Off the top of my head, I can think of three cases where self-plagiarism is a problem: 1) a researcher publishes the same work several times, inflating his publication record; 2) the researcher transferred the copyright to the original journal, so by self-plagiarizing he is violating copyright; 3) a student turns in the same paper for more than one class, getting double credit for the same work.
If the student writes a paper for a class, and then submits the work to Wikipedia at the same time as she submits it in class, I see nothing wrong with that except for the burden of proving that it wasn't plagiarized. If she wrote the article for Wikipedia a long time ago, then that might be questionable...most teachers want students to write papers in the context of the current class, I think.
In any case, any student who does this without checking with the teacher is asking for trouble; some teachers/professors can be very touchy about the Net, particularly if they don't understand it very well. At the least, the student had better be sure that she makes all her edits while logged in, so that she can prove her authorship later.
This is a shame; I was just thinking the other day that such a feature would be useful, and here they go.
They should consider doing one of two things: 1) Keep the Profiles option, but charge a fee for it to recoup whatever added expense exists. Make it cheaper than getting two separate accounts, but not quite as expensive. 2) Give a small discount when you have more than one account set up to the same address.
I suggest one take advantage of the student pricing for Mathematica
That works if you're a student.:) When I was a student I had ready access to it anyway; it was only when I left school that the problem developed. (I did own a student copy of Mathematica in graduate school, but I got a new laptop subsequently and didn't try to change over the license as it wasn't legitimate anymore.)
A word of warning about Mathematica, Matlab, Maple, etc: they're great when you're a student, but should you find yourself between jobs (e.g. teaching part-time while applying for tenure-track positions) for very long, you may be cut off and you won't know what to do. (Speaking from experience here.) This might not matter to an experimentalist who can't do research outside of a lab anyway, but for a theorist like myself it has been crucial that I be able to use open-source software (and therefore know how to do numerical integration, gradient searches, etc) so that I can maintain a research program, keep publishing, and not drop off the map professionally.
You're saying "this statement is ridiculous, because that would make Obama inconsistent" No, I'm saying that it would make for some awkward moments at dinner. It is also a strong piece of counterevidence, though by no means conclusive.
So if we were to follow your reasoning we would have to say that Hitler couldn't have been very much against Jews since his children were taught, with Hitler's knowledge, by one. He also constantly listened to Jewish music. So he couldn't possibly have been a racist, right ?
There is a commonly accepted difference between the love one has for one's mother, and the fondness one has for a type of music, or for the affection one might have for one's children's tutor. (I know nothing of this; did Hitler hang out with this tutor at all? Again, that must have made for some awkwardness.) If Hitler's mother were Jewish, and if he had a close relationship with her (necessary because maternal abandonment might actually trigger this level of hatred), then you'd have a point.
Obama, for example, wants to lower everyone's income by massively taxing it This is an old saw about Democrats. Prove it.
I'm not saying Obama's the new Hitler. Now don't be shy; the level of racism you are accusing Obama of is very close to that of a Hitler. You just threw that disclaimer in so that people wouldn't accuse you of Godwining the thread.
I'll come flat out and say it: I think you have a hard time accepting the possibility that a politician might be popular without being evil, and so you have developed a paranoid fantasy about Obama. That's my opinion. I can't prove it, short of voting for the fellow and seeing which of us is right. I have no qualms about doing so.
I'd like to make the point that physics majors are going to come in with VASTLY different levels of programming skill-- much more variation than in mathematical background. Some will have never programmed at all, while others may have programmed professionally. Any requirements you set up should take this into account: a placement exam of some sort is what I have in mind, although it could be relatively simple: "Have you programmed before? Do you know what a loop is?" etc. Even the simplest programming skills would be enough for students to get started, but you want to filter out those with ZERO aptitude so you can get them started before they actually need it (or before they've enrolled in a computational physics course
I am a physicist, and I learned how to program in BASIC when I was 8 or so. I took a class in Pascal my freshman year in college, and from there I learned what programming I needed as I went along: Mathematica as an undergrad thesis student, C as a graduate student, and C++ recently. It was possible to pick it up as I went along, given my background... but on the other hand, I was a third-year graduate student (doing hydrodynamics simulations for a professor who knew very little about computation) before I heard the words "Runge-Kutta" or discovered the inherent flaws in forward-Euler integration, so in retrospect a computational physics class would have been very useful indeed!
