Well, there are mitigating factors, no? Since it's spent a lot of the past few decades with a pole aimed at the Sun, one hemisphere was getting baked decently. Plus, there are no surface features to slow the winds down. Now that the other hemisphere is getting light for the first time in a while, it's also not surprising that disturbances are getting kicked up. On the original hand, Uranus does not have the source of internal heat that the other three giants have. (Well, source*s* most likely.)
Holy too much sig. fig., Batman! None of the Great Red Spot,the Great Dark Spot, and the Great White Spot are at 19.5 degrees south latitude on their respective planets. Their latitudes vary around 20 degrees south, but 19.5 is putting way too much precision on it. (If Hoagland insists on being that precise, then you have to accept that the numbers disagree with the data.) Plus, the Great Dark Spot disappeared a while ago. How does that fit in with the theories? And how does he base his prediction on the existence of Sunspots at 19.5 degrees latitude (they exist everywhere up to ~ +/-30 degrees on the Sun) and the "great dark spot" of Uranus which didn't even exist when he claimed to be basing his predictions off of it. (Voyager looked. The planet was basically featureless at that time.)
Really, if you want to go looking at around 19.5 degrees latitude (north or south, which is it?), you're going to find stuff. Especially when you go looking for storms which tend to form in the tropics and when you consider that the majority of the area of the planet lies between + and - 30 degrees latitude.
Hoagland is a crackpot, pure and simple. I invite anyone to go to his site and read his stuff, you'll quickly see what I mean. (He thinks that Iapateus is a dodecaheadron and will split apart, for example.) But he does do fascinating things with Photoshop.
And Intelligent Design makes "predictions", too. When they don't agree with the data, they either ignore the data (string theory has done this with the predicted value of the cosmological constant) or they tweak the many tunable parameters to make the theory work and claim that it's always worked fine. The problem with a theory with that much freedom is that it's a useless fit to the data. It's akin to fitting a linear data set with a 50th order polynomial. You can do it and the residuals will look great, but it's still useless to you.
Roman history is a personal interest and I've been thinking the same thing for some time. There are a lot of parallels to the fall of the Republic beyond even those: gradual erosion of the rules governing those in power, use of mobs to throw politics around (in the US the mobs are groups like Focus on the Family, so they're less violent but the principle is the same), and a government that can easily be bought by special interests all come to mind. Happily, at the moment we aren't suppressing individuals' abilities to stand above their peers in government, a pattern that all but forced Caesar into his radical behavior. So there is at least that.
Overall, it's true that there are also similarities to the fall of the Roman Empire, although I think that there are fewer there. There are also a lot of parallels to the fall of Athens earlier. This isn't surprising because history doesn't repeat itself. History plays variations on the same set of themes. If we're smart, we learn the themes and find ways to break out of the patterns and control them rather than be controlled. I'm not sure we're smart, though.
b) This sounds supeciously like a troll, really. But I'll bite: passing off someone else's work as your own sounds an awful lot like "fraud". Unless the person to whom you're submitting the work is OK with that, it's not OK. And that is *not* the basis for a free capitalistic economy. Whoever told you that was full of it. A decent, stable capitalistic economy requires a measure of trust. You'll notice our very capitalistic society has a lot of laws in that regard.
c) Terminology is a red herring, here. But either way, passing off someone else's work is plagarism under many definitions whether or not you have permission. (Under others it has to be stolen, granted.) No matter what, it's cheating and any arguement that's centered on protecting people's rights to do it are obviously on very shakey ground.
And you can't compare ghost-written texts with plagarism. In the former case, the buyer (the publisher) knows that the book is ghost-written. You'll note that fruad amoung authors has result in losses of contracts and/or civil lawsuits in a few recent cases. (At least one involves plagarism, although in the full-blown theft sense of the word.) So you might want to rethink the "well, it's OK in the literary world" argument in general.
b) You're ignoring fair use, among other things. That is, in fact, what turnitin.com argues makes it legal to use the papers in the manner that they do. And at that point, it's up to the plaintiffs to prove that they're being harmed by this activity and/or that this isn't fair use. It's not a clear-cut case by any means, I've seen legal experts come down on both sides of the matter. As such, you might want to consider that the other view-point isn't without merit, even if you disagree.
c) No, I don't get to decide. But neither do you, fortunately. My *opinion*, however, is every bit as valid as yours.
