Bill Ackman Declares Plagiarism War On MIT After Retaliatory Attacks On His Wife’s Ph.D. Thesis
“We will begin with a review of the work of all current @MIT faculty members, President Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism. We will be using MIT’s own plagiarism standards …”
Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman had now-former Harvard President Claudine Gay and Harvard itself in his sights well before Gay’s shocking Congressional testimony in December during which she claimed “context” would be important in determining whether or not someone calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s hate speech rules.
In October, just a few days after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, Ackman, who is Jewish and also a Harvard alum, called on CEOs to refuse to hire any Harvard student who signed on to the infamous letter that blamed Israel for the attacks.
In November, Ackman wrote a scathing letter directly to Gay, slamming her for her “free expression” response to the rise in anti-Semitism on campus, stating in part that “When antisemitism is widely prevalent on campus, and the DEI office – which ‘views diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging as the pathway to achieving inclusive excellence and fostering a campus culture where everyone can thrive’ – does not welcome Jewish students, we have a serious problem.”
When Gay was hit with the plagiarism allegations in December, Ackman—who experienced a wake-up call on DEI in the midst of evaluating Harvard’s response to Oct. 7th—was one of the more vocal critics of her work and her response to the claims against her and supported ousting her.
Now Ackman is on the receiving end of an alleged plagiarism scandal, one pertaining to his wife, Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor whom Business Insider alleges repeatedly engaged in plagiarism in her 2010 MIT doctoral dissertation:
The Business Insider report claimed Oxman “plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation” and found “at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.” The article presented examples of her dissertation side by side with passages from authors she allegedly failed to cite accurately.
Oxman apologized for several issues found in the report on X Thursday. She stressed, “I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my peers and those who came before me.”
The report noted “four paragraphs in my 330-page PhD dissertation: ‘Material-based Design Computation’” where “I omitted quotation marks for certain work that I used,” she wrote.
[…]
The examples posted by Business Insider showed Oxman’s explanation as true in three examples of the alleged plagiarism. However, it also showed an example in which she appeared to paraphrase an author without a parenthetical citation or quotes and another passage in which she allegedly inaccurately attributed a passage from the Royal Society of London paper to two different sources.
Oxman’s lengthy response can be read below:
I was forwarded an email this morning from a reporter at Business Insider who noted that there are four paragraphs in my 330-page PhD dissertation: “Material-based Design Computation,” which I completed at @MIT in 2010,https://t.co/6LE1O4FiiL
where I omitted quotation marks…
— Neri Oxman (@NeriOxman) January 4, 2024
Ackman’s reaction has been far more aggressive, with his first tweet on the issue claiming Business Insider gave them no time to respond to the allegations before they published the hit piece. He also said he believes this was done in retaliation against him for his public critiques of higher education in recent weeks and vowed to give the writings of MIT’s faculty, officers, and board members thorough reviews for any possible instances of plagiarism:
My wife, @NeriOxman, was just contacted by Business Insider claiming that they have identified other plagiarism in her work including 15 examples in her dissertation where she did not cite Wikipedia as a source.
Business Insider told us that they are publishing their story this evening. As a result, we don’t have time to research their claims prior to publication.
It is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher education have led to these attacks on my family.
This experience has inspired me to save all news organizations from the trouble of doing plagiarism reviews.
We will begin with a review of the work of all current @MIT faculty members, President Kornbluth, other officers of the Corporation, and its board members for plagiarism.
We will be using MIT’s own plagiarism standards which can be found here:
https://integrity.mit.edu/handbook/what-plagiarism
We will share our findings in the public domain as they are completed in the spirit of transparency.
My wife, @NeriOxman, was just contacted by Business Insider claiming that they have identified other plagiarism in her work including 15 examples in her dissertation where she did not cite Wikipedia as a source.
