You need to know the following three things. These facts will save you from getting tossed out of college or having a mark on your high school record.

1) Teachers hate plagiarism more than they hate stepping on puppies and kittens. If there are two students in a class, and one has plagiarized an assignment and one has crushed some puppies and kittens, and the teacher only has time to turn one of them it to the administration, they’ll turn in the plagiarizer.

2) There has almost never been a case where a student was proved to have plagiarized something (by matching the original to the student’s paper) where the plagiarism wasn’t already blindingly obvious to the teacher to begin with. In other words, when you plagiarize something, it is always spotted immediately. If some other student tells you that they got away with it, they are lying to you (like House says, people always lie) or the teacher chose to not turn them in. Yet.

Given this, you should understand that plagiarism is never a good strategy for improving your grade. Just don’t do it.

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Having said that, and recognizing that you didn’t come to this blog post to learn how to cheat, we can examine the marginal, rare cases that seem to happen so often; There are times, according to some students, when they didn’t really mean to plagiarize but they did anyway by mistake. For instance, the student copies a bunch of text from various web sites into a document file, then proceeds to write his own prose, deleting these “notes” as he goes. Then he saves the file and just at that moment the computer crashes. When the computer comes back up again, the file seems to be there but he has to get to basketball practice so he doesn’t look at the file. Then the next day he just turns the file in and never realized that the file had reverted to the earlier version which was nothing but snippets of text from various Wikipedia pages.

You might need this: I’d Rather Be PLAGIARIZING

Which brings us to the third thing:

3) It does not matter if you did not mean to plagiarize or if you did it by accident or if your dog did it while you were not looking or whatever. Plagiarism is when you hand in work that consists wholly or in part of the work of another, unattributed. It does not matter how it got there. It does not matter what your intent was. It only matters that someone else’s work was passed off as yours.

You might be thinking that teachers and others are overplaying this. You might be thinking that it is not as though civilization will come to an end if plagiarism happens, so just get over it. If that is what you are thinking, then you are definitely not getting this: The truth is, that if plagiarism happens a lot, an important part of civilization will in fact end. The fact that you don’t understand this is of no interest to the keepers of civilization who will crush you like an ogre crushes a puppy if you do it. So deal.

So, what about the title of this post? How do you avoid getting caught plagiarizing? There are two steps to this process.

1) Don’t do it.

2) Don’t seem to be doing it, and for that, I have some actual helpful advice.

When you do go about copying and pasting text from the Internet as part of your research ALWAYS use a simple convention to make sure that this text is ALWAYS identified as someone else’s. Your convention needs two parts: Attribution and delimiters.

Delimiters first. When you copy something into a document file form the Internet, always use the same symbols to surround the text you copies. I suggest /slash marks/ or possibly [brackets]. Later, you can look at your document and know which parts are either notes destined to be erased or quotes destined to be put in “quote marks” or made into a block quote.

The attribution is the information you put just after the text you copied so you can reference it later. There are a lot of ways to do this. The simplest way for a small project is to make a list at the bottom of your document that has the URL’s you used as sources, numbered, and then use the numbers in your document to identify the text. It is not my job to tell you the proper way to provide attribution and bibliographic references for your work … that varies with the school, the academic discipline, and the instructor. But however that is supposed to be done, it is in this stage of assembling the notes and information that you must link the reference to the source to the actual material.

If you use the delimiters, and your computer crashes and returns your document to the “notes” version, and you accidentally hand that in, you wont’ get in trouble for plagiarizing! Why? Because instead of handing in this…

The aardvark (Orycteropus afer, from Greek ???????????? (orykterópous) meaning “digging footed” and afer: from Africa) is a medium-sized, burrowing, nocturnal mammal native to Africa.[2] It is the only living species of the order Tubulidentata, although other prehistoric species and genera of Tubulidentata are known.

Aardvarks have 4 toes on the forefeet and 5 toes on the hind feet, each ending in a spade-like claw that helps them to dig with great speed and force. Digging is used both to acquire food and as a means of escape. The stance is digitigrade.

