the tracking-bot works and also at what speed content will be reviewed/curated.

I ran into some problems because my previous bot had a dependency on the search engine of Steemistry. So I put everything on hold for a few days. My new bot has its own search engine. In addition, I can conveniently run it from my laptop.

Hard sciences and soft sciences

The hard sciences are the scientific fields which are created by using rigour, objectivity and/or empirical evidence. The natural sciences from hard to least hard are ordered as follows: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology. The soft sciences are typically social sciences. Informally, social sciences rely on a black-box approach where questionaires play the role of output. The owls are only meant for hard sciences. So don't be angry if I don't award your content with owls because of this reason.

Curation of long and short posts

I will classify hard science posts in two classes:

• short posts: these are posts with less than 600 words,
• long posts: these are posts which are not short posts. :o)

Short posts can maximally receive 1 owl. Long posts can maximally receive 6 owls. Long posts with 3 owls or more will receive an upvote.

How to call the owls

First you need to follow me. If you write a hard science post and comment this post with

        @mathowl I want to catch them all

I will put you in a queue for future curation. First time users will be given priority in the curation process. You can only use the phrase once per week otherwise you will be moved to the end of queue.

Previously, my bot would reply to the post when this phrase was used. But this creates a bit a spam so I removed the bot-reply.

If you want to know how the bot works check the Appendix of this post.

About the bot & curation speed

Since I wanted to run the code on my laptop the bot is not very thorough. Approximately every 24 hours it will check if you have written a new reply and then (maximally) scan 10 of your last replies. But I think most of us write less than 10 replies per day so it should be fine. If I overlooked your post let me know. I will typically read your post within three days. If you think I have forgotten your post just send me a message on discord or reply to one of my curation owl posts.

If you have any questions about the process let me know. And if you don't have any questions go and do some science because you gotta catch all them owls!

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Technical Appendix

I made the bot using steem-python. To learn about steem-python check over here.

I am not a python-person since it is not usefull for my mathematical work but if you have some coding experience python is not so hard. steem-python comes with a lot of pre-made modules. My module mainly relies on the site-package script Blog.py which allows you to store all post-related information in a nice dictionary. The rest is pretty straight-forward: I scan the replies of my followers, write the links of the parent of the found replies to a html file and also create and pickle a dictionary from my followers with the time when they posted their last reply. If anybody wants me to write in detail about my silly bot let me know :)