Business Insider told us that they are publishing their story…
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 5, 2024
For good measure, Ackman said he’d also review the work of Business Insider‘s staff for any possible plagiarism issues as well:
This is an excellent idea. We will review the work of the reporters and staff at BI for completeness. https://t.co/4VImfFN4A6
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 6, 2024
In another tweet, Ackman implied that MIT Chairman Mark Gorenberg, who was accused by Ackman of tax fraud in mid-December, may have been a source for Business Insider‘s report:
I guess @MIT Chairman Gorenberg did not like it when I outed him for apparent tax fraud using @MIT’s donor advised fund. By doing so, he put at risk MIT’s tax exempt status.
The mainstream media failed to report on the thread below. They might want to take a closer look now.… https://t.co/b5nZe0btZw
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) January 6, 2024
Author/investment banker Carol Roth quipped that Ackman should hold a plagiarism awards ceremony where the winners could “give the same acceptance speech”:
You should hold and stream a plagiarism awards show.
All the winners can give the same acceptance speech.
— Carol Roth (@caroljsroth) January 6, 2024
Leading CRT critic Chris Rufo, who was one of the writers who first revealed the alleged plagiarism issues with Claudine Gay’s work, had this to say on the topic of what he called the “plagiarism war”:
A full-blown “plagiarism war” will turn the Right’s major disadvantage in academia—being outnumbered ~10:1 on elite university faculties—into a massive asymmetrical advantage. Game on.
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 5, 2024
Not sure what will be revealed from all of this, but I’m stocking up on the popcorn all the same.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
And just like that the left went from “this is just another example of MAGA right wing extremist white supremacy” to “fuck yes we support looking in to certain peoples plagerism even if we have to make it up” 😂😂
This attitude of attacking the messenger is pervasive in our society. I would often offer constructive criticism of actions at the hospital where I had my practice. Each and every time those criticisms were not acted upon and instead, I was written up for some slight that an individual suddenly found offensive. I moved my practice and subsequently the hospital (a very large one) is no more.
It is also not a good idea to p*ss off a billionaire by attacking their spouse.
Mr. Ackerman has my blessing and appreciation if he leads this charge.
Find and name all the on campus Hamas protestors and supporters. Create a website with their names and pictures at the support marches.
Find all the plagiarism of the “scholarly” papers in the media, academia and politics. Create a website with the information with names and employment.
Smart response, Doctor.
This article says Business Insider challenged 4 of Ackman’s wife’s paragraphs, but Ackman’s statement says it was 15. Which is it?
Good on Ackman for digging into the septic field of academia!
My guess is they hastily identified 15 and realized only 4 were good pieces.
To be clear, if she plagiarized then she should also be punished or at least noted for it.
That all depends. If it was only 4 instances, which could easily be attributed to a mistake, then fine. Let it go. But if we are talking about Claudine Gheeeeey levels of plagerism spanning pretty much her entire academic body of work the. Yes let’s have a conversation about next steps.
The 4 instances of plagiarism are outlined by Neri Oxman in the twitter post linked in the article.
Check them out for yourself and let us know what you think. After reading them, I see citations were listed but the applicable passages were not put in quotations.
Far different from Claudine Gay’s opaque, non-attributed paraphrasing that were passed as her own writing. Not to mention the myriad questions around the validity of Gay’s data and conclusions.
Plus for at least one of them she’s not sure who cited whom, and since the sources are not online she’ll need time to check them and figure out whether she cited the wrong one.
Maybe but Ackerman’s wife is not President of Harvard or MIT. She has nothing to do with them so I fail to see the relevance here other than the left throwing stones at the messenger instead of tending to their own failures. I will point out a difference between Ackerman’s wife and Gay in that his wife is an accomplished scholar while Gay is nothing of note except a box ticker on the diversity hire list.
Ph.D. dissertations are useless. Change my mind.
Pretty broad stroke, there. I would submit the majority of technical PhD dissertations add value. My PhD dissertation in Chemical Engineering netted 10 patents for my company (finished school while working full time).
THAT IS SO AWESOME!!!!
I guess the question is, would you have netted those 10 patents if you had simply done the work, but didn’t go through a dissertation process?