As for selling off your paper, it could be argued that to pass off a submission as your own work is fraud. As such, protecting your right to sell your work to someone else to do that is not something that the law has any real need to be doing. Try again.
a) YOu're right and I've already addressed that in the other 10 replies that said the same thing.
b) You're asserting your conclusion, not arguing for it. As such, I find this pretty unconvincing.
c) This is clearly a straw-man argument. There's a world of difference between a 10-foot wall in my front yard (which does real harm) and submitting my work to an anti-plagarism website (which cases no inherent harm to the student). I assume you're able to see that for yourself.
"If the goal is to get me to learn something new, then why even set a paper that could partly reuse something i've written before."
Why ask problems that are knock-offs of problems that have been worked for decades in engineering texts? Any assignment you give runs a real risk (to a varying extent) of being similar to something someone, somewhere, at some time has put forth. By your logic, we should just chuck the whole thing and give up.
The reason we assign papers is because they're great learning tools and great ways to see what the students understand. You absolutely run the risk of cheating, but that's the point of sites like turnitin.com.
You're right, I apologize. Aparently, my alma mater made that unclearly, probably itentionally to get us to fork over more money to submit our theses. I shouldn't be surprised, I guess.
I'm pretty sure that you, and everyone else, would agree that those are examples of new work, not re-using papers. I doubt that a 1-page paper fleshed out into a 15-page paper would trigger a lot of alarms provided you didn't copy and paste the original paper into parts of the later one.
And if you have permission, then there's no worry, is there? Even if the later work has a lot of flags against it, the prof knows why.
a) How many students actually copyright their papers? You have to actually apply for that and it requires a fee.
b) The students can still sell their own work if they chose (except that this blocks use for cheating, which I doubt any court will seek to protect). Having the paper in TurnItIn.com will not prevent that. There's a very real argument to be made that music-swapping *does* reduce sales (although probably not as a loss for every copy of every song). That's one of the key differences here: copyright law is usually about someone losing money due to the violation.
c) In any case, TurnItIn.com is in many respects protecting the students' work. By ensuring that no one else turns in that same paper, it helps guarantee the uniqueness of the work and protects the integrity of the work. Even if you don't think that that cancels out the IP violation, that must surely be considered in the debate.
How on earth is English Lit. different in any of those regards? You're showing that you either understand the material or you don't. Any decent professor can grade for that.
And re-using papers is generally explicitly forbidden. The goal is to get you to learn something new, not to turn in the same work over and over again. Otherwise, you're wasting your education and your professor's time both.
Employers *do* have to turn over aggregate statistics about you to the Feds. (At least my employer has to.) You don't get a choice in the matter, it's required.
Actually, a lot of cheating comes from paper mills and using old papers (yours or others'), not Wikipedia. (He says, having taught that the college level recently.) So keeping the papers is a very smart thing to do. I think that legally, TurnItIn.com and other such sites are probably OK in doing that as long as the papers are not accessible except by their comparisons to new submissions *and* they take good steps to make sure that the database isn't cracked. In many ways, it's akin to the difference between the Census Bureau publishing aggregate statistics that include you in them (even very personal data, like sex-related information) and actually publishing your census form.
You might have unusually long legs for your height. It certainly happens. My brother, who is 5'8" like I am, drives cars with the same seat position as our 6'1" father. His hips are definitely several inches above mine.
Um, there has been an Accord Hybrid for years now. So making a blanket statement that you or Arnold are too big for hybrids must, but definition, include the Accord. If not, then you shouldn't have spoken in the first place.
My friends would certainly have complained if they had felt cramped. Hell, some of them drive the same basic model cars, only the non-hybrid one. Frankly, you're the first person I've ever heard of complain that a Civic or an Accord is too small for a 6' tall person. In fact, I'd be shocked if that were a wide-spread problem, since there are plenty of people who top 6' and losing families with one of them would slice out a fair chunk of the market. The car-makers aren't that stupid, not where their profits are concerned.
Does Arnold have anything to do with the suit? Since the Attorney General is elected separately for most (all?) states, there is generally less of a chain of command there than at the Federal level.
As for hybrids, why exactly are hybrids thought to be small? There are hybrid models of many standard cars, quite a few of which are not at all tiny. So unless you're really large, claiming that you're too big for a hybrid seems sort of unbelievable. And Arnold is only 6'2". I've had people that tall in my Civic hybrid before.
Statistically speak, it looks to me as if the random error due to the sample size is around 3% per group of students. So it's difficult to say, statistically speaking, whether there is any real variation in the populations. On top of that, you have the possibility of lying about cheating which could introduce systematic biases, although there are ways of controlling for those.
This is actually a bit shocking to me, as a relatively-recent graduate of a doctoral program in a physical science. I can honestly say that I know of no cases of cheating that occurred in my department, so I'm surprised to see that the average is around 50%.
