Saturday, August 27, 2005
Mars coming closer to Earth
Mars getting closer to earth, space enthusiasts can now get a glimpse of the red planet.
"Mars, which orbits around the sun in about two years, is visible these days after midnight as a bright reddish object in the eastern sky," Amitabh Pandey from the science popularisation association of communicators and educators (space) told newspersons.
Mars is getting closer and brighter and would be the closest and brightest on November 7, when it would be in "opposition". During opposition Mars, sun and the earth are aligned, he said.
On that day, mars would rise as the sun sets, he said. The current time of mars rising is 11.16 pm And it is visible with the naked eye from midnight till early morning.
"The planet will get brighter and brighter night after night as the distance decreases from the present 76 million miles to 62 million miles, B.G. Siddharth, director B.M.Birla Science Center, Hyderabad, said.
Pointing out that there was nothing unusual in the event, he said it was the result of usual planetary motion.
Referring to the discovery of the tenth planet, Siddharth said his center was making arrangements to watch it once the monsoon is over as this new planet would be visible for the next six months.
The planet, designated as 2003 UB 313, has been discovered by Michael Brown of California. It is located about 15 billion km from the sun and is considered to be nearly 50 per cent larger than the ninth planet Pluto.
Bureau Report
"Mars, which orbits around the sun in about two years, is visible these days after midnight as a bright reddish object in the eastern sky," Amitabh Pandey from the science popularisation association of communicators and educators (space) told newspersons.
Mars is getting closer and brighter and would be the closest and brightest on November 7, when it would be in "opposition". During opposition Mars, sun and the earth are aligned, he said.
On that day, mars would rise as the sun sets, he said. The current time of mars rising is 11.16 pm And it is visible with the naked eye from midnight till early morning.
"The planet will get brighter and brighter night after night as the distance decreases from the present 76 million miles to 62 million miles, B.G. Siddharth, director B.M.Birla Science Center, Hyderabad, said.
Pointing out that there was nothing unusual in the event, he said it was the result of usual planetary motion.
Referring to the discovery of the tenth planet, Siddharth said his center was making arrangements to watch it once the monsoon is over as this new planet would be visible for the next six months.
The planet, designated as 2003 UB 313, has been discovered by Michael Brown of California. It is located about 15 billion km from the sun and is considered to be nearly 50 per cent larger than the ninth planet Pluto.
Bureau Report
Plagiarism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Plagiarism refers to the use of another's implementation of ideas, information, language, or writing, when done without proper acknowledgment of the original source. Essential to an act of plagiarism is an element of dishonesty in attempting to pass off the plagiarised work as original. Plagiarism is not necessarily the same as copyright infringement, which occurs when one violates copyright law. Like most terms from the area of intellectual property, plagiarism is a concept of the modern age and not really applicable to medieval or ancient works.
Definition
There is some difference of opinion over how much credit must be given when preparing a newspaper article or historical account. Generally, reference is made to original source material as much as possible, and writers avoid taking credit for others' work.
The use of mere facts, rather than works of creative expression, does not constitute plagiarism. For the latter, the issue of public domain works versus copyrighted works is irrelevant to the concept of plagiarism. For instance, it is legal for a student to copy several paragraphs (or even pages) of text from a public domain book, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and then directly add these quotations to his or her own paper. However if these quotations were not clearly identified as to his or her source, then the student would be guilty of plagiarism, using another writer's work as if it were his or her own. High schools, colleges and universities are especially sensitive to plagiarism, and as a result, they have academic codes of ethics (honor codes) which prohibit plagiarism in all its forms.
Similarly, it is considered plagiarism to take the specifics of someone else's novel idea, and then present it as one's own work. This type of plagiarism frequently occurs in high schools, colleges and universities, when, for example, students use the analyses in "CliffsNotes" and falsely present them as being their own original analysis. A small market has emerged of web sites offering essays and papers for sale to students, while a counter-industry has developed of companies offering services for instructors to compare a student's papers to a database of sources and search for potential plagiarism.
Moreover, just as there can be plagiarism without lawbreaking, it's possible to violate copyright law without plagiarizing. For example, one could distribute the full text of a current bestseller on the Internet while giving clear credit for it to the original author, financially damaging the author and publisher. In this respect, the mere fact that a piece of text is not plagiarized may not suffice to justify its use.