Or, conversely, if a technical Ph.D. dissertation doesn’t result in any patent or other concrete benefit, can we agree that particular dissertation was useless?
If I wasn’t working full time while going to school, it is unlikely I would have had the resources to get the patents, so probably not.
I think the purpose of graduate studies is to advance knowledge in the field, so others can build and improve from the work, so….no, you don’t need it to result in a patent for it to be useful.
“I think the purpose of graduate studies is to advance knowledge in the field, so others can build and improve from the work, so….”
So much this.^^^
I got to watch this happen as a support tech in research labs as an undergrad, here. The larger “we” support people to go reliably map new knowledge that we can use.
Such an interesting contrast with how graduate work in the social sciences and “studies” mostly recites the status quo. The former empowers people who learn it to go do new, interesting stuff. The latter corrals them into what their response must be.
So, “higher education system” or “higher indoctrination system” — which is it?
There is a difference between soft and hard majors. Many people with advanced degrees do not seem to have what it takes to apply tech.
This exactly. Leading to published/scholarly products or better yet a spinoff company is hardly useless.
The dissertation itself is just an internal school record of something that potentially leads to bigger products. If it sucks, it sucks but not ALL are useless.
Are we talking Theoretical Physics or African Women’s Studies?
I mean really, how can an English Literature PHD candidate write anything new about Shakespear? And after they are a professor, what new ideas are they going to publish?
My dissertation connected the sensory aspects of chronic pain via an anatomical pathway with the deleterious systemic effects seen over time in that patient base, so there’s that.
Thus are the advantages of novel findings. And novel techniques used to obtain them. It never hurts to be the first.
I get the vibe that Ackman is anti-fragile. While harvard, and most likely MIT, are not.
Advantage ackman.
Hm, if it was not for AI sticking false attributions into papers, it seems that AI would be a wonderful candidate for tracking down plagiarism. Just feed the doctoral and masters thesiseses… thesisi? Anyway, into them wholesale for every school and start matching pieces of the puzzles. I’ll bet there would be some hum-dingers emerge at the other end.
*theses; it’s from Greek where -is singular becomes -es plural.
AI sucks at plagiarism as badly as it sucks at detecting other AI.
The AI does not have free access to all info in real time. It is trained on static language models that have been carefully vetted before adding them (which does not make them mistake free).
“a former MIT professor whom Business Insider alleges repeatedly engaged in plagiarism”
Who, not whom. Subject of engaged. In modern English “who” is acceptable for “whom” but “whom” is very risky if you can’t tell which really belongs, so use “who” regardless in that case.
An exception is fronted prepositions, “For whom the bell tolls.” “Who the bell tolls for” is acceptable though. That’s a register rule, not a case rule, however. Formal vs informal.
We all have different strengths an weaknesses, for me I excel in science and math, not literary stuff. Frankly, I did not consider it worth my time. When on forums, is it worth reviewing work the way I would for publication?
“Literary stuff.”
Not worth the time of this superior white man to learn spelling and grammar. Too busy doing extensive research on the IQs of the races and fapping to thoughts of dead Muslims.
Triggered much? Too easy. lol
Thad Jarvis is easy to wind up, Kind of like Trumps tweets winding up people like him.
Should I give you a reply that sends you chasing KY? You are pitiful. Jews are right 99% of the time, their adversaries 1% or less.
Israel has neutron bombs an could clean that mess in short order, it is only Jew’s morality that has saved Pales from extermination, eventually they may well change their minds.
I think you misspelled Wahhhhh
My father had two master degrees, one in English & one in history, he was working on his PhD when he met my mother 🙂 He constantly corrected me, Some stuck, some did not. He did instill a love for learning, good work ethics, morals & ethics. So I have some handicaps, but not anywhere as bad as yours.
My interest in IQ developed as a result of handicaps, and after riots as cover to loot in 60s, along with interest in Archeology and early human development, it became clear that humanity has different capabilities on both a micro and macro level. Yes, IQ matters, both Africans and Arabs have significantly lower IQs.. I think that low IQ is driving most of the problems we see in those groups. Claims in the 60s that this was environmental are false. Environment can help or hinder someone achieving their full potential, it cannot change their innate abilities.
