Assorted Links

  • Plagiarism by Dr. Shervert Frazier, a Harvard psychiatrist and at one point director of the National Institute of Mental Health
  • David Shenk on talent & genius: why rely on homilies when we have data?
  • Should practice tests have warning labels? Apparently. A University of Central Florida business professor creates a test using a test bank, tells students he wrote the test, and says students who studied questions from the test bank are cheaters!

3 thoughts on “Assorted Links

  1. “As anyone who has worked with him knows, he is …not a detail person”: then he’s not a scientist.

    P.S. Is that really the same Harvard that’s been giving an easy ride to the monkey chap?

  2. hard to say with frazier. clearly bad to plagiarize, but when i look at the actual examples cited in the article, it looks like he plagiarized what is essentially stock text and put it forward as his own. he’s taking credit for other people’s words, but is he taking credit for their ideas? i know that happens too, and it’s not called plagiarism. what exactly is it called? it seems like that should be regarded as worse, but is it?

    i know that when i did research and wrote papers in mathematics i would often need to reiterate a standard argument — often i couldn’t rely on the audience the paper was geared toward knowing it. i wouldn’t always cite a reference if the reference was, say, “any graduate-level algebra text”. and i wouldn’t have been surprised if i did it in the same way as a text i had read before. there’s only so much eloquence to go around.

    also, i bet that _a lot_ of people stole little bits of text here and there before it became easy to find out about it.

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