… as though you wrote these words, which would actually be plagiarized from two sources, you’d be handing in this:

/The aardvark (Orycteropus afer, from Greek ???????????? (orykterópous) meaning “digging footed” and afer: from Africa) is a medium-sized, burrowing, nocturnal mammal native to Africa.[2] It is the only living species of the order Tubulidentata, although other prehistoric species and genera of Tubulidentata are known./ [1]

/Aardvarks have 4 toes on the forefeet and 5 toes on the hind feet, each ending in a spade-like claw that helps them to dig with great speed and force. Digging is used both to acquire food and as a means of escape. The stance is digitigrade./ [2]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark
2. http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Orycteropus_afer.html

And then your teacher will be like, “What’s this” and you’ll be like “oh, crap, those are my notes! My computer crashed and this musta legit happened, man!”

You might get a crappy grade for this, but you won’t have that letter added to your file that will follow you around for the rest of your life.

There is something else you need to be aware of. Plagiarism isn’t just copying the exact words someone else wrote as though they were your own. It is also stating ideas that other people wrote and not attributing the ideas to them. There is something you need to know if you are writing an essay for high school or an intro college course: I promise you that your grader or teacher will be much more impressed by your frequent use of properly done citations than with some lame idea you claim (inadvertence or purposefully) to have had which is not really yours. Keep in mind that the people who are reading your essay have likely already read some or even all of the material you are using. If you present an idea as your own, and the idea is already in the literature, we know that either stolen the idea or you’ve had an unoriginal idea that you did not know was out there because you’ve not really done your homework.

If you really do have an original idea or observation, which is quite possible because you are clearly a very smart person if you’ve read this far in this very important essay, then make it clear in your work that it is your idea. How do you do that? Using language. Words. Sentences. Just say it. If you were busy writing your essay in the third person or in passive voice, then you may have a hard time phrasing a reference to yourself. Otherwise, just say that something is your idea. But just before you do that, google it. Maybe you’ll find someone else saying the same thing, and that will be a win because you’ll have yet another reference to properly cite in your essay!

Robert’s Rules operates under the idea of majority rule while still acknowledging and respecting minority opinion. The system of debate allows for this by ensuring equal speaking opportunities from all sides.

From Roberts Rules:

The application of parliamentary law is the best method yet devised to enable assemblies of any size, with due regard for every member’s opinion, to arrive at the general will on the maximum number of questions of varying complexity in a minimum amount of time and under all kinds of internal climate ranging from total harmony to hardened or impassioned division of opinion. [Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised [RONR (11th ed.), Introduction, p. liii]

There are three pragmatic principles at work here. First, debate is limited. Since different individuals will have different levels of access to a body, such as control of a newsletter or speaking opportunities, it is important to have the debate about a specific question constrained and confined to a well defined session following agreed up on rules. This is a problem when on line or email based discussions are happening, because those rules are hard to apply or comprehend, let alone enforce.

Second, there is the idea of majority rule. This seems obvious, but in fact, many decisions are made by subsets of individuals with more power than others, or subsets of individuals with access to the decision making machinery. It is not reasonable to assume, however, that majority rule is best (see below) in all cases.

Third, the voices of the minority, which are often not defined at the beginning of a debate, are protected. If a majority emerges early in consideration of an issue, and the minority lacks this protection, the majority is likely to prevail before deliberation is complete. It is not uncommon for minority opinion to prevail after after a fair discussion.

Majority opinion is not always the best when an issue for debate comes before a body that has been carefully considered by a trusted and representative subset of the body. It is not uncommon for the larger body to reify, or replicate the work done by the smaller group, but with less expertise and less time, and thus reject the opinions or recommendations of the subgroup, where those recommendations were actually superior to the larger group’s opinion. For this reason, I recommend that subcommittees or study groups avoid presenting the larger group with unordered options unless full deliberation and debate is expected. Within the context of rules of order, a strong and trusted chair might call for some sort of consensus vote on an issue and hear the “Yeahs” and “Nays” rather than allow extensive discussion, but that power can be abused and therefore, there are rules that would easily stop it from happening, thus giving lie to the “strong and trusted” assumption.

Note, however, that in order for rules of order to function, they have to be followed from beginning to end of a process, for obvious reasons.

So, for rules of order to work, the following is recommended:

1) Pick Robert’s Rules from among the various available rule sets that exist, because they are the most widely known.

