The important point when "incorporating research done by someone else into your own" (as BrokenHalo mentions--see, I'm citing my quotation!) is to cite (not necessarily quote) the other someone. This is how I got my A's in college and HS. Failing to do so is plagiarism.
If you use someone else's idea, you cite it ("Hey, someone else thought of this before me."). That's it. If you use someone else's words, you quote it ("Someone else said 'exactly this'.").
If you don't use someone's exact words, it makes it harder to spot and/or prove plagiarism, but it doesn't mean you can't be caught. And the brain is an amazing thing: You'd be surprised how often that clever phrase you write two or three days later, regardless of intervening beer, is a nearly exact quote.
The problem, of course, is when the student "fill[s] in a little around it" with someone else's words. My wife, a professor of English lit, just found (yesterday!) a student who had copied much of er paper from two sources, quoted some bits, and changed a word here and there (perhaps hoping it would be enough to throw off a simple Google query) outside the quotes.
The astute professor, having some familiarity with the sources, instead looked up the quoted material in Google books to verify the blatant lifting that surrounded the quotes.
Students who plagiarize don't seem to realize that for little or no more work than they put in to create a plagiarized work (that, even if graded without regard to plagiarism, is usually lousy), they can turn in something crappy but at least original. A "C" (or even a "D") on the paper beats the hell out of an "F" for the course and a permanent black mark on the transcript. They're just rolling the dice, and they don't even know the odds.
http://www.wunderground.com/ The Weather Underground! From the same campus that brought you/.! Weather and night sky (or day sky, if you could see the stars for the sun) information.
You are misconstruing my position, although probably unintentionally. So be alert--rant ahead!
<rant>
I in no way indicated that the lead vehicle is traveling at an excessively slow rate of speed, only that it is slower than I wish to go. I in no way indicated that I am tailgating, which is what really causes so many multi-car pile-ups (piles-up? like mothers-in-law?). I don't see how passing itself can be "necessary for safety"; not tailgating is what's necessary, and often passing is the best way to not tailgate! Leaving a good following distance also gives you room to accelerate to the speed of traffic in the next lane so you can change lanes, when you get the chance, with less risk of causing a pile-up in the passing lane.
I have followed huge trains of semis down the highway (in the '70s, we called them "convoys"), with none of them passing each other, yet amazingly, there wasn't a huge pile-up of semis. Is it really possible that none of them desired to go faster than the leader?
A hundred cars traveling 65 mph, each with a two-second following distance (conveniently, two seconds is just about one yard per mph), is a "train of vehicles" a bit under four miles long. Inserting a new vehicle somewhere in that train reduces two of the following distances to one second each. As these two vehicles (the new one and the one behind that) relax their speed briefly to increase to a new two-second following distance, that "bump" should smoothly propagate back to the end of the train.
The following distance is not just your reaction time! It's your reaction time plus the time to make your speed change smoothly, so it doesn't incur a slam-on-the-brakes from the vehicle behind you, etc. That's the mistake many people make. They tell themselves, "I'm paying attention and I can slow to avoid anything this guy does." But the next person, or the next, sees a chain of brake lights and reacts in a hurry. If cars are too close together, even though everyone has time to react, the braking becomes more violent, until eventually someone has to slow to a crawl (or stop), and that's one of the ways traffic jams form when there's no apparent cause.
The only way to break the cycle is to leave enough room to react slowly, with a quick tap of the break (to alert the driver behind you) and hopefully simply coasting until you can accelerate again. Sure, someone's going to pull in front of you; but they'll probably pull out again soon, if they're weaving for advantage. Give way, relax, and wait until the risk of passing is acceptably low given the time you expect to save.
</rant>
Thank you for your time.
P.s. The genesis of the sig came from personal observations on a long weekly commute down a two-lane U.S. highway through farm country that had about ten miles between towns. The road would widen to four lanes in the towns, and I could easily pass. After one or two close calls with oncoming traffic, and many instances of frustration when I simply couldn't pass for whole minutes on end, I started calculating how much time it would cost me to just staying behind the slower traffic until the next town, versus passing and going my preferred speed. I then had a basis for determining how much risk I would accept in attempting to pass. Ninety seconds? It had better be almost no risk. Twelve minutes (stuck behind a combine)? I'd take the first reasonable chance.
(I never know whether to reply to people commenting on my sig, but here goes...)
You prove my point; you did the math for your trip. I read somewhere (probably years ago) that the average highway trip was eight miles. Then, recovering math teacher that I am, I cooked the speeds so that the time came out to just under a minute.