To be fair, the Federal Government doesn't *want* to be convinced. At least, not with this Administration in power. (Note that it did seem pretty convinced back when Clinton and Gore ran the show. Funny, that.) This lot has a very clear adgenda regarding fossil fuels and anthropogenic global warming hurts their interests, both politcal and personal fiscal. So I don't think you can draw any reasonable conclusions about how strong the case for or against man-made global is by what the Government currently believes (or claims to).
On the other hand, judges are generally a lot more reasonable in the face of a sensible argument. But convincing the judge that humans are responsible for global warming isn't the trick. Convicing her that the automakers are responsible (and not, say, the people driving the cars) is the real hurdle. And that's also why this suit is so inane: it implicitly tries to shift the blame for global warming to Big Scary Corporations and away from us as individuals. Heavan knows we can't go taking reasponsibility for our own actions.
There are no authorities in science, only experts. (Sagan's own words.) Sagan was, at best, passing himself off as an expert. Considering that he did seminal research in planetary atmospheres, I think he's justified in doing so. Experts can be wrong and Sagan owned up to his mistake. What's your gripe, then?
So what are your credentials to speak out on this issue? Since you're demanding that people need them to open their mouths, I think you'd be the first to play by those rules.
Uh, Sagan's field was planetary atmospheres. Earth is a planet and this was about its atmosphere.
Now, admittedly the prediction was probably based on a very quick analysis of the situation, not a more careful, detailed one. Under those circumstances, the fact that he was wrong proves little about Sagan, Singer, or anyone else involved. The fact that Sagan owns up to having made been wrong, however, shows that he was a very good model of what a scientist should be. I wish more of us were as open about mistakes as he was.
Ironically, Singer is one of the better-credentialed global-warming deniers. Go figure.
I think that eventually they'll just be placed in the "minor planet" class. Ceres was already moved there 150 years ago, after all.
You might be right that rephrasing the debate would have make it less charged, at least for the public. Professional astronomers would, I think, have been less interested in the precise wording, except to the extent that we're influenced by public opinion. (And there is some of that to be sure.) I think that the planetary community is aware that the debate is really "what kind of planet is Pluto?" but we're just inclinded to argue no matter what. (Hey, scientists are people to!)
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Well, there are mitigating factors, no? Since it's spent a lot of the past few decades with a pole aimed at the Sun, one hemisphere was getting baked decently. Plus, there are no surface features to slow the winds down. Now that the other hemisphere is getting light for the first time in a while, it's also not surprising that disturbances are getting kicked up. On the original hand, Uranus does not have the source of internal heat that the other three giants have. (Well, source*s* most likely.)
Holy too much sig. fig., Batman! None of the Great Red Spot,the Great Dark Spot, and the Great White Spot are at 19.5 degrees south latitude on their respective planets. Their latitudes vary around 20 degrees south, but 19.5 is putting way too much precision on it. (If Hoagland insists on being that precise, then you have to accept that the numbers disagree with the data.) Plus, the Great Dark Spot disappeared a while ago. How does that fit in with the theories? And how does he base his prediction on the existence of Sunspots at 19.5 degrees latitude (they exist everywhere up to ~ +/-30 degrees on the Sun) and the "great dark spot" of Uranus which didn't even exist when he claimed to be basing his predictions off of it. (Voyager looked. The planet was basically featureless at that time.)
Really, if you want to go looking at around 19.5 degrees latitude (north or south, which is it?), you're going to find stuff. Especially when you go looking for storms which tend to form in the tropics and when you consider that the majority of the area of the planet lies between + and - 30 degrees latitude.
Hoagland is a crackpot, pure and simple. I invite anyone to go to his site and read his stuff, you'll quickly see what I mean. (He thinks that Iapateus is a dodecaheadron and will split apart, for example.) But he does do fascinating things with Photoshop.
And Intelligent Design makes "predictions", too. When they don't agree with the data, they either ignore the data (string theory has done this with the predicted value of the cosmological constant) or they tweak the many tunable parameters to make the theory work and claim that it's always worked fine. The problem with a theory with that much freedom is that it's a useless fit to the data. It's akin to fitting a linear data set with a 50th order polynomial. You can do it and the residuals will look great, but it's still useless to you.
Roman history is a personal interest and I've been thinking the same thing for some time. There are a lot of parallels to the fall of the Republic beyond even those: gradual erosion of the rules governing those in power, use of mobs to throw politics around (in the US the mobs are groups like Focus on the Family, so they're less violent but the principle is the same), and a government that can easily be bought by special interests all come to mind. Happily, at the moment we aren't suppressing individuals' abilities to stand above their peers in government, a pattern that all but forced Caesar into his radical behavior. So there is at least that.