2) Read the book. If nobody knows the rules, using them isn’t going to work.

3) Make every part of the process operate under the rules. This means using the rules as the default, and it means making sure that important steps (like voting, handling motions, etc) are clearly defined with respect to procedure.

4) Follow the rules carefully and strictly. For example, after a motion is made, always make sure there is opportunity for supporting and opposing views, and always follow the rules adopted as to how many speakers, and how much time. When a person is done with their statements, they may be tempted to jump in later to clarify after a different person has spoken. This is normally not allowed. When this is happening regularly in a meeting, the rules are not being followed, and the protection of minority opinion has probably been thrown out the window.

5) Follow through with the rules. Apply the rules (to develop procedure) before things are done, follow the rules while doing the things, but then keep following the rules after the thing is done. In other words, a meeting must be adjourned properly before casual conversation about an issue handled during the meeting starts. A change in what was voted on during the meeting can’t happen on the way out the door.

Suggested* resources:

Robert’s Rules For Dummies (Yes, it is quite useful, even if you are smart.)

Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised, 12th edition

If you are a racist, and I say you are a racist, then my statement is ad hominem. Note that the statement may be technically correct. I’m saying something about you, and you really are a racist, so my statement is correct. On the other hand, if you are not a racist, and I say you are a racist, that is an incorrect ad hominem statement. My statement is incorrect. Either way, I have not committed an “ad hominem fallacy.” I’ve simply made a statement about you, that may or may not have been correct.

So, what the heck is the meaning of the term “ad hominem fallacy” you may ask? (Note that the term “ad hominem” itself, or “ad hom” for short, has come to imply “ad hominem fallacy.”) In the above example, you might think that if I call you a racist and you are, that I have not committed a fallacy, but if you are a racist, I’ve not. In neither of the above examples, have I committed the ad hominem fallacy.

If I sent you to this post to read it, it is more likely because I think you’ve committed the fallacy of the ad hominem fallacy. This is a meta-fallacy. You have claimed that an ad hominem fallacy has occurred because someone has called someone a racist (or some other nasty thing, I’m using “racist” as an example here, obviously) whether the accusation is right or wrong. But your reference to the ad hominem fallacy is in fact a fallacy because none of that relates to what an ad hominem fallacy actually is.

An ad hominem fallacy is when you are arguing over an issue, like are cats better than dogs, and you go after the person you are arguing with and attack them as a person as part of your argument. That is not the same as the question of whether the person is in fact worthy of this attack.

Let me give you an example.

Me: Cats are better than dogs.

Hitler: No, dogs are better than cats.

Me: No. You are, in fact, Hitler, and Hitler is a total jerk, so therefore, cats are better than dogs.

Here, I am wrong in two ways. First, you can’t say that cats are better than dogs. Or visa versa. Second, I’m arguing that the other guy in this argument is wrong because he is a jerk. I was committing an ad hominem fallacy.

However, I am right about one thing. Hitler is a jerk. So, let’s play it out again from a slightly different angle.

Me: Cats are better than dogs.

Hitler: No, dogs are better than cats.

Me: Hitler, you are a complete jerk, did you know that?

Hitler: So I’ve been told.

Me: In any event, you are wrong. Cats are better than dogs.

Hitler: Really, you can’t say one is better than the other.

Me: You know, you are right about that. You are still a jerk.

Hitler: So I’ve been told.

An ad hominem fallacy is when you use a personal attack on a person in order to devalue or dismiss an argument they are making. It is NOT when you make a statement about the person, which may or may not be a personal attack, in and of itself. I maintain Hitler is a jerk, and I don’t care about cats vs dogs. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong, but while that is an attack on the man, it is not a logical fallacy. If I say his opinion about dogs vs cats is wrong because he is a jerk, THAT is an ad hominem fallacy.

I sent you here because I think you got that wrong, and I wrote this post because I’m weary of that common fallacy, about a fallacy, being toted out in the middle of arguments.

What is a regular expression? We can talk about that in detail some other time. Briefly, it is a string of symbols that is designed to match a specified set of symbols, or a range of a set of symbols, in a larger body or stream of text. For example, if you pass a stream of information (say, all your emails) through a filter with the regular expression:

‘\d\d\d-\d\d\d-\d\d\d\d’

then any part of that stream of information that looks like a phone number (not using parens), such as 636-555-3226, will be isolated.