According to some academic ethics codes and criminal laws, a complaint of plagiarism may be initiated or proven by any person. The person originating the complaint need not be the owner of the plagiarized content, nor need there be any active or passive communication from a content owner directing that any investigation or discipline process be initiated in response to the plagiarism.
It is not plagiarism when two (or more) people independently come up with the same idea or analysis.
There is also accidental plagiarism. One case involved a boy whose mother had repeatedly read to him a story as a very small child. Later in life he was writing a story for an assignment, and a story 'came to him', but the story turned out to be exactly that which his mother had read to him as a small child, though he had no recollection of her reading it to him.
According to Diana Hacker, the citation criteria as specified by the MLA (Modern Language Association) (115), APA (American Psychological Association) (157-158), Chicago-Style (186), and others (228-230): "Three different acts are considered plagiarism: (1) failing to cite quotations and borrowed ideas, (2) failing to enclose borrowed language in quotation marks, and (3) failing to put summaries and paraphrases in your own words." A Pocket Style Manual, 4h ed., 2004 Bedford/St. Martin's
Famous examples of plagiarism
Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism as a young girl for a school composition. Mortified, she determined to have all future compositions screened by her friends before submission.
According to a Boston University investigation into academic misconduct, Martin Luther King plagiarized approximately one third of his doctoral thesis. He also appropriated others' text, without credit, for his famous speeches, including "I Have A Dream".
George Harrison was successfully sued for plagiarizing (though perhaps unconsciously) the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" for the melody of his own "My Sweet Lord".
[1]
George later wrote a bitter-lyric song on the subject. Ironically, he also "plagiarized" himself at least once, as the introductory chord for The Beatles' I'm Looking Through You is nearly identical to the introductory chord from End of the Line by his group The Traveling Wilburies.
Senator Joseph Biden was forced to withdraw from the 1988 Democratic Presidential nominations when it was revealed that he had failed a course in law school due to plagiarism. It was also shown that he had copied several campaign speeches, notably those of British Labour leader Neil Kinnock and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In both cases he was essentially exonerated.
[2].
Popular historian Stephen Ambrose has been criticized for incorporating passages from the works of other authors into many of his books.
Psychology professor René Diekstra, also well-known as author of popular books, left Leiden University in 1997 after accusations of plagiarism. Proceedings continued as of 2003, with Diekstra contesting a report about him on this matter.
Alex Haley was permitted to settle out-of-court for $650,000, having admitted that he copied large passages of his novel Roots from The African by Harold Courlander.
Eres tú, Spanish song at the Eurovision Song Contest 1973 was a plagiarism of Slovenian (then Yugoslav) song from ESC 1966 (Berta Ambrož: Brez Besed) but due to political reasons (Cold War) it wasn't disqualified.
Jayson Blair, then a reporter for the New York Times, plagiarized many articles and faked quotes in high-profile stories, including the Jessica Lynch and Beltway sniper attacks cases. He and several high-ranking editors from the Times resigned in June 2003.
Moorestown, New Jersey, high-school student Blair Hornstine had her admission to Harvard University revoked in July 2003 after she was found to have passed off speeches and writings by famous figures including Bill Clinton as her own original prose in articles she wrote as a student journalist for a local newspaper.
In 2003, the United Kingdom Government was accused [3] of copying some text from the work of a CSU Monterey Bay post-graduate student for its security dossier on Iraq, dubbed by the media the 'dodgy dossier'.
The doctoral thesis written by Kimberly Lanegran at the University of Florida was copied nearly verbatim by Marks Chabedi and submitted at the New School. When Lanegran discovered this, she launched an investigation into Chabedi, and he was fired from a professorship at University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and New School revoked his Ph.D.
Kim Lanegran's account of this incident published in the Chronicle of Higher Education
A retraction issued by a scholarly journal that published an article Chabedi plagiarized
(For those who wish to look up the actual dissertations in Dissertation Abstracts Online, the OCLC number for Lanegran's dissertation is AAG9801108 and the OCLC number for Chabedi's "dissertation" is AAI9980001.)