Overall, it's true that there are also similarities to the fall of the Roman Empire, although I think that there are fewer there. There are also a lot of parallels to the fall of Athens earlier. This isn't surprising because history doesn't repeat itself. History plays variations on the same set of themes. If we're smart, we learn the themes and find ways to break out of the patterns and control them rather than be controlled. I'm not sure we're smart, though.
b) This sounds supeciously like a troll, really. But I'll bite: passing off someone else's work as your own sounds an awful lot like "fraud". Unless the person to whom you're submitting the work is OK with that, it's not OK. And that is *not* the basis for a free capitalistic economy. Whoever told you that was full of it. A decent, stable capitalistic economy requires a measure of trust. You'll notice our very capitalistic society has a lot of laws in that regard.
c) Terminology is a red herring, here. But either way, passing off someone else's work is plagarism under many definitions whether or not you have permission. (Under others it has to be stolen, granted.) No matter what, it's cheating and any arguement that's centered on protecting people's rights to do it are obviously on very shakey ground.
And you can't compare ghost-written texts with plagarism. In the former case, the buyer (the publisher) knows that the book is ghost-written. You'll note that fruad amoung authors has result in losses of contracts and/or civil lawsuits in a few recent cases. (At least one involves plagarism, although in the full-blown theft sense of the word.) So you might want to rethink the "well, it's OK in the literary world" argument in general.
True, true. Although your pricier paper mills custom-write the paper for you. If you're going to cheat, go for quality cheating, I say.
b) You're ignoring fair use, among other things. That is, in fact, what turnitin.com argues makes it legal to use the papers in the manner that they do. And at that point, it's up to the plaintiffs to prove that they're being harmed by this activity and/or that this isn't fair use. It's not a clear-cut case by any means, I've seen legal experts come down on both sides of the matter. As such, you might want to consider that the other view-point isn't without merit, even if you disagree.
c) No, I don't get to decide. But neither do you, fortunately. My *opinion*, however, is every bit as valid as yours.
As for selling off your paper, it could be argued that to pass off a submission as your own work is fraud. As such, protecting your right to sell your work to someone else to do that is not something that the law has any real need to be doing. Try again.
a) YOu're right and I've already addressed that in the other 10 replies that said the same thing.
b) You're asserting your conclusion, not arguing for it. As such, I find this pretty unconvincing.
c) This is clearly a straw-man argument. There's a world of difference between a 10-foot wall in my front yard (which does real harm) and submitting my work to an anti-plagarism website (which cases no inherent harm to the student). I assume you're able to see that for yourself.
"If the goal is to get me to learn something new, then why even set a paper that could partly reuse something i've written before."
Why ask problems that are knock-offs of problems that have been worked for decades in engineering texts? Any assignment you give runs a real risk (to a varying extent) of being similar to something someone, somewhere, at some time has put forth. By your logic, we should just chuck the whole thing and give up.
The reason we assign papers is because they're great learning tools and great ways to see what the students understand. You absolutely run the risk of cheating, but that's the point of sites like turnitin.com.
You're right, I apologize. Aparently, my alma mater made that unclearly, probably itentionally to get us to fork over more money to submit our theses. I shouldn't be surprised, I guess.
I'm pretty sure that you, and everyone else, would agree that those are examples of new work, not re-using papers. I doubt that a 1-page paper fleshed out into a 15-page paper would trigger a lot of alarms provided you didn't copy and paste the original paper into parts of the later one.
And if you have permission, then there's no worry, is there? Even if the later work has a lot of flags against it, the prof knows why.
a) How many students actually copyright their papers? You have to actually apply for that and it requires a fee.
b) The students can still sell their own work if they chose (except that this blocks use for cheating, which I doubt any court will seek to protect). Having the paper in TurnItIn.com will not prevent that. There's a very real argument to be made that music-swapping *does* reduce sales (although probably not as a loss for every copy of every song). That's one of the key differences here: copyright law is usually about someone losing money due to the violation.
c) In any case, TurnItIn.com is in many respects protecting the students' work. By ensuring that no one else turns in that same paper, it helps guarantee the uniqueness of the work and protects the integrity of the work. Even if you don't think that that cancels out the IP violation, that must surely be considered in the debate.
How on earth is English Lit. different in any of those regards? You're showing that you either understand the material or you don't. Any decent professor can grade for that.
And re-using papers is generally explicitly forbidden. The goal is to get you to learn something new, not to turn in the same work over and over again. Otherwise, you're wasting your education and your professor's time both.
