Settle for what's sufficient!

Author that uses his last two setences to tell the reader
1) He's never had an internship
2) He's generically alright for the job



Coming Thursday: A cautionary short story about drugs!

The BG News and Wikipedia

I'm sure that plagiarism has happened at college newspapers across the country, so I set out looking. So far I haven't come up with much in googling through a few articles, but this Kid Icarus review from The BG News and its similarities to the Kid Icarus Wikipedia entry got me thinking.

Let's check out a few quotes.

-----

From Article:
"Pit runs and jumps vertically and horizontally across levels, just like Mario. He shoots arrows much like Samus Aran shoots her gun in the original "Metroid." He also collects treasures just as Link does in "The Legend of Zelda" series. There are also some RPG elements involved."

From Wiki:
"In volume 204 of Nintendo Power, an article was written about the game describing it as blending together elements from The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. and Metroid, stating that Pit can 'jump like Mario, collect items like Zelda, and shoot enemies like Metroid.' "

From Article:
"Released on the same date and using the same game engine as the original "Metroid," "Kid Icarus" was overshadowed and forgotten by those who had not played it."

[By the way, this fact seems wrong. My own wikipedia search says that Kid Icarus was released in July 1987, and Metroid in August of the same year]

From Wiki:
"Kid Icarus is often compared to Metroid (which was released the same year), as it uses the same game engine."

-----

So, is this plagiarism or coincidence? What if, instead of a video game review, this was a sociology paper submitted to a journal (and, obviously, was about sociology instead of wii virtual console games)?

I emailed BGNews editors yesterday, letting them know this was going up and asking for comment. They did not respond.

Ethnic studies credit?

Sarah Hewitt was kind enough to submit this, adding Albion College to the list of colleges we've seen submissions from.



Know someone at Albion? Why not forward this site to them to help us spread? More readers = more papers.

Updates over break

Michigan just started its week long winter break. I think I have enough papers to do a couple updates over the next week, so check back.

Ban Me

I think it's pretty obvious why Middlebury College banned Wikipedia.

Also, what's with including "Ann Arbor" in the citation? Last time I checked, Wikipedia loads the same around here as it does anywhere else in the world (China and Iran excluded).

Daily Writer Commits Plagiarism

According to an Editor's Note in today's paper, an Arts Writer committed some serious copy-and-paste style plagiarism. Given this now-ironic entry, our previous plagiarism discussions, and the fact that the Daily is all over the fishbowl, I figured this was relevant to this site.

The Daily's editor's note (figured this would be more legible than a scan)

I did some googling. Here's what I came up with.



Here's an Image Socket mirror in case the ImageShack link goes down:


Plagiarism is bringing the world to an end.

Congrats Devika: You just got yourself fired and made the Daily look stupid. I don't know how you figured you could plagiarize four out of your seven articles (according to a search on the Daily website) and make it out unscathed.

Edit (3/26/07): See also this editor's note. Daga also plagiarized in four other articles. In other words, it seems that every article she wrote had plagiarism in it.

Link: "Cancer #1" Flash Animataion

Too bad I don't know how to use Flash, or I could make flash/podcast comics like this: Cancer Has Become The #1 Killer Disease

Current Mood: Freshman

Ctool-bag

Better update coming later in the day. Till then, let's discuss this:




This is really just a test print that someone printed hastily, right?

[Insert amazing transition here]
What's the worst excuse you've heard someone give for a late paper?

Edit: today I found a similar printout that said "we can't find gobluewolverine.com," which would support the theory that this is only a test print.

Fresh Meat

Remember when I found A Comic With Turkeys back in January? It now has a source: one of the author's friends told her about the site, the author commented, and now, after a couple emails, here we have the found page (page 3) in context.

Here are all 5 pages of Emily Canosa's "Fresh Meat."



She writes the following:
"I'm working on a comic compilation of work from various artists that's going to be published in April, and the turkey/chicken one is something of mine I left behind when putting together a grant proposal. It's not 100% done, but here's the rest!
[...]The upcoming publication is called Comic Exposure, and it's all comics from a variety of artists and writers that address social or political issues. It's coming out in late April, and there's gonna be a release event at the Vault of Midnight."

So that answers our questions about that.

As far as I know, this is the first instance of someone claiming ownership of something seen on this blog.

On another note: if any of your are around campus computing sites on Monday (especially at UMich) could you be on the lookout for grabs? It's midterms season which means papers, papers, papers. Kick me an email with what you find.

On Vacation w/ a TV that doesn't receive calls

Handwritten stuff just has so much more character than printed documents.



My translation:

"On Vacation...
-I don't do anything except tan.
-I am not stressed at all.
-No one talks to be because my phone* does not work when I am not in the United States."

This person also took the time to translate "I <3" to "J'aime"

*Edit: As Srah points out in the comments, télé is actually the word for television, not phone. I'm guessing her TV doesn't receive calls inside the United States either.