And then there is culture, Muslims have a crap culture which refuses to change, they are homicidal, that seem innate to their culture. Their conduct is unacceptable, they seems intent on being Martyrs, I think it is time to accommodate them.
Bro, you should check your drawers for skidmarks, after this shart.
Everybody is good at their native language. The rules of _descriptive grammar_ are rules about what sounds wrong to a native speaker. The “whom” here is a diversion from what sounds natural to what sounds high-class, and that’s why it’s dangerous to use “whom” if you can’t tell which belongs. Use “who.”
_Prescriptive grammar_ is what you learn in school.
The interesting thing about descriptive grammar is how many rules there are that you follow but can’t articulate, thousands of pages of them. It’s not easy to be a native speaker in another language.
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik is 2000 pages of unexpected rules, if that sort of surprise is interesting.
I am probably Asperger, genius in sciences and math, but have difficulty with speech and language. I think that often when we excel in one area it comes at the expense of difficulties in other areas.
Excelling in “math & science” and “excelling in language/ literature” are hardly mutually exclusive. I had poor students in my stats class whose go-to excuse was “Well, I’m an art major, so….” Evidently they were completely unaware of Leonardo DaVinci or even the concept of a Renaissance man.
If you’re of average IQ or better, there’s no excuse for not knowing basic stuff.
I find very few East Coast Americans who can speak (or write) the English language properly today; the native language these days is NY Spanglish or Ebonics.
Who and whom can (almost) be forgiven: when you see a (written) confusion between I and me from a college graduate, you begin to wonder about their degree (in the Social Sciences).
And yes, I’ve many blue-collar friends who can speak and write a far better English than most of the college graduates of recent vintage
I’m from the East Coast (Rhode Island, in fact). I write weller than I speak.
Being from Rhode Island myself, I must confess that I was 14 before I realized that the word fot had an R in it. Yes, that is even how the local graffitists spelled it.
Everybody is good at his native language.
The attempt to sound more erudite is likely behind one of my many small pet peeves: the pronunciation of the word “processes” as prah-sess-eeze. When it doesn’t violate decorum to do so, I point out that if this were the correct pronunciation, then the singular would be processis and not process.
Or rephrase it as “whom Business Insider accused of repeated plagiarism”. I would guess that it originally said something like that, and then an editor decided that it needed an “alleged” but made the change in haste.
“whom police say committed the crime” is a form that turns up in the news every day. Just yesterday in fact, a rare double-whom:
“Bond is set for a nineteen year old man whom police say shot and killed another man whom he said was breaking into cars.”
– Allison Wyatt WTVN 610 1:03 pm 1/5/24
James Thurber said that “whom” should be used when a note of dignity and austerity is wanted. In fact it’s online
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3955
That Thurber piece is strictly humor, and not meant in any way as serious advice.
The handiest tool is to substitute he and him for who and whom and see if the sentence still makes sense. “For him the bell tolls” makes sense, whereas “For he the bell tolls” is clearly dreck.
Occasionally, you will have to shuffle a few words: “A former business professor… Business Insider alleges he repeatedly engaged in plagiarism.” So the correct choice here is who, not whom.
I have the same beef about scriptwriters who use “he and I” to sound erudite when it’s wrong. “The terrible things my mother did to my sister and I!” Drop everything but the me or I. Would you say “things my mother did to I?” No, therefore it’s “me.” Same trick for we and us.
You resort to direct personal attacks against a man who has that kind of resources, you had better be prepared for a real fight. This is analogous to the old adage that you don’t get into a pissing contest with someone who buys ink by the drum. Ackman has the same resources as MIT; they are used to picking on “little people”, he certainly is not one.
It is like attacking Trump 🙂
“It is like attacking Trump 🙂”
No, just no. Ackman has a very good mind.
Trump has different strengths and weaknesses’ than Ackman.
Some people are complete fools and morons and insisting on pointing it out.
