Hard News: Just Friday
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if you get my drift
I think I'm overdue for some flu.. :)
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I wonder how much of the stealing other people's work stuff is generational? To me, the "apology" seemed like sorry I got caught.
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They are also describing a possible link between paracetamol use in children and later asthma.
And yet most doctors pretty near force the stuff on you no matter what you take your kid in for.
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Okay: Anaheim fan, disrespecting my oral hygiene... I now officially hate you.
Said like a man whose team is running 24th out of 30.
Russell can correct me, but isn't the usual process on student radio stations, who can't afford a news gathering team or even Reuters/NZPA, to source stories from other media and put them in the journalists own words.
Many years ago it was heard on Radio One something along the lines of "We would read you the news now, but someone stole our ODT, so we don't have any sorry." They do more of their own now.
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Okay: Anaheim fan, disrespecting my oral hygiene... I now officially hate you.
Said like a man whose team is running 24th out of 30.
The sound you just heard? That was me dropping my gloves.
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dropping my gloves
In a threatening manner, old chap?
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In a threatening manner, old chap?
Is there any other manner?
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Carelessly?
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poisoning yourself with paracetamol has to be a fairly dumb way to self-harm - leading to a prolonged painful death from liver failure
I used to know a medical student who worked in an A&E unit; she said they were constantly pumping out teenage girls who had taken lots of paracetamol because they had been dumped by their boyfriends and wanted to show the boyfriends how upset they were. The paracetamol just happened to be the nearest pills to hand. Whether they really wanted to kill themselves, or to do themselves any real harm, is another matter.
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Hi Russell,
Just wondering if you would be able to tell us how the Chickens gig was either by review or a link to a review......am really annoyed I won't be able to see them due to being a hell of a long way away.....the children's hour gig in 2005 was stonking, and I'm picking the Chickens will be the same.
Fond memories of many crazy gigs from the early '90's.....and C Mathews on stage banter.....
thanks in advance.
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The sound you just heard? That was me dropping my gloves.
Man. Those are really nasty gloves dude. No palm at all.
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Whether they really wanted to kill themselves, or to do themselves any real harm, is another matter
"Silliest bottom burp? Rik." </quote> Young Ones fans will get it...
Seriously, I'm not being insensitive, really. I've had students who've tried to top themselves (and I've heard of some who've done more than try) and I won't go into the details, except to say that being a high-functioning alcoholic is wayyy preferable. Young women do seem to be very "brittle" students - they can do well, but if they're very bright and are used to good grades, a bad grade or a persistent bad grade in a writing-skills dependent paper when everything else in other realms is going well - due to dyslexia, for example - can be literally unbearably horrible for them (personal experience of one very talented design student in this case) (ah, she did very well in the end, if anyone's worried).
Knowing people who've tried and some who've succeeded (surely many of us have...), there are some people who do the "cry for help" kind of suicide attempt and use it as a stick to beat other people around them while others are more deeply confused and desperate. I'm afraid in the former case, I've come to despise the selfishness and cruelty of the persons involved after the third or forth staged attempt and seeing their subsequent treatment of those who tried to help them, at great emotional cost to themselves.
On the other hand, consciousness is a much overrated quality. People say and do things believing them utterly at one level while being compelled at a preconscious level by forces and instincts that are not at all rational in the sense that we mean it, but logical according to emotional rules. We seem to be a species that acts according to dramatic impulses and patterns and retrospectively finds "rational" justifications for our actions as a reflex... so perhaps the self-dramatising would-be-suicides deserve more sympathy too - though it's damned hard work when you see why some in truly desperate circumstances have tried and actually pulled themselves back from the brink rather than blaming everyone else around them. No doubt professionals can give a more coherent explanation than I.
Sorry, that's getting rather heavy.
On the plagiarism issue - for students, it's pretty clear cut, but in one case, one of the best essays I ever got was by a guy who included about a tenth or a fifth of his own words and used the rest of his wordcount as quotes - attributed - to make a hilarious and quite incisive and critical mock-interview with his subject.
I may be stereotyping here, but students from Asian cultures are taught to defer/refer to the master in their work, with the fact that they have done so being taken for granted. The bother of formal citation is dispensed with not so much out of a deliberate attempt to deceive so much as the result of a habit engendered in circumstances where it was mutually understood that the known authority was being respected and overt citation was needless pedantry. I find that I have to explain that proper citation does not imply that one would be dishonest in its absence, but that it's just one of those hoops that we silly Westerners want everyone to jump through.
