mcpackieh

What is striking about the allegations of plagiarism against President Gay is that the improprieties are routine and pervasive.

She is accused of plagiarism in her dissertation and at least two of her 11 journal articles. Two sentences from the acknowledgement section of her dissertation even seem to have been copied from another work.

Presuming the allegations are true, I find it interesting that it went unaddressed for so long. The matter was seemingly systematically ignored for almost 30 years until she pissed off the wrong people by allowing students to protest against Israel. Then people went digging for something to use against her and found this plagarism. From the NYTimes:

After weeks of tumult at Harvard over the university’s response to the Israel-Hamas war and the leadership of its president, Claudine Gay, there was no shortage of interest in a faculty forum with Dr. Gay this week.

In a town hall held over Zoom on Tuesday with several hundred members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Gay focused on how to bridge the deep divides that had emerged on campus as a result of the war, according to two people who attended and asked for confidentiality because of the sensitivity of the situation.

Faculty members who spoke up in the meeting were largely positive, and there were no questions about Dr. Gay’s academic record after public allegations of plagiarism. The matter wasn’t even raised, one professor said.

But by Thursday, new questions surrounding Dr. Gay’s scholarship had shifted to the forefront, after the university said late Wednesday that it had identified two more instances of what it called “duplicative language without appropriate attribution,” from her 1997 doctoral dissertation.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/us/harvard-claudine-gay-p...

"War on __" doesn't imply an irrational war on __

I'm not sure I buy that. I think the reputation of soldiers varies greatly with the public perception of the wars they fought. Soldiers are highly regarded when they're seen to be fighting some great evil, but at other times soldiers are considered to be fools or even among the lowest strata of society (particularly before the modern era.)

WW2 veterans receive near universal praise, but in the Vietnam era there were widespread (probably heavily exaggerated if not fabricated) reports of soldiers being spat on because a whole lot of people didn't think America's military adventurism was really in defense of America. Of course those who felt that the war was necessary in the fight against communism to defend the American way of life had a more positive view of the same soldiers. In more recent wars with all volunteer soldiers I think the reputation of soldiers is just as polarized although usually the negative side doesn't go further than cool sniffs and sneers; the spitting was probably all apocryphal in the first place. Certainly you won't see me going around thanking Iraq vets for their service; they signed up for a stupid war and I'm not going to thank them for making that mistake. I won't look down on a soldier who got drafted, but those soldiers who signed up for the travel, job experience, college education, etc are essentially mercenaries anyway.

We need to have severe penalties for negligent DMCA takedowns, not just willfully malicious ones. Including disbarment and possibly imprisonment for any lawyers involved. Taking down pages about NASA rocketry because they shared a name with a social media model was probably an accident, but it's an inexcusable accident that never should have happened. These kind of accidents wouldn't happen so often if the people issuing takedowns were forced to have skin in the game.

It's well respected in the sense that when you're at a dinner party and tell people that you're a school teacher everybody says "Oh how nice! that's such an important job. You must love working with the kids, right? So rewarding to be able to make a difference"

Contrast when you tell somebody you're a lawyer or lobbyist, some people will be impressed but other people will get a bit uncomfortable and try to change the subject or start telling "lawyer jokes".

What did the lawyer name his daughter? Sue!

The fact that nobody was injured in the previous incident is fortunate for anybody who might have been injured then, but doesn't diminish the importance of addressing whatever flaw caused the explosion. Considering that we're talking about a lot of liquid helium being improperly vented, the next time something goes wrong it could end up asphyxiating a hundred people.

Just because nobody was in the danger zone the first time it exploded doesn't mean you should count on nobody being in the danger zone the second or third time it might explode. This is the reason work site safety officers yell at people to report all near-miss incidents, not only the accidents that get people hurt. If something went wrong and nobody got hurt by chance coincidence, it might happen again when people are actually near it. Therefore a near miss incident needs to be addressed with the same seriousness as an accident that actually caused injury.

Tell us how you really feel. :)

Anybody who says that deserves a prompt smack. I told you how I feel you smarmy parasitic prick.

You nose detects it and your brain reacts to it; it's odor. Just because you don't consciously perceive it doesn't mean it isn't odor. If it isn't odor then there isn't any other good word for it.