Thanks for the pointer.
MIT apparently hasn’t heard about Oberlin. That is the best part about Oberlin not admitting their mistake. It will allow others to make the same one, almost appearing as if they have a learning disability. The mistakes that I make are my own. The mistakes that I don’t make are those of others, from whom I learned what not to do.
Good point. Although, I suspect they know all about Oberlin, but believe it can’t happen here…
AI will do what it’s trained to do, and it can be trained to find plagiarism.
Already has. Machine learning has been around for a while
Specific AI apps do not have to chat.
AI is not that good at it as I explained above.
AI isn’t needed for this task…it’s really a simple string matching or at most a basic NLP search problem, albeit at large scale.
This is great, Ackman is going to reign fire and brimstone down on MIT, hopefully this spreads to review all dissertation’s, elites first.
with respect and no snark:
rain (down): bring down, such as rain
reign: to rule
rein: to control, as in reining in a horse
Damn! You really are the “goddess of the classroom!”
I have to say — watching a woman correcting another’s grammar gets me hot.
Well, maybe I didn’t have to say that.
TMI, my friend.
Hooooray! A fellow grammar/spelling dweeb!
Perhaps we could shout to the world the plural of bus is buses and not busses! Too many “journalists” spell it incorrectly.
Indeed. The street is a very appropriate place for buses, but not necessarily for busses.
“Attorney generals” and addressing them individually as “general” gets me hot and bothered in a bad way.
Never could figure out why they put buss fuses in cars too. 😉
The first time I saw the term, it was on a street sign in Rhode Island. It said “BUSSES ONLY.” (It was probably at a school as well.) Being “official,” it warped my mind at an early age and I have had to battle the impulse ever since.
So is that like a permanent sprig of mistletoe?
“Well, dear, I’m just obeying the sign!”
Out here, mistletoe is a ubiquitous uneradicable parasite. If I cared about its symbolism, I’d never get anything else done.
I was going to keep my mouth shut, but it bothered me too.
I don’t mind constructive criticism, thanks.
It would be foolish for me not to accept well intentioned criticism, so thank you.
He who reigns may rein in his horse, but cannot stop the rain.
A “reign of fire and brimstone” is perfectly fine.
>> A “reign of fire and brimstone” is perfectly fine. <<
I believe that appeared as a promise in some emails during the Gibsons trail discovery. 😉
All I can say is that these are the times that try men’s souls.
Am I missing something?? Who cares about Ackman’s wife?
The issue is that Gay’s unqualified for academia. And that Harvard’s got a weird Qatar-financed agenda protecting her.
And why is Gay The Plagiarist still on the Harvard faculty?
And why is the Harvard faculty still supporting her, despite the plagiarism?
Good grief
Can somebody explain why Harvard is not being investigated by a legitimate regional or federal accreditation body for:
1. Continuing to employ a credibly-accused plagiarist on faculty
2. Allowing the physical and mental harassment intimidation of certain groups of their students
Why isn’t Harvard already on probation?
Why doesn’t Harvard already have an Improvement Plan in place, with outside credible supervision?
Harvard, as it turns out, turns out to be like that house at the end of the block with the weird odors and all the cats. And finally the owner dies and the city has to call in the health department …….
to fumigate the whole place.
Because Harvard gets a rubber stamp from every accreditation body that “monitors” them.
Coasting on reputation.
The accreditation nazis only exist to harass schools that lack power over them.
Harvard and the rest of their cabal *are* being investigated and etc. outside the systems they have captured.
They’re not being investigated “officially” because the people who would “officially” investigate are etc. are part of the same machinery. If worked with laws as written, and words having meaning, there’s a hell fo a RICO case, there.
I was disappointed when your final phrase turned out not to be, “to catalog the cadavers.”
If Gay was guilty of this in her quest for a Ph.D. then a look at her undergraduate work might be in order too. According to Glenn Beck, her apology letter was also plagiarized.
I believe it was also in her meager publications.