The 1922 film Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Stoker's widow sued the producers of Nosferatu, and had many of the film's copies destroyed (although some exist to this day).
Science fiction author Harlan Ellison sued and won in a case against James Cameron, claiming that his film The Terminator plagiarized his episodes "Soldier" and "Demon With a Glass Hand" of the show "The Outer Limits"
Stephen Glass
Doris Kearns Goodwin (2002 scandal)
Nicholaos K. Artemiadis has recently published a book, History of Mathematics from a Mathematician’s Vantage Point, which is plagiarised from Morris Kline's classic text Mathematical Thought From Ancient to Modern Times. [4].
Writer and television commentator Monica Crowley was accused of plagiarism for a 1999 article on Richard Nixon.
Plagiarism and the Internet
The widespread use of the Internet has increased the incidence of plagiarism. Students are able to use search engines to locate information on a wide range of topics. Once located, this information can be cut-and-pasted into their own documents with minimal effort. The size of the Internet makes it difficult for teachers to trace the source of plagiarised material.
There are also websites which provide complete essays for students to download. These websites provide a database of subject-specific topics; some provide custom-made essays on any topic (for a fee). Some of the largest fee-based term paper sites are: Valedictorian Essays, Go2Essay, Fast Papers, AcaDemon, Custom Research Papers, EssayToday, Essay Town and Research Assistance.
The Internet can also be used to combat plagiarism. Teachers can use search engines to search for parts of suspicious essays. Using search engines to check papers for plagiarism, however, is neither practical nor effective since teachers lack the time necessary to check each paper by hand using an online search engine. For this reason, many teachers have turned to plagiarism prevention services like Turnitin that automate the search process and check essays for plagiarised material by comparing each paper against millions of online sources. The techniques used in such engines are often based on variants of the Rabin-Karp string search algorithm. Despite these counteractions, some empirical evidence suggests that the overall effect of the Internet is to increase plagiarism.
Old maxim
It is sometimes humorously said that "copying from one source is plagiarism, copying from several sources is research". Of course, this is not literally true, because all good researchers do cite their sources. Regardless, the old maxim/joke is part of this self-defining example of this topic, having been cribbed from Tom Lehrer's 1953 song Lobachevsky:
Plagiarize!
Let no one else's work evade your eyes!
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes!
So don't shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize!
Only be sure always to call it, please, "research"!
Plagiarism refers to the use of another's implementation of ideas, information, language, or writing, when done without proper acknowledgment of the original source. Essential to an act of plagiarism is an element of dishonesty in attempting to pass off the plagiarised work as original. Plagiarism is not necessarily the same as copyright infringement, which occurs when one violates copyright law. Like most terms from the area of intellectual property, plagiarism is a concept of the modern age and not really applicable to medieval or ancient works.
Definition
There is some difference of opinion over how much credit must be given when preparing a newspaper article or historical account. Generally, reference is made to original source material as much as possible, and writers avoid taking credit for others' work.
The use of mere facts, rather than works of creative expression, does not constitute plagiarism. For the latter, the issue of public domain works versus copyrighted works is irrelevant to the concept of plagiarism. For instance, it is legal for a student to copy several paragraphs (or even pages) of text from a public domain book, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and then directly add these quotations to his or her own paper. However if these quotations were not clearly identified as to his or her source, then the student would be guilty of plagiarism, using another writer's work as if it were his or her own. High schools, colleges and universities are especially sensitive to plagiarism, and as a result, they have academic codes of ethics (honor codes) which prohibit plagiarism in all its forms.
Similarly, it is considered plagiarism to take the specifics of someone else's novel idea, and then present it as one's own work. This type of plagiarism frequently occurs in high schools, colleges and universities, when, for example, students use the analyses in "CliffsNotes" and falsely present them as being their own original analysis. A small market has emerged of web sites offering essays and papers for sale to students, while a counter-industry has developed of companies offering services for instructors to compare a student's papers to a database of sources and search for potential plagiarism.
Moreover, just as there can be plagiarism without lawbreaking, it's possible to violate copyright law without plagiarizing. For example, one could distribute the full text of a current bestseller on the Internet while giving clear credit for it to the original author, financially damaging the author and publisher. In this respect, the mere fact that a piece of text is not plagiarized may not suffice to justify its use.
