MIT’s president sends an email to the school in the aftermath of Aaron Swartz’s suicide.
It was at MIT that Swartz illegally downloaded millions of JSTOR articles; and while JSTOR itself chose not to press charges, “U.S. Attorneys Carmen Ortiz and Steve Heymann, backed by Federal government, continued to pursue the prosecution of Swartz, with the tacit support of MIT behind them.”
… took a Zipcar to Rokeby Avenue this morning. He posed UD doing one of her MOOC lectures in front of her baby grand, and he clicked away for quite some time.
I’ll link you to the article when it comes out.
Well, this one wins a prize.
As explanations for plagiarism go, it’s a winner.
And this guy needs a prize, just having lost one for plagiarizing – virtually in its entirety – a poem that had won him a contest.
Like almost all copiers, he’s done it many times.
He’s begun examining his other poems for plagiarism. Apparently you never know where the muse will send you.
I have begun to examine my published poems to make sure there are no similar mistakes. I want to be as honest as I can with the poetry community and I know it will take some time to regain their trust. Already I have discovered a 2009 poem called The Neighbour is very similar to Tim Dooley’s After Neruda and admit that a mistake has been made. I am still digging and want a fresh start.
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UPDATE: People have begun writing limericks about Ward. Here’s one, from comments on a Telegraph article:
There was a young poet called Ward,
Whose verses appeared to be fraud,
When questioned about it,
He claimed he’s been ‘careless’,
An excuse that is seriously flawed.
Not bad. Here’s one from UD, American-accent style:
There was a young poet called Ward
Who thought of his childhood and soared
To heights of great feeling…
These turned out to be stealing
Which he thought would go largely ignored.
The suicide of a 26-year-old principled hacker (if you can be that) has people speculating. They speculate that because he was facing prosecution for hacking into JSTOR and liberating scads of academic papers he became fatally depressed. No doubt being incredibly young and facing a serious trial whose outcome might be jail time undermined him; but he had a history of depression as well.
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From the New York Times:
In 2007, Mr. Swartz wrote about his struggle with depression, distinguishing it from the emotion of sadness. “Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.” When the condition gets worse, he wrote, “you feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms.” Earlier that year, he gave a talk in which he described having had suicidal thoughts during a low period in his career.
America’s struggling pharmaceutical industry finally gets the spokesman it needs! Bravo, John LaMattina, for having the guts to go up against the power of Marcia Angell and tell it like it is!
Anxious editorial in the Duke University newspaper about the fiasco at the University of North Carolina.
Duke is absolutely right to be anxious.
The only weak part of the editorial is its repeated insistence that the leaders of UNC must have been shocked to discover widespread academic/athletic fraud. No way.
… about suicide among professors.
Also: A reporter at George Washington University’s paper has been interviewing her about her MOOC. She’ll link to that piece as well.
In response to Junior Seau’s suicide, America speaks. A football player is just like a police officer or a soldier.
… are just beginning to be rounded up. Stay tuned.
In her years of following plagiarism stories, UD has seldom come across a plagiarist who did it just that one time. Virtually all of them, once one case comes to light, turn out to have done it for ages. You can bet on it.
So when the story about the Director of Education for the entire Toronto District School Board having plagiarized appeared a couple of days ago, UD sat tight and waited while reporters found all his other plagiarized material.
Now that they’ve done that, UD will post on the story. Let’s see… It’s always icky when a high-level academic type, an example to many students, turns out to be a serial plagiarist. The character of this guy’s plagiarism is particularly disgusting: For instance, he lifted someone else’s story about talking to her child after the Sandy Hook massacre and pretended he was talking to his child…
Will he be fired? I think yes.
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UPDATE: Off he goes.
… is out front on the latest Yeshiva University scandal – a decades-long cover-up of sexual abuse. And the cover-up continues.
[A Yeshiva alumnus] said he was dismayed when [the Yeshiva-appointed investigator] told him that her report might be delivered to the Y.U. board orally rather than in writing. He said he was even more alarmed when [she] said that unlike the [Penn State] Freeh report, which was disseminated publicly the same day it was presented to the board, she “could not say whether… the board would release the report to the public.”
[The alumnus] sent a letter, signed by 18 Y.U. high school alumni [the abuse took place at Yeshiva’s high school], to the chairman of the university’s board on January 3, asking that the investigation follow the blueprint laid out by the Freeh report. By January 8, the chairman, Henry Kressel, a managing director at a private equity firm in Manhattan, had not responded.
When a reporter from the Forward called Kressel on January 7 and identified himself, Kressel cut off the call. Kressel’s assistant later directed the Forward to Y.U.’s press office. (Y.U.’s press office did not respond to several questions, including a request to know who on the board is overseeing the investigation and when the board might decide to make the report public.)
Other high-ranking Y.U. officials declined to speak to the Forward. Reached at his New York home, David S. Gottesman, a billionaire investor and a Y.U. chairman emeritus, said: “I don’t talk to reporters. I never have.” Another chairman emeritus, Ronald P. Stanton, who made his fortune in agrochemicals, said, “I have no comment, sorry.”
… Seymour also declined to respond in regard to whether any member of her investigation team has any past or present ties to Y.U….
Yes, Yeshiva, following its long-established M.O. (denydenydenydenydeny), is covering itself in glory once again.
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Brava to this Yeshiva professor who takes advantage of her tenure (keep this in mind when considering the benefits of tenure) to go after Yeshiva. I’m sure Yeshiva will punish her in other ways; but they can’t fire her.
We now can see that there is a paradigm of institutional cover-up, and have named institutions that stand in that line: the Roman Catholic Church, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish organizations, Penn State, Syracuse University, the Citadel, Poly Prep Country Day School, the Horace Mann School, and now my own employer, Yeshiva University, among many others too numerous to name. At the same time, the paradigm is crumbling before our very eyes. No institution can expect to protect its secrets of abuse and assault any longer.
Board members of a fraternity with a chapter at the University of Florida don’t understand why that university made life so difficult for the boys that the frat’s national reps had to shut the chapter down. I mean, yes, theft; yes, hazing; yes, underage drinking…
But when you understand, for instance, the reason for the theft, it doesn’t look so bad.
[T]wo of its members were arrested and charged with theft in March after getting caught walking out of a local home improvement store with nearly $600 worth of plastic sheeting to be used for a pool party at the chapter’s house.
Boys are going to need plastic sheeting for pool parties, and it’s just sitting right there in the store.
I thought of doing this; I’m glad someone got there before I did.
Yet another arsenal hauled onto an American university campus. Last one of these we looked at was courtesy of an eighteen year old woman who drove to Elon College to I guess uh talk – with a little backup – to her boyfriend. Now here’s a guy at North Carolina State – he works in the vet school – who’s got all kinds of shit, some of it loaded, on campus. Let’s see…
Authorities said O’Connell, a necropsy medical support technician at the College of Veterinary Medicine, consented to the police search Friday of his employee locker, where police found an unloaded Colt Delta Elite 10mm handgun and a loaded Taurus .357 Magnum revolver.
A subsequent search of a locked cabinet in O’Connell’s office turned up two axes and a dagger, and police searching his truck found a new Colt AR-15 rifle that was still in the box.
Poor baby is going through a divorce. Y’all understand.