In any case, the lesson stands: Take a few seconds to figure out how much time you'll save and see if it's worth the risk (and passing always incurs some risk). And if passing one guy just puts you behind the next one doing 65, what's the point? (LOLBuddha: "Do not want!")
At the very least, you'll help your blood pressure knowing you're only losing a minute or so if you end up stuck behind someone for a few miles.
BTW, how many 1500 mile trips do you make? If I'm going from NY to Dallas, I fly.
Maybe I'm not entirely up on the difference between macro- and micro- (Econ 101 was decades ago), but didn't Krugman just get a certain piece of bling for his work on international trade models? (I will sit corrected if that's micro.)
Funny you should mention that. My April issue of Analog arrived in the mail yesterday (January), and I'm pretty sure I've had March for about a month.
I know about lead times and all that, but I simply cannot believe that the April issue could hit bookstores more than a few days before I got mine. Perhaps I'll drop by my local megabookcoffeebagelmusicstore and see what issue is on the shelf (but not today, thanks; I'm avoiding Superbowl traffic by staying home).
The original problem came out of a long weekly "commute" on a two-lane highway that ran through a town every ten miles or so (where the road would widen, allowing easy passing). I would have to decide whether it was worth the risk and the small cost in gas to try to pass some schlub I got stuck behind (drop back to see, speed up while moving over, brake and drop back if traffic approaches too close). I always knew how far I was from the next town, so I could quickly estimate the time I would save if I could go sixty-four instead of fifty-two or whatever I was stuck doing. It did wonders for my blood pressure when I could say, hey, it'll only save me thirty-eight seconds, and I could happily sit tight.
As a recovering math teacher, I have massaged the numbers (using a distance I once read as the median highway commute) so that the savings is under one minute and the sig is under 120 characters.
What of those that want to be the bellwether? Let sheeple (iTunes users, perhaps) sign up to be trendsetters. You don't even have to pay them cash, but give them a free download after they've rated, say, ten new songs (and perhaps they get to keep the songs they've rated).
An earlier commenter mentioned that the "blog" version of this might be like slashdot moderation, but even that can show the preconception bias. I'm not sure I have a good answer for this. In real psych labs, they can track how long you look at something, how long it takes you to answer questions, or even do active MRI to look at the parts of the brain that are working hard. These things are tricky to do remotely.
We have healthcare, the most expensive in the world.
Fixed that for you.
Seriously, even for insured people, the problem of doctors accepting some insurers and not others, the amount of paperwork for filing with insurance companies, and the reduplication of work between different insurers all increase the cost; doesn't that make you ask whether there's an easier, cheaper way?
You may say you don't want your healthcare choices made for you by a bureaucracy, but if you have private insurance, it already is. When it isn't, it's going to cost you. My insurer (BCBS of FL) is usually pretty good, with a glaring exception. Locally, there's one diagnostic lab that's pretty much got a monopoly on those tests the doctors, and even some hospitals, send out (blood tests, throat swabs, biopsy samples). But BCBS feels their charges are far too high and can't come to an agreement with them on reimbursement, so simply stopped working with them a few years ago. So every time I have a blood test, I end up paying a big chunk out of pocket to someone I have no choice about. If the insurer could insist that doctors work with a lab they have a reimbursement agreement with, we'd probably all save money. But the doctor has no incentive to change, because the tests don't cost him anything. If I could find a doctor that used a lab that has a reimbursement agreement with my insurer, would I change doctors? What if that doctor doesn't accept my insurer?
Rationally, single-payer universal coverage is the cheapest insurance there can be. There's only one administrative bureaucracy, there's only one set of forms to learn, no other insurer is cherry-picking the healthiest individuals, and every service provider accepts them (or accepts no insurer, but that's another argument).
Sure, the young and healthy are subsidizing the old and unhealthy, but they'll be old too someday (or they'll stop paying in, so don't have to worry about it).
What can I say? I never said the "lazy-assed hotel owner" should set the clock. Every other hotel I've stayed in, from four-star resort to crappy highway Super 8, had the right time (give or take five minutes) on the clock in the room, whether I was there in July or January. They were all in states that observed DST.
Does that mean somebody on staff actually goes around changing all the clocks twice a year, or that guests do? I don't know. I only know I have a significant sample from DST states, and exactly one example from Indiana. Nobody had bothered to set that clock in years, while someone is setting clocks in all those other hotels at least twice a year.