He listened to "white people are the devil" for 17 YEARS, while being raised by his white mother. Must have been some awkward Thanksgivings at that house....
But let's take a look at races, without prejudice : -> Race A votes 91-9 for the candidate of the same race (and 25% admit that they only did soe because of race) -> Race B votes 58-42 for the candidate of the same race (and only 2 guys admitted it had something to do with race)
Sure, their support is racially motivated, even racist by some standards (racism is a terribly ambiguous word, meaning everything from "pride in one's race" to "discomfort with strangers" to "desiring the extinction of another race".) But I for one can't blame them for it: it's no more wrong than Arkansans voting for Clinton because she lived there for a while, or for military families voting for McCain because he is a veteran. One would hope that voters would take their responsibility more seriously than that, but people are always going to have some sympathy for "one of their own" becoming President.
Well then, what's so wrong about white voters refusing to vote for Obama because he's black? Frankly, I can't help but be sympathetic with those white voters who say they are afraid of black retaliation: the proper response to them isn't "you are a horrible racist!" but "how can we alleviate those fears?" But there is a distinction between voting FOR someone vs. voting AGAINST someone. To take a less controversial example, saying "I am proud to be a Texan!" is less likely to offend anyone than saying "I'd hate to be one of them Oklahomans!", let alone "You can't trust those damn Okies!" (None of the above statements apply to me, btw.)
I will admit that it is a mixed bag, with "black pride" all mixed up with white hatred, and white racism all mixed up with "white pride", so that it's hard to tell the difference.
You quote Obama's "mentor" (actually pastor); I'll quote Obama:
In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience -- as far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything. They built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.
I have a preference for democrats but their "family friendly" policies make me sick Just curious: what policies are those? Republicans are the ones who more typically throw the phrase "family-friendly" around.
That leads to a followup question, then: can anyone suggest a simple spreadsheet program? OpenOffice and Excel have too much bloat, and take too long to load (well, NeoOffice does; can't speak to the others), when all you need is a way to quickly read and modify tables of data.
How is Einstein's rejection of quantum mechanics megalomania? Einstein made some of the foundational discoveries of Quantum Mechanics, so if he was out to toot his own horn he would have embraced them. He just had a strongly held belief that QM was wrong: is believing strongly in something megalomania?
Question for the readership: This is an obvious, sometimes jarring feature in early science fiction too: the authors for the most part did not foresee the breakdown of traditional gender roles. People occasionally talk about predictions made by SF authors which came true; did anyone pre-1960 successfully predict the societal trend with men and women on an equal footing? (Not just individual women-- there were women professionals long before the 70's-- but women as a whole in the workforce.)
What lets companies get away with this is that consumers don't know about it, and stores toss around words like "buy" and "sell" when the more appropriate term might be "(indefinite) lease". Let's pass a law forbidding e-book sellers from saying in their advertising "Buy this e-book!" or "We have e-books for sale!"; if they are forced to say "Buy a license for this e-book!" or "Lease this e-book!" and consumers will get the idea that something is up, and become informed.
Ditto for DVDs, music, software, or anything else where the manufacturer claims to be selling licenses.
First, let's look at the odds. If they only take pictures once every six months, and if you spend 90% of daylight (a low estimate for many people) inside buildings, in a car, or otherwise away from city streets, then you'll be photographed by Google maybe once every five years. If you randomly pick one moment out of the last five years, what is the probability that you were doing something you wouldn't want other people to see?
I don't think Google is nearly as much of a threat to privacy as are all the photos posted on the web, on Flickr and Picasa and MySpace and so forth. There are many more of them than there are Google Street Views, they cover more areas of space, and any one of those photos might have something illegal or immoral going on in the background, unnoticed (or noticed!) at the time by the photographer.