The apology letter that started “four score and …?” She will be remembered as the gift that keeps on giving.
I just want to see her SAT and GRE scores, and then hear the explanations about how she got into anywhere.
Standardized scores are really the only things you can trust, these days. Grades are mostly BS – especially at the Ivies and other so-called top schools, for their diversity pets.
“Grades are mostly BS…”
It has filtered all the way down to the HS level.
Just for fun, let’s do Obama while we’re at it.
Wayne Allan Root tried in the 2008 Presidential race. He went to Columbia the same time as Barky and also went to law school after. Root was rejected from Hah-vahd Law, though, and challenged Barky to compare LSATs to see if Barky was given racial preferences to get into Hah-vahd.
Of course, we know that Barky only made the Law Review because they had just changed the requirements (due to annoying sit-ins and the like from the year or two before) de-emphasizing grades (in order to allow more minorities as editors) and changed the President of the Review to an election, I believe. Interestingly, the year that Barky was elected the Precedent of the Review the guy who came in second was also a minority. What were the odds of that happening?
Further, just from listening to the idiocy that poured out of Barky’s mouth, it was clear that he didn’t score north of 400 on the math section of his SATs … and his English wasn’t very good, either.
Love this Ackman guy!!! He’s a pitbull – got enough money at this stage – would be a great match for veep and meshes with Trump’s personality and style.
Sorry but Ackman is smarter than that.
It must be real painful to know your every waking TDS nerve ending has been battered and that Trump is running away with the R nomination in spite of all your China owned GOPe engineered antics. 100% failure, 100%.
Swing and a miss.
Ackman won’t be led around by the nose as Trump’s VP. No one of any value will. He will actually end up with a GOPe running mate that he has made a deal with a la Nikki Haley.
I also think Ackman is showing the “right stuff.” But the comment that he “meshes with Trump’s personality and style” is a diss of Ackman’s abilities. Ackman doesn’t strike me as an impulsive blowhard.
Mess with someone who has money to burn and the will to get it done. Elon’s lesson was not absorbed by the most important on the planet set but Ackerman might just awaken them to the danger they are now in when the sleeping prolls realize what is going on
Agreed. This is a point that the lefty woke weirdos haven’t internalized. Not surprising b/c they have control of the major institutions and organs of power. They are used to having their ‘six’ covered by their prominent allies. When someone who has the men as not only to resist but go on the offensive the woke left, like all bullies, become confused and apprehensive. IOW they prefer to punch down as the kids say but folks like Musk and Ackerman among others are now deciding to intercede and punch back.
The lefty woke weirdos are used to being the only ones able to call upon
spirits from the vastydeep-pocketed sources of dark money. The Soroses, Tideses, Steyers, Bloombergs, Hoffmans. Meanwhile, mega-rich conservatives tended not to write blank checks to truculent advocates on “their side,” not even the Koch brothers. That is, until Musk went based. Now perhaps the wake-up horn is sounding.Yep. Especially so when calling upon the steady flow if not near unlimited govt funding of their agenda. Soros pushing $ into local DA contests is shrewd b/c it has outsize gains but is something that can be countered. The lawfare playbook can be replicated from the center/right. The govt funding is much harder to counter as is the infiltration of the Executive Branch agencies by ideological operatives. Add in the public sector unions and private sector unions and the structural advantages of the leftists becomes far more clear. Gonna take a POTUS willing to break the current paradigm of civil service constraints and use outside the box methods. I favor transferring all the ‘resistance’ to the Arctic interagency Task Force. Let them resign or choose to accept, either way they ain’t in position to gum up the works of his admin.
Absolutely everyone should be checked for plagiarism.
Make these people live up to the rules they demand you and others follow.
Yes, and that applies to all the posters here on LI.
“Yes, and that applies to all the posters here on LI.”
Oh, let’s not stop there. Have the bleeting bots declare where they heard their knee-jerk response. When you hear the same meme-bait thing, the same way, from a gaggle, way better put than what they’ve otherwise come up with … it might be crafted, and they’re just carriers.