That reminds me of a dinnertime conversation with my seven-year-old daughter recently. We were discussing good rules to live by, and she came up with, "Don't imitate idiots."
We all had to agree that was a darned good rule. So I guess that means none of us can run for public office.
The latest change took effect in 2007, which was passed in the Energy Policy Act of 2005; wasn't the 109th still a Republican-controlled Congress? You can also thank the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association and the National Association of Convenience Stores, who lobbied for it with their "More Corporate Welfare Now!" Republican buddies on the hill (okay, they probably also lobbied the Dems).
See, with DST, hotels have to set the clocks twice a year. This place apparently never adjusted the clocks, so after who knows how many years, it was half an hour fast. We didn't figure out that Indiana wasn't on DST until nearly 10:00pm.
Pads are not the problem when riding the brake downhill, brake fluid is. If your brake fluid boils, the brakes are useless. Using up your brake pads just reduces you to metal-on-metal braking (which still works, but it's unpleasant to listen to and requires new/resurfaced discs).
Thanks. That's basically the second paragraph I didn't add.
My point is that we have the hard-wired preference for a tribe, but since we no longer go around sniffing each other, "tribe" is defined socially. Eventually, our tribe might be all of humanity, but we may have to face alien invasion for that to happen.
Maybe we should go back to sniffing. (Did you see that one of the Ig Nobel awards went for research that found a correlation between strippers' ovulatory cycles and their tips?) It makes at least as much sense as, "My country, right or wrong!"
From what I've read in the last few years, it is in our genes to prefer our own "tribe" over the outsider. Not that I would normally recommend Dawkins, the selfish gene theory would have it that we share more of our genetic code with our tribe, so we work to perpetuate its survival over other tribes.
As a mathematician who was nearly a math/physics double major, I can second the "little brothers"; those were my texts for the first two years of physics. Plenty of vector calc necessary for those.
Slashdot Mirror
The important point when "incorporating research done by someone else into your own" (as BrokenHalo mentions--see, I'm citing my quotation!) is to cite (not necessarily quote) the other someone. This is how I got my A's in college and HS. Failing to do so is plagiarism.
If you use someone else's idea, you cite it ("Hey, someone else thought of this before me."). That's it. If you use someone else's words, you quote it ("Someone else said 'exactly this'.").
If you don't use someone's exact words, it makes it harder to spot and/or prove plagiarism, but it doesn't mean you can't be caught. And the brain is an amazing thing: You'd be surprised how often that clever phrase you write two or three days later, regardless of intervening beer, is a nearly exact quote.
The problem, of course, is when the student "fill[s] in a little around it" with someone else's words. My wife, a professor of English lit, just found (yesterday!) a student who had copied much of er paper from two sources, quoted some bits, and changed a word here and there (perhaps hoping it would be enough to throw off a simple Google query) outside the quotes.
The astute professor, having some familiarity with the sources, instead looked up the quoted material in Google books to verify the blatant lifting that surrounded the quotes.
Students who plagiarize don't seem to realize that for little or no more work than they put in to create a plagiarized work (that, even if graded without regard to plagiarism, is usually lousy), they can turn in something crappy but at least original. A "C" (or even a "D") on the paper beats the hell out of an "F" for the course and a permanent black mark on the transcript. They're just rolling the dice, and they don't even know the odds.
http://www.wunderground.com/ The Weather Underground! From the same campus that brought you /.! Weather and night sky (or day sky, if you could see the stars for the sun) information.
And highways and airports aren't subsidized? Huh. Didn't know that.
You are misconstruing my position, although probably unintentionally. So be alert--rant ahead!
<rant>
I in no way indicated that the lead vehicle is traveling at an excessively slow rate of speed, only that it is slower than I wish to go. I in no way indicated that I am tailgating, which is what really causes so many multi-car pile-ups (piles-up? like mothers-in-law?). I don't see how passing itself can be "necessary for safety"; not tailgating is what's necessary, and often passing is the best way to not tailgate! Leaving a good following distance also gives you room to accelerate to the speed of traffic in the next lane so you can change lanes, when you get the chance, with less risk of causing a pile-up in the passing lane.
I have followed huge trains of semis down the highway (in the '70s, we called them "convoys"), with none of them passing each other, yet amazingly, there wasn't a huge pile-up of semis. Is it really possible that none of them desired to go faster than the leader?
A hundred cars traveling 65 mph, each with a two-second following distance (conveniently, two seconds is just about one yard per mph), is a "train of vehicles" a bit under four miles long. Inserting a new vehicle somewhere in that train reduces two of the following distances to one second each. As these two vehicles (the new one and the one behind that) relax their speed briefly to increase to a new two-second following distance, that "bump" should smoothly propagate back to the end of the train.