Employers *do* have to turn over aggregate statistics about you to the Feds. (At least my employer has to.) You don't get a choice in the matter, it's required.
Since when did kids start getting copyrights on papers?
Actually, a lot of cheating comes from paper mills and using old papers (yours or others'), not Wikipedia. (He says, having taught that the college level recently.) So keeping the papers is a very smart thing to do. I think that legally, TurnItIn.com and other such sites are probably OK in doing that as long as the papers are not accessible except by their comparisons to new submissions *and* they take good steps to make sure that the database isn't cracked. In many ways, it's akin to the difference between the Census Bureau publishing aggregate statistics that include you in them (even very personal data, like sex-related information) and actually publishing your census form.
You might have unusually long legs for your height. It certainly happens. My brother, who is 5'8" like I am, drives cars with the same seat position as our 6'1" father. His hips are definitely several inches above mine.
Um, there has been an Accord Hybrid for years now. So making a blanket statement that you or Arnold are too big for hybrids must, but definition, include the Accord. If not, then you shouldn't have spoken in the first place.
My friends would certainly have complained if they had felt cramped. Hell, some of them drive the same basic model cars, only the non-hybrid one. Frankly, you're the first person I've ever heard of complain that a Civic or an Accord is too small for a 6' tall person. In fact, I'd be shocked if that were a wide-spread problem, since there are plenty of people who top 6' and losing families with one of them would slice out a fair chunk of the market. The car-makers aren't that stupid, not where their profits are concerned.
Does Arnold have anything to do with the suit? Since the Attorney General is elected separately for most (all?) states, there is generally less of a chain of command there than at the Federal level.
As for hybrids, why exactly are hybrids thought to be small? There are hybrid models of many standard cars, quite a few of which are not at all tiny. So unless you're really large, claiming that you're too big for a hybrid seems sort of unbelievable. And Arnold is only 6'2". I've had people that tall in my Civic hybrid before.
Statistically speak, it looks to me as if the random error due to the sample size is around 3% per group of students. So it's difficult to say, statistically speaking, whether there is any real variation in the populations. On top of that, you have the possibility of lying about cheating which could introduce systematic biases, although there are ways of controlling for those.
This is actually a bit shocking to me, as a relatively-recent graduate of a doctoral program in a physical science. I can honestly say that I know of no cases of cheating that occurred in my department, so I'm surprised to see that the average is around 50%.
To be fair, the Federal Government doesn't *want* to be convinced. At least, not with this Administration in power. (Note that it did seem pretty convinced back when Clinton and Gore ran the show. Funny, that.) This lot has a very clear adgenda regarding fossil fuels and anthropogenic global warming hurts their interests, both politcal and personal fiscal. So I don't think you can draw any reasonable conclusions about how strong the case for or against man-made global is by what the Government currently believes (or claims to).
On the other hand, judges are generally a lot more reasonable in the face of a sensible argument. But convincing the judge that humans are responsible for global warming isn't the trick. Convicing her that the automakers are responsible (and not, say, the people driving the cars) is the real hurdle. And that's also why this suit is so inane: it implicitly tries to shift the blame for global warming to Big Scary Corporations and away from us as individuals. Heavan knows we can't go taking reasponsibility for our own actions.
There are no authorities in science, only experts. (Sagan's own words.) Sagan was, at best, passing himself off as an expert. Considering that he did seminal research in planetary atmospheres, I think he's justified in doing so. Experts can be wrong and Sagan owned up to his mistake. What's your gripe, then?
So what are your credentials to speak out on this issue? Since you're demanding that people need them to open their mouths, I think you'd be the first to play by those rules.
Uh, Sagan's field was planetary atmospheres. Earth is a planet and this was about its atmosphere.
Now, admittedly the prediction was probably based on a very quick analysis of the situation, not a more careful, detailed one. Under those circumstances, the fact that he was wrong proves little about Sagan, Singer, or anyone else involved. The fact that Sagan owns up to having made been wrong, however, shows that he was a very good model of what a scientist should be. I wish more of us were as open about mistakes as he was.
Ironically, Singer is one of the better-credentialed global-warming deniers. Go figure.
I think that eventually they'll just be placed in the "minor planet" class. Ceres was already moved there 150 years ago, after all.
You might be right that rephrasing the debate would have make it less charged, at least for the public. Professional astronomers would, I think, have been less interested in the precise wording, except to the extent that we're influenced by public opinion. (And there is some of that to be sure.) I think that the planetary community is aware that the debate is really "what kind of planet is Pluto?" but we're just inclinded to argue no matter what. (Hey, scientists are people to!)