For that matter, however, newspaper photographers have been taking photos of public places and publishing them for decades now: surely some of those photos caught an embarrassing moment and put it in the LOCAL newspaper, where it's seen by everyone who knows you, not a complete set of strangers. What's different now isn't the source of the photos, so much as the audience: thousands or millions of people searching online photographs for titillating details and sharing the results with the world. A Google photograph of you scratching your butt isn't nearly as embarrassing as a blog telling its millions of readers "Hey, come look at this guy scratching his butt!" Face recognition software, once (if?) it matures, will make things a lot worse, because then you'll be able to type someone's name into a website and pull up pictures of them from all over. (Note that this would also be really cool.:)
The world has not exhaustively ruled the young-earth theory incorrect.
The world never will; there is no scientific method to prove that the world wasn't created last Thursday.
Science is not about TRUTH, it's about observation and predictability. If God did create the world 6000 years ago, he created it so that it APPEARS to be much older, and so that it BEHAVES as if it were much older. Scientists are interested in learning how creation behaves and how it will behave, which is why they study evolution: whether the entire world is a giant holodeck simulation or whatever is a matter for philosophy and theology, not science.
It is true that nearly all scientists reject creationism, but this is for two reasons: (a) their own belief system precludes it (yes, even atheists have beliefs, perhaps starting with Occam's razor), but also (b) creationists actively try to suppress the teaching of evolution (see Scopes). If creationists did not meddle in science curricula, but contented themselves with saying "Evolution might be how the world works, but it isn't truth", then most scientists wouldn't care. (Intelligent design is even more offensive because it deigns to tell scientists what science is, when it in fact has nothing to do with observation and predictability and everything to do with TRVTH. Truth is for philosophers and theologians, remember.)
I personally reject creationism and intelligent design for other reasons, based on my own theological beliefs. (Note that these assume the existence of God, so readers who do not accept that postulate needn't mock.)
If the world is really only 6000 years old, then God is deliberately trying to deceive us. I believe in a God that is good.
Intelligent design proposes that God has to step in every once in a while and create new species, while theological evolution proposes that God set the process in motion and left it alone afterwards (this isn't deism, mind: God can intervene in human affairs without bothering with the low-level stuff like biology). Look at it like a programmer: which is the better programmer, one who gets the code to work right first time, or one who has to constantly tweak things? I believe in a God that is competent.
I know little about hardware, so forgive a stupid question: would it make any sense to pull out these computers' drives, replace them with smaller ones, and either sell the lot or assemble them in one place (a RAID?) for easier maintenance? Having your storage spread out through a company becomes a problem if one computer goes down (or is turned off by its user).
I know the cheapness of drives may make this silly.
I respectfully disagree. Just as every human being deserves respect, their sincere beliefs do as well. It would be disrespectful to knowingly mail a picture of Muhammad to a Sunni, for instance, or maybe to hang one in a Sunni-dominated town. But it is NOT disrespectful to display a picture of Muhammad in your own home, or to include it on a website, just as it is not disrespectful to eat hamburgers even though such behavior would offend Hindi or PETA members.
Respecting someone's beliefs does not mean agreeing to them or following them; it means that one should consider their comfort where possible, and to not intentionally insult them.
Respect is a basic human right independent of religion, so when I see the "spokespeople" of atheism mocking theists because they believe in something that cannot be tested, I am unimpressed.
Any "Church" that charges for its teachings and also has them copyrighted to prevent free distribution is not a church it's a scam at best and a dangerous cult at worst.
So you're a supporter of Open-Source Religion?
(It's actually an interesting analogy: we've got Scientology and the gnostics which are closed-source, then of course we have a variety of forks of Christianity (including the Reformation, or the Great Fork as it might be called). And most religious people modify the source to some extent or another, choosing to believe this bit and not that bit, and so forth.)
Slashdot Mirror
Off the top of my head, I can think of three cases where self-plagiarism is a problem:
1) a researcher publishes the same work several times, inflating his publication record;
2) the researcher transferred the copyright to the original journal, so by self-plagiarizing he is violating copyright;
3) a student turns in the same paper for more than one class, getting double credit for the same work.