The following distance is not just your reaction time! It's your reaction time plus the time to make your speed change smoothly, so it doesn't incur a slam-on-the-brakes from the vehicle behind you, etc. That's the mistake many people make. They tell themselves, "I'm paying attention and I can slow to avoid anything this guy does." But the next person, or the next, sees a chain of brake lights and reacts in a hurry. If cars are too close together, even though everyone has time to react, the braking becomes more violent, until eventually someone has to slow to a crawl (or stop), and that's one of the ways traffic jams form when there's no apparent cause.
The only way to break the cycle is to leave enough room to react slowly, with a quick tap of the break (to alert the driver behind you) and hopefully simply coasting until you can accelerate again. Sure, someone's going to pull in front of you; but they'll probably pull out again soon, if they're weaving for advantage. Give way, relax, and wait until the risk of passing is acceptably low given the time you expect to save.
</rant>
Thank you for your time.
P.s. The genesis of the sig came from personal observations on a long weekly commute down a two-lane U.S. highway through farm country that had about ten miles between towns. The road would widen to four lanes in the towns, and I could easily pass. After one or two close calls with oncoming traffic, and many instances of frustration when I simply couldn't pass for whole minutes on end, I started calculating how much time it would cost me to just staying behind the slower traffic until the next town, versus passing and going my preferred speed. I then had a basis for determining how much risk I would accept in attempting to pass. Ninety seconds? It had better be almost no risk. Twelve minutes (stuck behind a combine)? I'd take the first reasonable chance.
(I never know whether to reply to people commenting on my sig, but here goes...)
You prove my point; you did the math for your trip. I read somewhere (probably years ago) that the average highway trip was eight miles. Then, recovering math teacher that I am, I cooked the speeds so that the time came out to just under a minute.
In any case, the lesson stands: Take a few seconds to figure out how much time you'll save and see if it's worth the risk (and passing always incurs some risk). And if passing one guy just puts you behind the next one doing 65, what's the point? (LOLBuddha: "Do not want!")
At the very least, you'll help your blood pressure knowing you're only losing a minute or so if you end up stuck behind someone for a few miles.
BTW, how many 1500 mile trips do you make? If I'm going from NY to Dallas, I fly.
"We distort, you deride."
Maybe I'm not entirely up on the difference between macro- and micro- (Econ 101 was decades ago), but didn't Krugman just get a certain piece of bling for his work on international trade models? (I will sit corrected if that's micro.)
Funny you should mention that. My April issue of Analog arrived in the mail yesterday (January), and I'm pretty sure I've had March for about a month.
I know about lead times and all that, but I simply cannot believe that the April issue could hit bookstores more than a few days before I got mine. Perhaps I'll drop by my local megabookcoffeebagelmusicstore and see what issue is on the shelf (but not today, thanks; I'm avoiding Superbowl traffic by staying home).
Then you're doing the math.
The original problem came out of a long weekly "commute" on a two-lane highway that ran through a town every ten miles or so (where the road would widen, allowing easy passing). I would have to decide whether it was worth the risk and the small cost in gas to try to pass some schlub I got stuck behind (drop back to see, speed up while moving over, brake and drop back if traffic approaches too close). I always knew how far I was from the next town, so I could quickly estimate the time I would save if I could go sixty-four instead of fifty-two or whatever I was stuck doing. It did wonders for my blood pressure when I could say, hey, it'll only save me thirty-eight seconds, and I could happily sit tight.
As a recovering math teacher, I have massaged the numbers (using a distance I once read as the median highway commute) so that the savings is under one minute and the sig is under 120 characters.
Thank you for playing.
(8/65 - 8/90) * 3600 = 123.077, not 155. You have to go 100mph to save 155 seconds.
What of those that want to be the bellwether? Let sheeple (iTunes users, perhaps) sign up to be trendsetters. You don't even have to pay them cash, but give them a free download after they've rated, say, ten new songs (and perhaps they get to keep the songs they've rated).
An earlier commenter mentioned that the "blog" version of this might be like slashdot moderation, but even that can show the preconception bias. I'm not sure I have a good answer for this. In real psych labs, they can track how long you look at something, how long it takes you to answer questions, or even do active MRI to look at the parts of the brain that are working hard. These things are tricky to do remotely.
charm and strange...
We have healthcare, the most expensive in the world.
Fixed that for you.