You've rightly hedged with "sometimes", the article on the other hand is very whiggish and seems to incline that any perception of decline at any time in any place is a cognitive bias and not representative of reality. What about in the UK during and in the years after WW2, when rationing continued and in some cases got even worse even after the war ended and average body weights were dropping? Where people who perceived a decline there and then operating under delusions and believing things which weren't true? Do their experiences at the time not count because a generation later things started to recover? Or maybe their experiences don't count because the decline of the British empire was actually a good thing from certain points of view and anybody who saw it as a decline had an invalid opinion?

Or maybe because technology seems to march inexorably onward, decline in other aspects of life are wholly negated and therefore anybody who perceives any decline is wrong. If rent and groceries now account for a larger portion of an average worker's spending but ipads got twice as fast, does that mean that people who perceive a decline are objectively wrong?

In any case, I don't think anyone is qualified to credit or discredit a claim in a medical or psychologically diagnostic sense without a clinical interview (something that few psychiatrists are qualified to perform by the way). That's not what I'm doing here. What I'm pointing out is the unreliability of recovered memory.

Uh huh... and in another comment in this discussion you've gone on to speculate that she has BPD, with the implication that her accusations shouldn't be believed for that reason.

So let me get this straight, your training as a psychoanalyst qualifies you to discredit a woman's testimony, despite you never having met with her? How wonderful.

By the way, have you read this?

Today, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) reiterates its continued and unwavering commitment to the ethical principle known as "The Goldwater Rule." We at the APA call for an end to psychiatrists providing professional opinions in the media about public figures whom they have not examined, whether it be on cable news appearances, books, or in social media. Armchair psychiatry or the use of psychiatry as a political tool is the misuse of psychiatry and is unacceptable and unethical.

https://www.psychiatry.org/newsroom/news-releases/apa-calls-...

When chemicals float through the air into your nose or mouth and get detected by your brain, that's odor. Conscious perception or unconscious emotional reaction makes no difference, both are odor. If there are no chemicals being emitted or they have no reaction to your nose and your nose doesn't change the signals it's sending to your brain, then you can fairly say it has no odor.

To say that odors aren't odors unless they are consciously perceived is like saying UV isn't light because you don't consciously perceive it. Except it's the same physical phenomena, electromagnetic radiation or chemicals floating through the air, your sensory organs are detecting it (mostly being destroyed by it in the case of UV, but probably not in the case of tear odor...) and your brain is reacting to it even though you don't consciously realize it.

If tears are being detected by the brain, it's through chemicals from the tears traveling through the air and landing on sensors in your nose (or mouth); that is odor. If there is some mechanism other than odor by which humans might distinguish tears them from saline solution after sniffing them, please tell me.

Odors also being detected with your tongue is irrelevant trivia which doesn't alter my conclusion. Sound can be heard through your chest but that's irrelevant trivia when somebody says "if there's no air to transmit pressure waves to your ears then there's no sound." Sound is transmitted through pressure waves in the air, and odors are transmitted through chemicals in the air. If you're hearing them with your ears or chest or smelling them with your nose or mouth makes no difference, the fact that any detection is evidently taking place shows that there is sound or odor involved. Furthermore, the researchers obviously suspect that the mechanism of detection is odor because they asked their subjects to sniff it. You don't ask subjects to sniff a thing unless you suspect odor of being involved. If researchers were studying the perception of magnetic fields, they wouldn't ask people to sniff the fields.

Again, if there is any other plausible mechanism for detection, then tell me. Otherwise, stop wasting my time.

If they think it's being absorbed through the lungs then they should plug the subjects noses and have them inhale instead of sniffing it. But that's a far fetched assumption. Assuming the effect is real at all, it's almost certainly chemical detection through the nose. That's odor. That's why they had the subjects sniff it, because they obviously suspect that it's based on odor.

If both are actually odorless then what's the mechanism? Magic?

Obviously if there is any effect then the tears aren't actually odorless.

What's a viable business model for web search other than ads (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Naver, etc.) or paid search (Kagi)?

Not my problem. Those companies, and any other with business models reliant on advertising, don't have a right to exist. If your business can't be profitable without child labor, your business has no right to exist. This is no different.

You think it implausible that somebody might grow weary of discussing such dreary things?

I've used several laptops as file servers in hot apartments without AC and haven't had issues. The trick is to make sure you're not running a bunch of bloat you don't need (which is the root cause of 99% of "my old computer became slow") Slap something like debian on the laptop and don't even bother installing a desktop environment. The load of an NFS server sitting there idle most of the time and a few other system services doing basically nothing is negligible, any laptop should be able to handle it in 40 C weather. If not then you probably have some dust issues, so blow it out and see if the issue resolves itself. Keep the screen partially open (you can turn it off though) to help with ventilation.