If the student writes a paper for a class, and then submits the work to Wikipedia at the same time as she submits it in class, I see nothing wrong with that except for the burden of proving that it wasn't plagiarized. If she wrote the article for Wikipedia a long time ago, then that might be questionable...most teachers want students to write papers in the context of the current class, I think.
In any case, any student who does this without checking with the teacher is asking for trouble; some teachers/professors can be very touchy about the Net, particularly if they don't understand it very well. At the least, the student had better be sure that she makes all her edits while logged in, so that she can prove her authorship later.
This is a shame; I was just thinking the other day that such a feature would be useful, and here they go.
They should consider doing one of two things:
1) Keep the Profiles option, but charge a fee for it to recoup whatever added expense exists. Make it cheaper than getting two separate accounts, but not quite as expensive.
2) Give a small discount when you have more than one account set up to the same address.
I believe the license is only valid if you're still a student; one of Wolfram's representatives told me as much once at a convention.
I suggest one take advantage of the student pricing for Mathematica
:) When I was a student I had ready access to it anyway; it was only when I left school that the problem developed. (I did own a student copy of Mathematica in graduate school, but I got a new laptop subsequently and didn't try to change over the license as it wasn't legitimate anymore.)
That works if you're a student.
A word of warning about Mathematica, Matlab, Maple, etc: they're great when you're a student, but should you find yourself between jobs (e.g. teaching part-time while applying for tenure-track positions) for very long, you may be cut off and you won't know what to do. (Speaking from experience here.) This might not matter to an experimentalist who can't do research outside of a lab anyway, but for a theorist like myself it has been crucial that I be able to use open-source software (and therefore know how to do numerical integration, gradient searches, etc) so that I can maintain a research program, keep publishing, and not drop off the map professionally.
You're saying "this statement is ridiculous, because that would make Obama inconsistent"
No, I'm saying that it would make for some awkward moments at dinner. It is also a strong piece of counterevidence, though by no means conclusive.
So if we were to follow your reasoning we would have to say that Hitler couldn't have been very much against Jews since his children were taught, with Hitler's knowledge, by one. He also constantly listened to Jewish music. So he couldn't possibly have been a racist, right ?
There is a commonly accepted difference between the love one has for one's mother, and the fondness one has for a type of music, or for the affection one might have for one's children's tutor. (I know nothing of this; did Hitler hang out with this tutor at all? Again, that must have made for some awkwardness.) If Hitler's mother were Jewish, and if he had a close relationship with her (necessary because maternal abandonment might actually trigger this level of hatred), then you'd have a point.
Obama, for example, wants to lower everyone's income by massively taxing it
This is an old saw about Democrats. Prove it.
I'm not saying Obama's the new Hitler.
Now don't be shy; the level of racism you are accusing Obama of is very close to that of a Hitler. You just threw that disclaimer in so that people wouldn't accuse you of Godwining the thread.
I'll come flat out and say it: I think you have a hard time accepting the possibility that a politician might be popular without being evil, and so you have developed a paranoid fantasy about Obama. That's my opinion. I can't prove it, short of voting for the fellow and seeing which of us is right. I have no qualms about doing so.
I'd like to make the point that physics majors are going to come in with VASTLY different levels of programming skill-- much more variation than in mathematical background. Some will have never programmed at all, while others may have programmed professionally. Any requirements you set up should take this into account: a placement exam of some sort is what I have in mind, although it could be relatively simple: "Have you programmed before? Do you know what a loop is?" etc. Even the simplest programming skills would be enough for students to get started, but you want to filter out those with ZERO aptitude so you can get them started before they actually need it (or before they've enrolled in a computational physics course
I am a physicist, and I learned how to program in BASIC when I was 8 or so. I took a class in Pascal my freshman year in college, and from there I learned what programming I needed as I went along: Mathematica as an undergrad thesis student, C as a graduate student, and C++ recently. It was possible to pick it up as I went along, given my background... but on the other hand, I was a third-year graduate student (doing hydrodynamics simulations for a professor who knew very little about computation) before I heard the words "Runge-Kutta" or discovered the inherent flaws in forward-Euler integration, so in retrospect a computational physics class would have been very useful indeed!
