cellio | random bits

I'll be reading torah at Friday-night services at the end of August. Nifty. (And Saturday morning too, but my congregation's main service is Friday night and we read then too.) Reading on Friday night has generally been limited to the rabbis.

Rob at UnSpace (unspace) wrote a good entry about blogs and plagarism today. I know that at some level "information wants to be free", and I've certainly snagged the occasional article from a free-but-registration-required site for my own archives or to share. And maybe I'm depriving the original site of hits, which I hadn't thought about much before. But more importantly to me, even if information wants to be free, it doesn't want to be incorrectly attributed. There's really no excuse for stealing a person's reputation by stealing his words -- especially on the web, where attribution and linking are so easy.

The installation of air conditioning for our second floor continues. Actually, the installation per se is done; we have cool air flowing. Yet to be done is some plaster work to make the holes go away, and a lot of clean-up. I'll be curious to see whether they put the bookcases they moved back in the right places (maintaining alphabetical order); the last contractor who needed to move them didn't get that right on the first try.

Today's mail brought another non-trivial trinket from a charity -- one I've already told to stop doing that. They lose points for two things this time: (1) sending me this stuff anyway (that's not why I sent them money -- and, in fact, it's been more than two years since I sent this one money precisely because of this sort of thing) and (2) sending me a personalized item with someone else's name on it. If the Goltz family is out there, act quickly to claim your piggy bank, 'cause it'll be going out with the trash in the next few days. (That's sad in a way -- if it didn't have a name on it, I might have been able to give it away.)

For those who follow Real Live Preacher (preachermanfeed): he moved his site and someone set up a new RSS feed at ~~rlpreacher_blog~~. I don't know if they're going to eventually edit the original feed with the new link, but you might want to pick up the new one just in case. Edit: They merged the feeds, so you don't need to do anything.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

At one point, I know the only way they could edit the URL of a feed was if there wasn't an LJ feed of the new address. That was at least a year ago, so it may have changed, but I know it was that way at one point. :-(

Plagiarism is a big issue for me because I have to be careful of it every day in my work. One of the things about journalism is that publications tend to cannibalize each other. One news wire reports something, then they all pick it up from the original source. Or you have reporters from 10 different publications hanging out in the same press room, and they all use the same raw material to write 10 slightly different articles saying almost exactly the same thing. It is easy to get sloppy and use someone else's words rather than take the time to think of your own way to say or to reframe the subject by focusing on a different angle of the story. I was taught to be very careful about attributing information, and I work hard to go along with that teaching -- not least because I was at one point accused of plagiarism. The accusation stemmed from a misunderstanding -- someone who didn't know the original material mistook my attribution for straight copying. It was all straightened out in the end, but I was pretty distraught. It was bad enough to begin with, and it happened at one of the lowest emotional points in my life. So yeah, this is a big issue for me.

I read about 600 wpm, and I have an ear for a "turn of phrase." It's not uncommon for me to slam through two or three dozen articles on the web, looking for different things. I not only notice the things I jot down, but sometimes the things I didn't put to paper. I've actually taken to doing searches on really good snippets of writing to make sure I didn't swipe them.

I'm a bit surprised to read that plagiarism can be more than straight copying. If I read a document with a list, even a list with different examples might be plagiarism, if I haven't presented a list with my own "angle" on it. I've probably blown that one.

I wish I'd taken some journalism classes in college.

Rob of UnSpace

It was scary! The incident did drive home to me how important it is to be careful and put me in a position of being able to give tips to other writers, but I would not want to go through it again. *shudder*

According to how I was taught (and FWIW, I never took any journalism classes in college -- did all my learning on the job, starting with my college newspaper), you can avoid issues of plagiarism by reframing information from another source in such a way that 70% of what you write differs obviously from the original. Using the info is fine; using all of the same turns of phrase is not. I have heard of people being accused of plagiarism when it's not straight copying but more like copying 9 out of every 10 words.

Do you know how many friends you've got?

I haven't quite been "Slashdotted," but dang, girl, you is popular!

Thanks.

Sometime I should write about the conflict you mention between information freedom and being a writer. There was this SF story a long time ago where an alien gives humans a duplicator machine, to destroy our economy....

Rob of UnSpace

Do you know how many friends you've got?

Well, I know how many declared readers I have, but how that overlaps with the set of people who read on a regular basis I can't say. (In both directions -- how many people read without explicitly subscribing, like you, and how many people read occasionally or just want to grant access to restricted posts, but don't read regularly?) I don't have access to LJ logs, so I've got no idea.

And, err, sorry about your server. Didn't mean to knock it over.

There was this SF story a long time ago where an alien gives humans a duplicator machine, to destroy our economy....

Which story? That sounds vaguely familiar but I can't conjure up any identifying details.

If the Goltz family is out there, act quickly to claim your piggy bank, 'cause it'll be going out with the trash in the next few days.

Hey, but you could use it as another tzedekah box! Oh, wait, er, the irony of a piggy bank tzedekah box is almost too much for my little brain to take.

It's twisted, but I actually like that idea! It'll go so nicely with my Pesach pot-holders (which have pictures of bagels on them). Though I'd be happier if I could do something about the Goltz label -- nothing personal, y'know, but I'm not them.

Actually, here's an idea -- maybe this little piggy tzedakah box can make the rounds tucked in with the Purim baskets, since Purim is all about things that appear to be something other than they are. Don't be surprised if you find a new tzedakah box in with your goodies some year. :-)

The naming might have been printed on as a cheap personization sort of thing--I'd attempt a few organic solvents on it to see if it can be rubbed off before giving up on the entire item.

Rob's article was really gr4eat. I especially appreciated his acknowledgement of his own fallibility in this area, and his vow to improve. I rarely post about anything that isn't my own personal life, so this isn't often an issue for me, but every now and then it's something I have to think hard about.

Now I'm off to read the EFF Legal Guide for Bloggers per Rob's suggestion. :)

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That must have been scary!

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Friends

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