According to some academic ethics codes and criminal laws, a complaint of plagiarism may be initiated or proven by any person. The person originating the complaint need not be the owner of the plagiarized content, nor need there be any active or passive communication from a content owner directing that any investigation or discipline process be initiated in response to the plagiarism.
It is not plagiarism when two (or more) people independently come up with the same idea or analysis.
There is also accidental plagiarism. One case involved a boy whose mother had repeatedly read to him a story as a very small child. Later in life he was writing a story for an assignment, and a story 'came to him', but the story turned out to be exactly that which his mother had read to him as a small child, though he had no recollection of her reading it to him.
According to Diana Hacker, the citation criteria as specified by the MLA (Modern Language Association) (115), APA (American Psychological Association) (157-158), Chicago-Style (186), and others (228-230): "Three different acts are considered plagiarism: (1) failing to cite quotations and borrowed ideas, (2) failing to enclose borrowed language in quotation marks, and (3) failing to put summaries and paraphrases in your own words." A Pocket Style Manual, 4h ed., 2004 Bedford/St. Martin's
Famous examples of plagiarism
Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism as a young girl for a school composition. Mortified, she determined to have all future compositions screened by her friends before submission.
According to a Boston University investigation into academic misconduct, Martin Luther King plagiarized approximately one third of his doctoral thesis. He also appropriated others' text, without credit, for his famous speeches, including "I Have A Dream".
George Harrison was successfully sued for plagiarizing (though perhaps unconsciously) the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" for the melody of his own "My Sweet Lord".
[1]
George later wrote a bitter-lyric song on the subject. Ironically, he also "plagiarized" himself at least once, as the introductory chord for The Beatles' I'm Looking Through You is nearly identical to the introductory chord from End of the Line by his group The Traveling Wilburies.
Senator Joseph Biden was forced to withdraw from the 1988 Democratic Presidential nominations when it was revealed that he had failed a course in law school due to plagiarism. It was also shown that he had copied several campaign speeches, notably those of British Labour leader Neil Kinnock and Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In both cases he was essentially exonerated.
[2].
Popular historian Stephen Ambrose has been criticized for incorporating passages from the works of other authors into many of his books.
Psychology professor René Diekstra, also well-known as author of popular books, left Leiden University in 1997 after accusations of plagiarism. Proceedings continued as of 2003, with Diekstra contesting a report about him on this matter.
Alex Haley was permitted to settle out-of-court for $650,000, having admitted that he copied large passages of his novel Roots from The African by Harold Courlander.
Eres tú, Spanish song at the Eurovision Song Contest 1973 was a plagiarism of Slovenian (then Yugoslav) song from ESC 1966 (Berta Ambrož: Brez Besed) but due to political reasons (Cold War) it wasn't disqualified.
Jayson Blair, then a reporter for the New York Times, plagiarized many articles and faked quotes in high-profile stories, including the Jessica Lynch and Beltway sniper attacks cases. He and several high-ranking editors from the Times resigned in June 2003.
Moorestown, New Jersey, high-school student Blair Hornstine had her admission to Harvard University revoked in July 2003 after she was found to have passed off speeches and writings by famous figures including Bill Clinton as her own original prose in articles she wrote as a student journalist for a local newspaper.
In 2003, the United Kingdom Government was accused [3] of copying some text from the work of a CSU Monterey Bay post-graduate student for its security dossier on Iraq, dubbed by the media the 'dodgy dossier'.
The doctoral thesis written by Kimberly Lanegran at the University of Florida was copied nearly verbatim by Marks Chabedi and submitted at the New School. When Lanegran discovered this, she launched an investigation into Chabedi, and he was fired from a professorship at University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, and New School revoked his Ph.D.
Kim Lanegran's account of this incident published in the Chronicle of Higher Education
A retraction issued by a scholarly journal that published an article Chabedi plagiarized
(For those who wish to look up the actual dissertations in Dissertation Abstracts Online, the OCLC number for Lanegran's dissertation is AAG9801108 and the OCLC number for Chabedi's "dissertation" is AAI9980001.)
The 1922 film Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Stoker's widow sued the producers of Nosferatu, and had many of the film's copies destroyed (although some exist to this day).