He listened to "white people are the devil" for 17 YEARS,
while being raised by his white mother. Must have been some awkward Thanksgivings at that house....
Good example, thanks.
-> Race A votes 91-9 for the candidate of the same race (and 25% admit that they only did soe because of race)
-> Race B votes 58-42 for the candidate of the same race (and only 2 guys admitted it had something to do with race)
Sure, their support is racially motivated, even racist by some standards (racism is a terribly ambiguous word, meaning everything from "pride in one's race" to "discomfort with strangers" to "desiring the extinction of another race".) But I for one can't blame them for it: it's no more wrong than Arkansans voting for Clinton because she lived there for a while, or for military families voting for McCain because he is a veteran. One would hope that voters would take their responsibility more seriously than that, but people are always going to have some sympathy for "one of their own" becoming President.
Well then, what's so wrong about white voters refusing to vote for Obama because he's black? Frankly, I can't help but be sympathetic with those white voters who say they are afraid of black retaliation: the proper response to them isn't "you are a horrible racist!" but "how can we alleviate those fears?" But there is a distinction between voting FOR someone vs. voting AGAINST someone. To take a less controversial example, saying "I am proud to be a Texan!" is less likely to offend anyone than saying "I'd hate to be one of them Oklahomans!", let alone "You can't trust those damn Okies!" (None of the above statements apply to me, btw.)
I will admit that it is a mixed bag, with "black pride" all mixed up with white hatred, and white racism all mixed up with "white pride", so that it's hard to tell the difference.
You quote Obama's "mentor" (actually pastor); I'll quote Obama:
I have a preference for democrats but their "family friendly" policies make me sick
Just curious: what policies are those? Republicans are the ones who more typically throw the phrase "family-friendly" around.
one of the most common formulas is Schoolgirl + 6Tentacle -> Schoolgirl +12Tentacle + H
I have no idea what H means in this context, but I have to infer that 1 H = 6 anti-Tentacles.
That leads to a followup question, then: can anyone suggest a simple spreadsheet program? OpenOffice and Excel have too much bloat, and take too long to load (well, NeoOffice does; can't speak to the others), when all you need is a way to quickly read and modify tables of data.
with DVD suddenly the discs were a lot higher quality (picture and sound), and were considerably closer to indestructible than VHS tapes
Not to mention random access (no rewinding), smaller size (video library takes up less room), and DVD players in computers.
I have two ISBNs that should have already passed into the public domain.
What do you mean, "should have"? You can release material into the public domain yourself, you don't have to wait for Congress to do it for you.
How is Einstein's rejection of quantum mechanics megalomania? Einstein made some of the foundational discoveries of Quantum Mechanics, so if he was out to toot his own horn he would have embraced them. He just had a strongly held belief that QM was wrong: is believing strongly in something megalomania?
Question for the readership:
This is an obvious, sometimes jarring feature in early science fiction too: the authors for the most part did not foresee the breakdown of traditional gender roles. People occasionally talk about predictions made by SF authors which came true; did anyone pre-1960 successfully predict the societal trend with men and women on an equal footing? (Not just individual women-- there were women professionals long before the 70's-- but women as a whole in the workforce.)
So why not talk to Meraki and see if you can work something out rather than whining about it on your blog?
Because (a) now we all know* to watch out for Meraki, and (2) Meraki might be more willing to fix a public stink than a private complaint.
*(and knowing is half the battle. GI J... oh wait. sorry.)
What lets companies get away with this is that consumers don't know about it, and stores toss around words like "buy" and "sell" when the more appropriate term might be "(indefinite) lease". Let's pass a law forbidding e-book sellers from saying in their advertising "Buy this e-book!" or "We have e-books for sale!"; if they are forced to say "Buy a license for this e-book!" or "Lease this e-book!" and consumers will get the idea that something is up, and become informed.
Ditto for DVDs, music, software, or anything else where the manufacturer claims to be selling licenses.