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is a book that teaches beginning Python computer Augean programming focusing on examples from day to day life, including but well beyond REs.

The new edition includes pattern matching with regular expressions, input validation, reading and writing files, organizing files, web scraping, manipulating Excel spreadsheets and Google Sheets, PDF and Word documents, CSV and JSON files, email, images, and automating your keyboard and mouse.

The great benefit of a book like this is that you learn Python (the first part of the book gives you all you need to know to program in Python) in the context of things you actually want to do with Python. If you are interested in learning Python, or coding in general, this can be your first book.

The book is well done, as all in this series are, and fun. There are strong on line resources including all the code, and that information is regularly updated. Generally, “No Starch” press books are great, and this is one of those!

I would like to have seen at least sidebars on manipulating things using Libreoffice software, but note that the book focuses on documents, and OpenSource software does work with normal Excel and Word documents, so it is there.

The second edition adds a new chapter on input validation. The Gmail and Google Sheets sections, and the information on CSV files is also new. I plan on using the software tips and tricks to develop my own highly specialized and targeted search software. I’m often looking for files that have specific extensions, and certain kinds of content, in certain locations. Just the ability to hard-wire where to search for files will save me a lot of time and trouble.

Author Al Sweigart is a professional software developer who teaches programming to kids and adults, and who is author of Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, Cracking Codes with Python, and Coding with Minecraft, all of which are quite nice. We need a new edition of Coding with Minecraft, by the way, that looks at a wider range of coding options and keeps up with the major advances in that software environment! So, get to work, Al!

Like this:

Click here to see it (at NBC News)

This is a peer reviewed study. No kidding. Here’s the title:

Semi-supervised Content-based Detection of Misinformation via Tensor Embeddings

Abstract:

Fake news may be intentionally created to promote economic, political and social interests, and can lead to negative impacts on humans beliefs and decisions. Hence, detection of fake news is an emerging problem that has become extremely prevalent during the last few years. Most existing works on this topic focus on manual feature extraction and supervised classification models leveraging a large number of labeled (fake or real) articles. In contrast, we focus on content-based detection of fake news articles, while assuming that we have a small amount of labels, made available by manual fact-checkers or automated sources. We argue this is a more realistic setting in the presence of massive amounts of content, most of which cannot be easily factchecked. To that end, we represent collections of news articles as multi-dimensional tensors, leverage tensor decomposition to derive concise article embeddings that capture spatial/contextual information about each news article, and use those embeddings to create an article-by-article graph on which we propagate limited labels. Results on three real-world datasets show that our method performs on par or better than existing models that are fully supervised, in that we achieve better detection accuracy using fewer labels. In particular, our proposed method achieves 75.43% of accuracy using only 30% of labels of a public dataset while an SVM-based classifier achieved 67.43%. Furthermore, our method achieves 70.92% of accuracy in a large dataset using only 2% of labels.

There is a writeup on this at Think Progress by Joe Romm.

I’ve seen, and in some cases, been part of various efforts by various on line entities to clean up fake news or, more often, anti-science news or activism. What I’ve found in every case is that there is an enormous perceived shift in the bottom line for on line entities that keep out fake news vs. those that ignore it, or even encourage it.

In fact, I suspect that people who are more likely to believe, purvey, or defend fake news are also more likely to be ripped off by unscrupulous retailers. The scruples of the business are one thing, the profit levels are another. Facebook makes its money off of retailers making profits. Facebook is going to be dragged out of the fake news business kicking and screaming, if ever.

If you are like me, you live in a Facebook bubble. I do not maintain “friend” status with purveyors of fake news. The people on my Facebook feed are generally much more interested in the truth. So, it is hard to see the fake news problem as very important.

But there are all these other people who also live in a Facebook bubble. Their bubble is full of fake news. Their friends include voters, influencers, parents, maybe even teachers, who are living in that fake news bubble as well. This is a real problem. Facebook fakeness is the proximate reason that Donald Trump is president. I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg is taking that seriously, and I assume this is because he is biased by the prospect of a huge shift in profits with vs. without the heavy spice of alt-reality in the feed.