Science fiction author Harlan Ellison sued and won in a case against James Cameron, claiming that his film The Terminator plagiarized his episodes "Soldier" and "Demon With a Glass Hand" of the show "The Outer Limits"
Stephen Glass
Doris Kearns Goodwin (2002 scandal)
Nicholaos K. Artemiadis has recently published a book, History of Mathematics from a Mathematician’s Vantage Point, which is plagiarised from Morris Kline's classic text Mathematical Thought From Ancient to Modern Times. [4].
Writer and television commentator Monica Crowley was accused of plagiarism for a 1999 article on Richard Nixon.
Plagiarism and the Internet
The widespread use of the Internet has increased the incidence of plagiarism. Students are able to use search engines to locate information on a wide range of topics. Once located, this information can be cut-and-pasted into their own documents with minimal effort. The size of the Internet makes it difficult for teachers to trace the source of plagiarised material.
There are also websites which provide complete essays for students to download. These websites provide a database of subject-specific topics; some provide custom-made essays on any topic (for a fee). Some of the largest fee-based term paper sites are: Valedictorian Essays, Go2Essay, Fast Papers, AcaDemon, Custom Research Papers, EssayToday, Essay Town and Research Assistance.
The Internet can also be used to combat plagiarism. Teachers can use search engines to search for parts of suspicious essays. Using search engines to check papers for plagiarism, however, is neither practical nor effective since teachers lack the time necessary to check each paper by hand using an online search engine. For this reason, many teachers have turned to plagiarism prevention services like Turnitin that automate the search process and check essays for plagiarised material by comparing each paper against millions of online sources. The techniques used in such engines are often based on variants of the Rabin-Karp string search algorithm. Despite these counteractions, some empirical evidence suggests that the overall effect of the Internet is to increase plagiarism.
Old maxim
It is sometimes humorously said that "copying from one source is plagiarism, copying from several sources is research". Of course, this is not literally true, because all good researchers do cite their sources. Regardless, the old maxim/joke is part of this self-defining example of this topic, having been cribbed from Tom Lehrer's 1953 song Lobachevsky:
Plagiarize!
Let no one else's work evade your eyes!
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes!
So don't shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize!
Only be sure always to call it, please, "research"!
Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others,
even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in you business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars,
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.
attributed to Max Ehrmann, 1927
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others,
even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in you business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
it is perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars,
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.
attributed to Max Ehrmann, 1927
Friday, August 26, 2005
Greedy Google Wants to Chat
Wired News Report
09:35 AM Aug. 24, 2005 PT
The new program, Google Talk, will compete against similar free services offered for several years by America Online, Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO). AOL's messaging program has about 41.6 million U.S. users, followed by Yahoo Messenger with 19.1 million and MSN Messenger with 14.1 million.
Google based its software on open standards, so it will work with smaller networks that are based on the same technology. Text messages can be exchanged with users of Apple's iChat, Cerulean Studios' Trillian and the open-source Gaim program.
The new Google program features a basic user interface with few graphics, much like the main Google search site. It does not spawn pop-up windows or display ads like America Online's Instant Messenger.
Voice chat requires that both the caller and recipient have speakers and a microphone hooked up to their computers. It does not currently offer an adapter to which regular phones can be connected. And unlike internet phone services such as Vonage and Skype, Google's voice service does not support calls to the regular telephone system.
09:35 AM Aug. 24, 2005 PT
The new program, Google Talk, will compete against similar free services offered for several years by America Online, Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO). AOL's messaging program has about 41.6 million U.S. users, followed by Yahoo Messenger with 19.1 million and MSN Messenger with 14.1 million.
Google based its software on open standards, so it will work with smaller networks that are based on the same technology. Text messages can be exchanged with users of Apple's iChat, Cerulean Studios' Trillian and the open-source Gaim program.
The new Google program features a basic user interface with few graphics, much like the main Google search site. It does not spawn pop-up windows or display ads like America Online's Instant Messenger.
Voice chat requires that both the caller and recipient have speakers and a microphone hooked up to their computers. It does not currently offer an adapter to which regular phones can be connected. And unlike internet phone services such as Vonage and Skype, Google's voice service does not support calls to the regular telephone system.