Ethan

So would you think it were a big deal if it were longer then a single sentence? Say like:

Bradley and Voss:

… the average turnout rate seems to decrease linearly as African Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when changes in one race’s turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other’s across the graph).

Gay:

The average turnout rate seems to increase linearly as African-Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatterplot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race’s turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph.

Or like:

Canon:

The central parts of the VRA are Section 2 and Section 5. The former prohibits any state or political subdivision from imposing a voting practice that will “deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” The latter was imposed only on “covered” jurisdictions with a history of past discrimination, which must submit changes in any electoral process or mechanism to the federal government for approval.^3

Gay:

The central parts of the measure are Section 2 and Section 5. Section 2 reiterates the guarantees of the 15th amendment, prohibiting any state or political subdivision from adopting voting practices that “deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” Section 5, imposed only on “covered” jurisdictions with a history of past discrimination, requires Justice Department preclearance of changes in any electoral process or mechanism.

Also- so you say copying a definition (even when not word for word and completely indistinguishable from your own writing) isn’t plagiarism and copying an explanation of a graph isn’t plagiarism. That’s a bit of weird opinion but you do you. I just have a few more questions to prove your definition of plagiarism.

Would you also say that copying an analysis of a text isn’t plagiarism?

Gilliam:

This paper explores two models-symbolic politics and governing coalitions-that focus on how minority office-holding affects people’s political orientations. In other words, after an extended period of minority empowerment, what is the distribution of political attitudes between and within racial and ethnic groups? Which groups and subgroups positively evaluate the results of governmental action and which groups will hold more negative views? What are the important demographic and political correlates of how citizens respond to minority empowerment?

Gay:

The central question of this chapter is “How does black representation impact attitudes?” More explicitly, what is the distribution of political attitudes between and within racial groups in black-represented districts? How do groups evaluate the presence of black incumbents? What are the important demographic and political correlates of how citizens respond to minority political leadership?

Would you also say that copying an explanation of a law isn’t plagiarism?

Canon:

The central parts of the VRA are Section 2 and Section 5. The former prohibits any state or political subdivision from imposing a voting practice that will “deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” The latter was imposed only on “covered” jurisdictions with a history of past discrimination, which must submit changes in any electoral process or mechanism to the federal government for approval.^3

Gay:

The central parts of the measure are Section 2 and Section 5. Section 2 reiterates the guarantees of the 15th amendment, prohibiting any state or political subdivision from adopting voting practices that “deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” Section 5, imposed only on “covered” jurisdictions with a history of past discrimination, requires Justice Department preclearance of changes in any electoral process or mechanism.

How far are you willing to stretch the definition of plagiarism?

They’re not cherry picked, I’m just not going to list all 47 (as of today, more keep being discovered) instances of plagiarism here. The ones I gave aren’t even the close to the most egregious!

Would you prefer these:

Bradley and Voss:

the average turnout rate seems to decrease linearly as African Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one description of bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatter plot (resulting only when changes in one race’s turnout rate somehow compensated for changes in the other’s across the graph).

Gay:

The average turnout rate seems to increase linearly as African-Americans become a larger proportion of the population. This is one sign that the data contain little aggregation bias. If racial turnout rates changed depending upon a precinct’s racial mix, which is one way to think about bias, a linear form would be unlikely in a simple scatterplot. A linear form would only result if the changes in one race’s turnout were compensated by changes in the turnout of the other race across the graph.

Gilliam:

Historically, politics has been a vehicle for upward mobility among racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Minority political incorporation and the redirection of public resources that is hypothesized to come with it, should alter how people evaluate and relate to their local governments.

Gay:

Historically, politics has been an important vehicle in the mobility (and “mainstreaming”) of racial and ethnic groups in the United States. As a consequence, minority office-holding should alter how people evaluate and relate to government

Yes, I’m going to ignore what some of the people she didn’t cite think, for two reasons. First because it doesn’t matter as to her intent at the time- they didn’t know her, she didn’t know them, they didn’t give her prior permission. Second because she’s the direct boss and controller of funding for many of them so there’s an inbuilt power dynamic there.

Have you read the papers at hand? They absolutely seem indistinguishable from her own writing. You’d never notice that it wasn’t- in fact it wasn’t noticed for years. She incorporates them directly into arguments and explanations as well.

I don’t recall any former president of Harvard needing to have an academic dishonesty tribunal review their work because they all cited their sources properly (it’s not that hard to do!). I’m quite confident that if they had they done that they would’ve been evaluated in the exact same way- other professors at Harvard in similar situations have gone through similar processes and been punished in the past.

Single sentence and partial sentence is a minor issue and totally understandable if it happens a handful of times (everyone forgets citations one point or another). But if it happens nearly 50 times in less then a dozen articles it’s a very consistent pattern of academic dishonesty.

So if your definition of a quotation is something written word for word, whether it is cited or even at all distinguishable from her own work (read them yourself, they very clearly aren’t distinguishable at all), what do you call something where she very clearly doesn’t copy the original text word for word but instead rewrites it to better fit in with her own prose without ever citing it? Maybe something like changing:

“…the statistical correspondence of the demographic characteristics and more “substantive representation,” the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.”

to

"…the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities…”

It’s not a conspiracy theory to suggest that the review board might’ve treated her differently from any random undergraduate because of her status within academia. That’s just human nature, it doesn’t even require intent to do so.

It very clearly wasn’t negligence- she cited plenty of other sources in her work that she didn’t copy word for word. She only left out the ones that she quite directly copied language from and did so on multiple occasions.