I've never had any laptop die while operating like this. I only replace them when I replace my primary use laptop with something new, demoting my last primary use laptop to the server role.

websites shouldn't be able to make money from advertising at all.

This is the case. Advertising is a scourge, psychological warfare waged by corporations against our minds and wallets. Advertisers have no moral qualms, they will exploit any psychololgical weakness to shill products, no matter how harmful. Find a "market" of teenagers with social issues? Show them ads of happy young people frolicking with friends to make them buy your carbonated sugar water; never mind that your product will rot their teeth and make them fat. Advertisers don't care about whether products are actually good for people, all they care about is successful shilling.

Advertising is warfare waged by corporations against people and pretending otherwise makes you vulnerable to it. To fight back effectively we must use adblockers and advocate for advertising bans. If your website cannot exist without targeted advertising, then it is better for it to not exist.

That data come from surveying people directly, not data aggregated through medical professionals. So no, your supposition is incorrect. Transgender people really do report a 4x higher rate of severe long covid symptoms as "cisgendered" people. That's according to their own answers to surveys, not according to doctors.

If you think the result is anomalous, then explain why transgender sufferers of severe long covid are more likely to respond to surveys than any other sufferer of severe long covid.

Response to hnbad's flagged response: "people who believe long COVID is a thing are more likely to seek out a long COVID diagnosis whereas those believing it's not a thing are more likely to "push through" and remain undiagnosed even when their condition may be severe and debilitating."

Real and earnest "severe and debilitating" afflictions aren't something you can successfully "push through" and remain productive with. If you can push through them, and evidently most of the working class can, then at the very least it's certainly not as severe and debilitating as advertised. Some people may earnestly have some mild lingering fatigue issues, as is the case after any viral infection, but that's about it. However that doesn't make severe disabling long covid, the sort that would actually hurt the economy, a hoax. There is a difference between a hoax and delusion. A hoax is a falsehood promulgated by somebody who knows it isn't true. Long covid is a hysteria promulgated by people who earnestly believe it is true, to their own detriment.

What a strange remark. Would you object to somebody saying they are tired of human conflict, hunger, disease? These have all existed for the entirety of humanity, so by your thinking people cannot be tired of them?

And the reason they insist on checking the ID of a 40 year old man with gray in his beard and photoaged skin is because... 1) A teenager might be a special effects makeup artist.. or 2) because the law compels them to be bureaucratic twats who follow the rules even when the rules make no sense.

The correct answer is number 2, and that's the real reason they won't accept expired IDs either.

Incidentally, the TSA does accept expired IDs. I flew with one and TSA didn't say anything to me; they scanned it into their computer then waved me through like normal. Then the bartender at the airport pointed it out and refused to serve me.

they don't want to be in the legacy media licensing business.

Isn't that business basically free money? The way I see it, no capital investment is needed. You just need to keep a few accountants and lawyers around to handle occasional licensing paperwork. Am I missing something?

I'm answering the question "How do I pronounce ...?" The procedure is the same for any name or technical term. You pronounce it however you feel is best (which will mean different people pronounce it in different ways.) Then if anybody feels strongly about it, a simple social protocol is used to negotiate a different pronunciation. It's not any different, it works the same for any pronunciation ambiguity.

Why should they settle for lesser protection of the word engineer when they're winning their legal battles to protect the word engineer itself?

You literally suppressed the discussion.

You pronounce Riza the same way you pronounce any other name; whichever way feels most natural to you the speaker. If the person with that name wants you to pronounce it another way, they'll tell you (and if they aren't in earshot, then it doesn't matter.) Pronunciations are clarified using this simple social protocol.

About half the people I encounter pronounce my last name "wrong", I correct them if I'm in the mood to care, and that's it.

Your impression of a consensus is shaped by lopsided censorship and suppression of the other side.

98% of assistant professors say they self-censor, and 81% of those say they're self-censoring views critical of Israel. That's 79% of assistant professors who would be voicing opinions against Israel if not for the pressure they perceive to silence themselves. If anything, your perception of consensus is completely backwards.

Of course both claims are false, but they are nevertheless popular points of view, and the popularity of these points of view explain why academics feel suppressed. That's the point I'm making here, I thought that was clear.

Aaand it's flagged. This kind of discussion is suppressed on HN too, not just on campuses.