Even if they won’t declare they’re just repeaters, you can tell, and ask them: “How do you know that?”
I’m curious: to what standard?
Casual conversation isn’t footnoted like a research paper. Using ideas that are “common knowledge” likewise. Bon mots that have entered the vernacular are notoriously misattributed. Turns of phrase — “turns of phrase”, “bon mots” or “entered the vernacular” — are worse, even. (I wonder, need we credit Shakespeare for every novel word or turn of phrase we use from those works? We’ll be here for weeks, at least in modern English.)
“Credit your sources” can become another bludgeon to shut people down or dirty them up, should they say something inconvenient. “To what standard” has a lot to do with what kind of conversation.
“Personal Communication” can and is used in formal publications.
I was unclear. “Casual communication” is indeed footnoted in formal pubs. My point: not a lot of footnotes in casual communications, whatever the reference points to;.
Thought which was clear from how the thread started:
Absolutely everyone should be checked for plagiarism. — TheOldZombie, 6-Jan
…
Yes, and that applies to all the posters here on LI. — JR, 6-Jan
I’m not sure formal pub citation requirements fit blog comments. That said, these conventions were quite robust in old-school newsgroups. Ex-Prezzy Happy’s work wouldn’t have cut it any place I used to hang out. (Yes, I’m old. Also, get off my lawn.)
Now let’s do “fair use.”
Comments on blogs are not expected to be original work, so the concept of “plagiarism” doesn’t apply.
It also doesn’t apply to sermons, which is offered as an explanation for why MLK may not have realized it was wrong when he did it in his dissertation.
It also doesn’t apply to speeches, which is why Biden’s infamous speech pretending to be Neil Kinnock would not have been a problem had the biographical facts he lifted from Kinnock’s speech been true about himself as well. The problem was not that he copied Kinnock’s words, but that he copied his biography, claiming things that were true about Kinnock but not about himself.
But Biden is well-known for compulsively lying about his own biography even when he makes it all up himself. So in his case, still plagiarism.
Huh? I think you have that backwards, somehow. Or sideways.
I keep a lot of my own posts for future reference. Sometimes I quote from them. Do I need citations?
Poor reliability; I recommend Seagates instead.
Coming from the gun-rights field, I have to ask: it is plagiarism if you quote something that somebody never said?
“1935 will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!”
–Adolf Hitler
That’s anti-plagiarism! Like when Robert Burns attributed “Auld Lang Syne” to that prolific composer “trad”, when in fact it was his own creation.
Are you really suggesting comments with footnotes? What rubbish.
I say again: especially in the “soft” sciences and “angry studies” departments, start by looking into what these pseudo-scholars claim is the “data” that supports their BS theses.
In these fields, it’s stupid easy to just make stuff up (a-la Michael Bellesiles), and especially in fringe studies (or where there has been a DEI hire), where nobody is checking the data or whether the claimed results are replicable.
The key here is that data fabrication is an absolutely unforgiveable sin in academia. I suspect *that’s* what caused Gay to pull the ripcord, in that long-simmering (and memory-holed) questions about here dataset (which she suspiciously has refused to release) have been renewed, and she knew it was only a matter of time before that overtook her plagarism and unsuitability for office as the driving issue.
If Ackman collected even a few scalps in this way, I suspect you’d see a tsunami of these academics taking early retirement before the axe came for them.
“angry studies” — that’s good. Imma be using that.
Original with you, or do I credit someone else?
I’ve heard and usde the phrase “grievance studies” for the past few years.
I’ve heard Grievance Studies but not Angry Studies. Since I can spell angry I think I’m going to use that phrase instead. As has been noted elsewhere, if it has “Studies” in it’s title it is not a serious thing but a grift. Take any information from such people with a great deal of caution
Can’t recall where I heard it before, but thought it was fitting. So not my creation, but happy to popularize the usage.
When was Climate Change data fabrication ever “unforgiveable”?
No no no, it isn’t “fabricated” it is “cleansed’ or ” adjusted,”
There’s fabrication, too.