The review board let her off easy, giving her the benefit of doubt towards her intentions because she was the esteemed president of the university.

But that’s very clearly not what happened here and it’s detrimental to the discussion at hand to falsely label it as such. She in fact was able to let it slide for multiple months longer than her white counterpart and Penn.

It doesn’t matter one single bit what the people who she plagiarized think about her, if they’re upset by it or not, or if they think she’s a good person or not. That’s not what plagiarism is.

She directly took language from the work of others without prior permission and claimed it to be her own. That’s all the context that is taken for academic dishonesty- if I was accused of plagiarizing my friend’s essay by my department and countered with “but my friend thinks I’m such a good person”, I’d be laughed out of the room.

The same third party board that said she didn’t commit plagiarism while also forcing her to add dozens of missing citations to her work where she directly copied sentences from other articles… Which makes absolutely no sense.

It’s absolutely not flimsy- she’s only written a dozen articles and there’s been concrete examples of plagiarism in at least of a quarter of them. Here is one of 40+ examples of the plagiarism found:

Swain in her article:

“the statistical correspondence of the demographic characteristics and more “substantive representation,” the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.”

Gay in her article:

"the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities.”

Swain in her article:

“Since the 1950s the reelection rate for House members has rarely dipped below 90 percent”

Gay in her article:

"Since the 1950s, the reelection rate for incumbent House members has rarely dipped below 90%”

She never cited Swain in any way until she was forced to do so this year by the review board. If I pulled this in college in more then 25% of my essays I’d most certainly be in front of my department head in a very serious conversation, looking at suspension at least.

Edit: Lol, late breaking news! As of today plagiarism allegations now cover 50%! Half! of her papers as even more examples have come out literally a few hours ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/02/us/harvard-claudine-gay-plagiarism.html

Now I see that she’s black in an important locus of elite power and it suddenly makes a lot more sense.

Not everything has to be a conspiracy about race. The white Penn administrator that screwed up their testimony in the exact same way in the exact same hearing was forced out in the exact same way.

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Creating a paid or ad-supported client app for a website isn’t profiting off of content, it’s profiting off of the user’s desire for a better mobile experience. There’s no ‘stealing’, the developer never has access to nor purports to own any of the content themselves- it’s simply a voluntary intermediary for a user to access their own account with their own content feed.

That said, any client apps that run ads are dumb and will fail miserably. It’s awful for UX. Just so long as client apps can be monetized in other ways I think it’s fine to adopt a license that prohibits specifically ads.

This same story was posted yesterday, so I’ll rewrite what I did back then:

Most of this report is patently ridiculous. HRW asked people who follow the HRW social media accounts to please send in perceived instances of censorship they’ve seen for the Palestinian conflict social media, they got about a thousand examples from a self-selecting population, then published a big exposé about it.

There’s no comparative analysis (either quantitative nor qualitative) to whether similar censorship happened for other topics discussed, other viewpoints discussed, or at other times in the past.They allege, for example, that pro-Palestinian posters didn’t have an option to request a review of the takedown. The obvious next step is to contextualize such a claim- is that standard policy? Does it happen when discussing other topics? Is it a bug? How often does it happen? But they don’t seem to want to look into it further, they just allude to some sense of nebulous wrongdoing then move on to the next assertion. Rinse and repeat.

The one part of the report actually grounded in reality (and a discussion that should be had) is how to handle content that runs afoul of standards against positive or neutral portrayal of terrorist organizations, especially concerning those with political wings like the Hamas. It’s an interesting challenge on where to draw the line on what to allow- but blindly presenting a thousand taken down posts like it’s concrete evidence of a global conspiracy isn’t at all productive to that discussion.

the fact that he could reschedule and effectively legalize marijuana

No he can’t. He can direct the DEA to look into rescheduling the drug, a process he has already started. But he doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally force them to reschedule it. He could theoretically Saturday Night Massacre the DEA into doing it, but they really wouldn’t be a good look.

Most of this entire report is patently ridiculous. They asked people who follow HRW’s social media to please send them instances of censorship on social media, get about 1,500 random examples from a self-selecting population, then publish a big expose about it.

There’s no intensive comparative analysis (statistical or otherwise) to other topics discussed, other viewpoints discussed, or at other times in the past. They allege, for example, that some people didn’t have an option to request a review of the takedown- is that standard policy? Does it happen in other cases? Is it a bug? They don’t seem to want to look into it further, they just allude to some sense of nebulous wrongdoing then move on to the next assertion. Rinse and repeat.

The one part of the report actually grounded in reality (and a discussion that should be had) is how to handle content that runs afoul of standards against positive portrayal of terrorist organizations with political wings like the PFLP and Hamas. It’s an interesting challenge on where to draw the line on what to allow- but cherry picking a couple thousand taken down posts doesn’t make that discussion any more productive in any way.

Because as it’s currently designed Apple is not handling any of the actual transactions- those are handled by the Payment Service Provider that the merchant is required to provide to be granted Apple’s permission to use the API.

If Apple opened it up to non-Merchants (who don’t come with their own PSP), then Apple would have to act as the PSP which is a much larger headache that they don’t want to deal with.

Honestly, BlueSky’s AT Protocol fixes pretty much all of these issues (save for having a single actor controlling things as for the moment it’s still in active development and not adopted by any other project).

Even if you never intend to sign up for or use their protocol, I’d give it a read- it’s a really fascinating system design:

https://atproto.com/guides/overview