Lois is a connector

The fishbowl is pretty dry for material today: luckily we've got these B-School slides. Taken from a sheet of six, these three slides seem to be about how to evaluate the relationships you have with people to figure out if you can use them in work. I like how everything on the "Weak Ties" list is just the obvious opposite of the "Strong Ties" list.

I'm told that there's a whole class about networking? I guess that would explain the letters to businessmen and women saying "Thank you for your time and meeting with me" early last semester.



How does "The Strength of Weak Ties" in any way relate to the material on this slide anyhow?

I'll be checking again later for more stuff at the fishbowl. If I find anything good it'll be up early tomorrow morning.

Ecofeminism!

Dana Khan keeps us updated on what all those school of natural resource kids at the Dana Building are up to.



Elsewhere on the internet, someone wrote this regarding this poem:
"Whether I agree or not with your stance or your feelings, this is a very, very well-written poem. Surprisingly so. I'm quite impressed. I like your repetition ("Should you desert, revert, undo") & that sense of not being able to take back love already given, which makes your poem more universal.

Like all truly brilliant poems, this one is occasional, written for a specific situation and emotion, yet it is universally identifiable, all with clear & concise imagery & wonderful diction. Well done."

Praise be upon Wikipedia

And Wikipedia said "I shall be a voice for the people on this Earth."

Only found one page of this, but I like to think that I found the very best one. I'm sure there's a lot more comments that could be made on this person's perspective on medicine and eating disorders, but I don't even know how to address it in such a small space.

SomethingAwful: Mystery Box

Given the found-item nature of this site, I figured some of you out there might be interesting in this recent SA forum thread in which a goon has a big box of random old photos, notes, and booklets left on his doorstep. The thread isn't NSFW, but I still feel like you don't wanna be caught browsing forums if you're at work. Just a heads up.

The Five Paragraph Essay

New horrible papers are on their way. Until then, I wanted to write about something different:

If there's any form of paper writing that needs to die, it's the five paragraph essay. They're really popular for standardized high school tests in Michigan, mostly because they're easy to grade. Oddly enough, they still have a place here at the University of Michigan. The format goes like this:

Paragraph 1: Introduction
Paragraph 2: Antithesis
Paragraph 3: Info
Paragraph 4: Info
Paragraph 5: Conclusion

And the writer is not to deviate from the structure!
Back in high school, I had to do one of these essays in preparation for the MEAP. I did all this research and put together an essay I thought was pretty good, but my slight deviations (saving the antithesis for the fourth paragraph for example) earned me a C: not because I didn't write well, but because I observe the rules of the five paragraph essay.
Furthermore, the red ink suggested that it was a huge error on my part to allow my conclusion paragraph to analyze and wrap up. According to the powers that be, the conclusion cannot introduce any new information. The author is not allowed to analyze: only to repeat what he has already said as if the reader might have forgotten the point of the paper in the time it took him to read a few paragraphs.

In the end it goes something like this [if I were writing about five paragraph essays]:

In this blog post, I am going to convince you that five paragraph essays suck. They're awful.
Some may say that five paragraph essays are great. They are wrong.
This is a short paragraph where I can't cram in any info.
This is another short paragraph. Too bad I can't have a third info paragraph.
Conclusion paragraph that consists of what I just wrote less than a page ago.

Is this how we're going to teach kids to write a good essay? A child would do considerably better if someone taught him how to write a several-paragraph essay where the paragraphs transition nicely from one to another. Why teach a kid to fill up all his essays with dead words? There's something wrong about an essay where only two out of five paragraphs have good, solid information.

Dentistry is Rainbows

It's also a hands-on profession.

Blockhead

The first of two posts for today.

Quick Hits: Listening, Critique, Language

Excerpts from three different papers.

Let's talk about internships.

Found by our pal Dana Khan

Now, I give these resumes I find a lot of crap for being sneaky ways to say you did data entry, and I thought i'd be interesting to start up a discussion about this. Who out there knows somebody (or is somebody) that's had an intership that's something more than fly-on-the-wall experience? What percentage of interships are really great ones, and how many of 'em are glorified data entry? Are the intereships in this resume more than I think they are? It seems to me that if they really did anything of major value, they'd be more specific about it rather than using all the vague words like they do.


If that's too small to read, here's a version thats 1000px wide (click on it once you get to the image to make it bigger):

Updates this week

Updates this week may not be as regular as usual: my desktop computer is down and out and , until I have the stuff I need to fix it, I can't get at certain files. I may just end up posting a couple days worth of stuff on fewer weekdays.

Morphine Emails

I really can't believe I found these emails. Below are emails from a daughter to her father here in Ann Arbor. Googling of the sender and recipient's names tells me that "Dad" was born before the 1920's and the daughter now has kids of her own and has moved away across the country. [I'm fortunate that both of these people are known enough to have webpages that mention or profile them]. I don't wanna give too much else away about the letters' content. But if this were a book, I would read it.



Sorry that I had to blur so many names. I wanted to be extra careful.

Global Warming Soapbox

Because whit found this paper in the library, we now have the knowledge necessary to save the planet!