Even worse than that, most of the data isn’t even “data”, as the Global Warming nuts love to use their own model predictions as “data”, which is beyond laughable. And most of their models aren’t really “models”, either, but just curve fitting programs.
I’ve not found much actually fabricated but mostly either taken out of context or used to build models that are wildly inaccurate which are used to back a narrative of the persons choosing. Mostly to advance advance that narrative which just happens to require more study and more money to fund it keeping that person or persons in a job
And nothing is ever corrected or retracted, it’s “walked back.”
Way way back, when I first learned about statistical modeling studies (at Oberlin, I know), the prof stated that anyone who couldn’t alter the participants view on a subject while administering a survey to them should just “get out” now. He then went on to explain the concept of funneling questions, where over the course of the survey one can edge the veracity of a question by a smidgen each time it is asked in order to get the participant to drift along with the change. Similarly, he showed how the validity of a survey could be tested by asking similar questions throughout and then seeing if they were in agreement, or was the person answering the same question in a randowm fashion. That is why I am always skeptical of anything which depends on survey data, since there is no way to verify the authenticity, unlike my hard science work, where the slides are still in a box and we can look at them any time we want, ditto the paer chart recordings. In the hard sciences, not being able to produce the data means that the data doesn’t exist, and neither do publications which depend on it.
In light of these revelations over the last few weeks, it seems like the highest level of degree in the social sciences should be a Masters, where one has “book studied” the material that has been accumulated. As someone pointed out, there should not be any new PhD’s granted which feature Shakespeare as a subject, since pretty much everything known has been examined in minute detail. The best one can do is read up on all the previous analyses, and maybe submit a lengthy compare and contrast essay.
I recall a history prof talking about going to Germany and researching the local papers to see how things developed between the Wars. Given what we see with the Post and the Times these days, I am starting to wonder how future historians will handle what is obviously propaganda and not actual news. I know that pretty much everything reported about Portland is the complete opposite of reality, so maybe even paper may not be a reliable source down the road.
There’s interesting work on how questions and situations frame the responses, sometimes emerging from non-narrative corners of social psychology. Experimental design to account for those effects is the devil’s own job.
Behavioral Social Psychology is one access term.
All private universities should not have any tax-exempt status, at all. If alumni want to support their schools then they can give money without getting any tax breaks and the schools can pay taxes on that money as income as they should.
That, and all federal money coming out of undergraduate financing and we’d be good to go. Take that money and that tax fiction away from these schools and their DIE junk will be cleaned up in no time along with many of the joke departments disappearing. Probably half the universities will go away, but at least half of them should go away.
Academia is a sick joke, these days.
Well, that’s pretty blatant.
Disturb the grift, and they’ll come after everything you have, know or love. The game is extortionate at several levels.
The Opportunistic Apparatus is showing it’s hand pretty often these days. No wonder they want Teh InterWebz throttled. Word gets out.
“Disturb the grift.”
Isn’t that what Trump did?
Now, now, easy with the WrongThink about the Orange Man Bad!
(Trump is a symptom, not the cause. Not mine originally, but nails it.)
This is reminding me a bit of the first rule of avalanche rescue. “Don’t create more victims.” Everyone hopping in to help Gay has now opened themselves up to further scrutiny, because no one I suspect is doing this out of the kindness of their heart.
Will Ackman become a MAGA supporter or is he going to stay with the liberals and attempt to change their evil intentions? Because the one thing for sure, he’ll never succeed in changing those murderers.
I suspect his motivation in this is not altruistic, but rather to create a massive short opportunity somehow.
Who knows? Enough slings and arrows from strident leftists redpilled the very liberal Naomi Wolf… though she may still be the last person among her acquaintances to realize it
We’ve all seen the video clips and memes of herds of reporters using identical language to describe a news event. How likely is it that if plagiarism scrutiny is applied to journalists that absolutely staggering amounts of it will be found?
I’ll certainly be interested to what investigation of Business Insider yields.
I’ll certainly be interested to SEE what investigation of Business Insider yields.