First, let's look at the odds. If they only take pictures once every six months, and if you spend 90% of daylight (a low estimate for many people) inside buildings, in a car, or otherwise away from city streets, then you'll be photographed by Google maybe once every five years. If you randomly pick one moment out of the last five years, what is the probability that you were doing something you wouldn't want other people to see?
:)
I don't think Google is nearly as much of a threat to privacy as are all the photos posted on the web, on Flickr and Picasa and MySpace and so forth. There are many more of them than there are Google Street Views, they cover more areas of space, and any one of those photos might have something illegal or immoral going on in the background, unnoticed (or noticed!) at the time by the photographer.
For that matter, however, newspaper photographers have been taking photos of public places and publishing them for decades now: surely some of those photos caught an embarrassing moment and put it in the LOCAL newspaper, where it's seen by everyone who knows you, not a complete set of strangers. What's different now isn't the source of the photos, so much as the audience: thousands or millions of people searching online photographs for titillating details and sharing the results with the world. A Google photograph of you scratching your butt isn't nearly as embarrassing as a blog telling its millions of readers "Hey, come look at this guy scratching his butt!" Face recognition software, once (if?) it matures, will make things a lot worse, because then you'll be able to type someone's name into a website and pull up pictures of them from all over. (Note that this would also be really cool.
The world never will; there is no scientific method to prove that the world wasn't created last Thursday.
Science is not about TRUTH, it's about observation and predictability. If God did create the world 6000 years ago, he created it so that it APPEARS to be much older, and so that it BEHAVES as if it were much older. Scientists are interested in learning how creation behaves and how it will behave, which is why they study evolution: whether the entire world is a giant holodeck simulation or whatever is a matter for philosophy and theology, not science.
It is true that nearly all scientists reject creationism, but this is for two reasons: (a) their own belief system precludes it (yes, even atheists have beliefs, perhaps starting with Occam's razor), but also (b) creationists actively try to suppress the teaching of evolution (see Scopes). If creationists did not meddle in science curricula, but contented themselves with saying "Evolution might be how the world works, but it isn't truth", then most scientists wouldn't care. (Intelligent design is even more offensive because it deigns to tell scientists what science is, when it in fact has nothing to do with observation and predictability and everything to do with TRVTH. Truth is for philosophers and theologians, remember.)
I personally reject creationism and intelligent design for other reasons, based on my own theological beliefs. (Note that these assume the existence of God, so readers who do not accept that postulate needn't mock.)
You must be thinking of Hamas and Al Qaeda.
He might also be thinking of Blackwater mercenaries, who have fired on civilians; those guys are giving our military a bad name.
I know little about hardware, so forgive a stupid question: would it make any sense to pull out these computers' drives, replace them with smaller ones, and either sell the lot or assemble them in one place (a RAID?) for easier maintenance? Having your storage spread out through a company becomes a problem if one computer goes down (or is turned off by its user).
I know the cheapness of drives may make this silly.
No religion gets "respect".
I respectfully disagree. Just as every human being deserves respect, their sincere beliefs do as well. It would be disrespectful to knowingly mail a picture of Muhammad to a Sunni, for instance, or maybe to hang one in a Sunni-dominated town. But it is NOT disrespectful to display a picture of Muhammad in your own home, or to include it on a website, just as it is not disrespectful to eat hamburgers even though such behavior would offend Hindi or PETA members.
Respecting someone's beliefs does not mean agreeing to them or following them; it means that one should consider their comfort where possible, and to not intentionally insult them.
Respect is a basic human right independent of religion, so when I see the "spokespeople" of atheism mocking theists because they believe in something that cannot be tested, I am unimpressed.
Any "Church" that charges for its teachings and also has them copyrighted to prevent free distribution is not a church it's a scam at best and a dangerous cult at worst.
So you're a supporter of Open-Source Religion?
(It's actually an interesting analogy: we've got Scientology and the gnostics which are closed-source, then of course we have a variety of forks of Christianity (including the Reformation, or the Great Fork as it might be called). And most religious people modify the source to some extent or another, choosing to believe this bit and not that bit, and so forth.)