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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!
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To: Bill who wrote (72540)1/21/2000 5:15:00 AM
From: nihil  Read Replies (1) of 108807
 
Plagiarism is far from the worst academic crime. At least in plagiarism, one is usually stealing from something worthwhile that one believes is true. No one should be deceived about the substance, only the authorship, which seldom matters ultimately. If you plagiarize and unknown student you can usually get away with it for years, so you get the degree and get promoted and because you've stolen nothing worth while you can expect to get away with it. If you plagiarize someone really famous, you'll be caught almost immediately. I remember lunching with some distinguished widely published academics, and the talk turned to plagiarism. Everyone at the table (except me) had been egregiously plagiarized in published articles and books. It was routine. Few universities subscribed to all second rate or worse journals.
There are few defenses to plagiarism. There are some scholars who have the unfortunate ability to remember vast amounts of what they read verbatim. My uncle had a nearly perfect photographic memory, and could find what he sought by turning over the pages in his mind. The Homeric bards remembered tens of thousands of lines, and the "author" was the one who first wrote it down. Much of what we say and write is plagiarized from the fathers and mothers of our literature. I was once delighted to discover I had written a beautiful song --- then I discovered that Grieg had written it years before. The Bible is composed almost entirely of plagiarism (some of the Psalms are attributed). Shakespear was a master plagiarist. Big deal.
The greatest academic crime is stealing credit from a student. A graduate student at Cambridge discovered the quasar. Her professor stole the credit and received the Nobel prize. Ethical physicists always give them joint credit.
The next greatest crime is telling a lie, faking data. This is serious because it makes people waste time.
Another crime is publishing estimates with incorrectly defined error limits.
Yet another is fail to cite "prior art" because one has not done the necessary research. A Swedish economist accused Keynes of this offense of what he called "unnecessary Anglo-Saxon originality!" This is the most common form of scholarly tort, a form of negligence.
Newton and Leibniz insulted each other over calculus priority for years. Newton had the idea first, but wouldn't publish but wrote Leibnitz.
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