Seriously, even for insured people, the problem of doctors accepting some insurers and not others, the amount of paperwork for filing with insurance companies, and the reduplication of work between different insurers all increase the cost; doesn't that make you ask whether there's an easier, cheaper way?
You may say you don't want your healthcare choices made for you by a bureaucracy, but if you have private insurance, it already is. When it isn't, it's going to cost you. My insurer (BCBS of FL) is usually pretty good, with a glaring exception. Locally, there's one diagnostic lab that's pretty much got a monopoly on those tests the doctors, and even some hospitals, send out (blood tests, throat swabs, biopsy samples). But BCBS feels their charges are far too high and can't come to an agreement with them on reimbursement, so simply stopped working with them a few years ago. So every time I have a blood test, I end up paying a big chunk out of pocket to someone I have no choice about. If the insurer could insist that doctors work with a lab they have a reimbursement agreement with, we'd probably all save money. But the doctor has no incentive to change, because the tests don't cost him anything. If I could find a doctor that used a lab that has a reimbursement agreement with my insurer, would I change doctors? What if that doctor doesn't accept my insurer?
Rationally, single-payer universal coverage is the cheapest insurance there can be. There's only one administrative bureaucracy, there's only one set of forms to learn, no other insurer is cherry-picking the healthiest individuals, and every service provider accepts them (or accepts no insurer, but that's another argument).
Sure, the young and healthy are subsidizing the old and unhealthy, but they'll be old too someday (or they'll stop paying in, so don't have to worry about it).
Joke? No, thanks...
Well, perfesser, what the frell's the chord?
I did hear one report of a R vote flipping to D. It seems to have been a hoax.
And here and here are links to several stories of votes switching from D to R.
What can I say? I never said the "lazy-assed hotel owner" should set the clock. Every other hotel I've stayed in, from four-star resort to crappy highway Super 8, had the right time (give or take five minutes) on the clock in the room, whether I was there in July or January. They were all in states that observed DST.
Does that mean somebody on staff actually goes around changing all the clocks twice a year, or that guests do? I don't know. I only know I have a significant sample from DST states, and exactly one example from Indiana. Nobody had bothered to set that clock in years, while someone is setting clocks in all those other hotels at least twice a year.
That reminds me of a dinnertime conversation with my seven-year-old daughter recently. We were discussing good rules to live by, and she came up with, "Don't imitate idiots."
We all had to agree that was a darned good rule. So I guess that means none of us can run for public office.
The latest change took effect in 2007, which was passed in the Energy Policy Act of 2005; wasn't the 109th still a Republican-controlled Congress? You can also thank the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association and the National Association of Convenience Stores, who lobbied for it with their "More Corporate Welfare Now!" Republican buddies on the hill (okay, they probably also lobbied the Dems).
Oh, and DST pisses me off, too.
The first time I went to Indiana, Notre Dame put my (at the time) fiancée and me up in a real hotel, and it was February (so they were on the same time as Michigan, where we lived). The second time I went to Indiana was when we were apartment-hunting in July. When we got to the motel, I thought it was about 11:30am. The clock in the room said 11:00. The waitress at the diner across the street gave us breakfast menus, which surprised us a bit.
See, with DST, hotels have to set the clocks twice a year. This place apparently never adjusted the clocks, so after who knows how many years, it was half an hour fast. We didn't figure out that Indiana wasn't on DST until nearly 10:00pm.
Pads are not the problem when riding the brake downhill, brake fluid is. If your brake fluid boils, the brakes are useless. Using up your brake pads just reduces you to metal-on-metal braking (which still works, but it's unpleasant to listen to and requires new/resurfaced discs).
Thanks. That's basically the second paragraph I didn't add.
My point is that we have the hard-wired preference for a tribe, but since we no longer go around sniffing each other, "tribe" is defined socially. Eventually, our tribe might be all of humanity, but we may have to face alien invasion for that to happen.
Maybe we should go back to sniffing. (Did you see that one of the Ig Nobel awards went for research that found a correlation between strippers' ovulatory cycles and their tips?) It makes at least as much sense as, "My country, right or wrong!"
From what I've read in the last few years, it is in our genes to prefer our own "tribe" over the outsider. Not that I would normally recommend Dawkins, the selfish gene theory would have it that we share more of our genetic code with our tribe, so we work to perpetuate its survival over other tribes.
As a mathematician who was nearly a math/physics double major, I can second the "little brothers"; those were my texts for the first two years of physics. Plenty of vector calc necessary for those.