My point, if there is one, is that apparent plagiarism is not necessarily piracy by deliberate malice... and I gather that Generation Y is taking the principle that information wants to be free to heart. That's going to lead to some very interesting legal discussions, as it has already - and some fundamental changes in how society comes to view intellectual property rights as the years pass (current reactions still being largely determined by print media standards). I refuse to make any predictions...
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Funnily enough, I think that "a discussion on octopuses and the Rubik’s cube" is far more interesting and newsworthy because of what it implied about cognition anf the fourth or fifth dethronement (1, Copernicus saying that we're not at the centre of the universe; 2, Darwin saying that we're not at the pinnacle of creation; 3, Freud saying that we're not even masters of our own minds) than any bullshit about the Rugby World Cup or John Key's favourite movie (Mr Bean Drops Acid or whatever).
I would sooo love to see TVNZ News have this headline: "Breaking news - yet more proof has come in that we are indeed only shaved monkeys. We will be spending the next three hours looking at this in depth and won't even hint at referring to creationists to give the fatuous appearance of 'balance'. By the way, there has been another outbreak of simian poo-flinging in parliament this week and reporting on that will be an anthropologist, not Mark Fucking Self-Important Sainsbury."
Does that make me a nerd?
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Whether Noelle's plagiarism was at the lower end of the scale or not I think is irrelevant - above nothing else is it not about having professional pride in her own work? It would have taken 30 seconds to rehash those sentences.
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It would have taken 30 seconds to rehash those sentences
Well, a bit longer. It's actually hard work paraphrasing without seeming to be merely reshuffling words and when you're just giving throwaway titbits on air, it's easy to slip into repetition. Storm in a bloody teacup, really, except to the amoebae that have temporarily morphed into bipedal form at t' Harold and the SST who want some drama and daren't risk overstraining their nuclei.
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Generation Y is taking the principle that information wants to be free to heart
And perhaps a subconscious realisation of that is driving (curmudgeonly) media interest in this instance of plagiarism that I'm reading is at the "lower end" of some scale.
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So, is Noelle McCarthy's passing off sections of the work of others as her own inherently different from that for which Alexis Stuart lost her job?
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That's it, I guess - we have to deal with degrees rather than essentialist judgments. Quothe Paracelsus, "The portion maketh the poison" - mayhaps.
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OK, I must confess I didn't directly hear what she said, but I gather that she uttered words to the effect that something had been discovered and isn't it interesting? rather than explicitly attributing to herself investigative work and insight, so "passing off" (when the journalists she was relying on themselves were only recycling press releases) may imply rather more design on her part than was actually the case.
I'm making an assessment based on the most casual observation, however.
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headless chickens suck balls...
...end of story
goodnight:)
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headless chickens suck balls...
...end of story
goodnight:)
Sooo, is that good or bad?:)
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headless chickens suck balls
With what, given that they have no heads?
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is Noelle McCarthy's passing off sections of the work of others as her own inherently different from that for which Alexis Stuart lost her job?
I can't abide the NatRad afternoon show, so I'm not sure to what extent they're expected to be original, but my general impression is that in radio, reading other people's stuff without attribution is the norm. The most amusing thing about this is that if you read widely on the internet, it usually takes at least a fortnight for it to permeate radio consciousness. Whether it be the latest "Rock News" or "Celebrity Gossip", it's usually pretty stale.
I think the other notable thing about the Stuart incident was her unstated relationship with Maxim/Bruce Logan. As far as I'm aware Ms McCarthy isn't alliedly to a lobby group whose viewpoint she is claiming as her own.
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teaching young kids about plagiarism in these internet times is actually really easy - I think my kids got it at 8 or 9 - it's an obvious thing to do if no one tells you it's bad - there's all this great text around on the 'net, why not use it? It's pretty obvious at that age when they 'write' stuff that isn't theirs - I'd sit down with them and grab 3-4 obvious words and plug them into google - every time up would come whatever it was they'd copied - then I'd explain that their teacher could do that just as easily ....
That's when you get to talk about the difference between copying verbatim and rewriting someones ideas in your own words (and quoting and how much of it you can get away with)
I think that because so much wonderfull stuff is available so easily it's part of a modern education to learn how to use it correctly.
As far as Noelle's concerned I'm tempted to be a little charitable - mostly I think she's doing the thing we all do - "I found this neat web site/article check it out" - but she can't just hand you the URL - she should be pointing you to it of course - so she's basically reading it to us - what she should have done of course is what I've been trying to teach my kids about the web: either quote someone, or do it in your own words
Mind you she's kind of screwed whatever she does doing "I found this cool thing on the web" to a large group almost certainly means there's a bunch of people who think "but I saw that on PA last week"
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On the topic of journalism, a small interjection - I think the author of this Herald article wins some kind of award for Most Inappropriate Metaphor. Just, what.
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