… which brains and hearts do nothing to relieve. I need to spend a few hours with good books.
Archive for May, 2005
Excruciating sadness of being
Wednesday, May 11th, 2005BBC Backstage
Wednesday, May 11th, 2005Great garrulous grandfather, R.I.P.
Wednesday, May 11th, 2005The perils of careless analysis
Tuesday, May 10th, 2005Eggshell memory
Tuesday, May 10th, 2005Fragile and elusive, we depend on memory for so much of our understanding of ourselves, our loved ones, and the world.
Every week I encounter some truly flabbergasting quirk in memory amonth my dearest friends, family members, and loved ones. There is a very narrow selection of people who I deeply trust to preserve accurate memories over years and decades; off the top of my head, I can count five of them. If you dig into people I have only known sporadically, or who I know largely *because* of their excellent memories, you can perhaps make it to ten.
Of course memory is a double-edged sword. When I find that someone’s memory differs significantly from mine, even if there is a third party involved who agrees with one or the other of us, I could always be the one misremembering. Quite a frustrating dilemma. Only if you have at least two external sources who agree with you, can you feel confident that you are remembering correctly some disputed event.
Quite interesting to me, is the detachment of memory accuracy from mental acuity and brilliance. The people I trust to have perfect memories span the range of traditional ‘smarts’, and those whose memories change so often I’m certain they are unreliable, include two of the most brilliant people I have ever met.
In any case, I felt only deep understanding upon reading this story about Vietnam vets and their changing memories of spitting during their homecomings. It also reminded me a bit of a story I was editing not long ago…
Amazing graceful art…
Tuesday, May 10th, 2005…if only the statistics were better!
Icaro Doria, a Brazilian artist in Lisbon, has been working on a novel art project for the magazine Revista Grande Reportagem. It is a flag campaign called, even in Portugal, “Meet the World”. Various national flags are reproduced, with their different colors being interpreted as relative statistics (corresponding to the % of the flag’s total area? this is unclear). And they are beautiful.
But where’s the detailed data in fine print backing up these elegant and grand claims? Is this just a political statement based on the creator’s opinions on the matter? The statistics mentioned cannot possible be so precise as to reproduce the national flags so closely. An online report says that the magazine has been doing its own research into this information… but I doubt that is a very important part of this campaign, without better references.
Julie Klein, unbearably hot soprano
Monday, May 9th, 2005Sorry, that would be Julieanne Klein, singer and now apparently a budding musicologist. Don’t get that wrong, or you’ll have a heck of a time tracking her down. I did, at least. Turns out she has been stowed away in Montreal, finishing research into the development of Modern . That’s not really my bag, but I figure any diva worth her vibrato can do as she pleases. Don’t take my word on the perfection of her voice; thanks to the miracles of modern technology, you can hear for yourself.
Through her site, I also discovered
the Alignment project, which introduces musical notation PDQ Bach would be proud of. Fleur’s fave Project for New Music around here is doubtless green with envy.
Mental damage test
Monday, May 9th, 2005I don’t know who Daniel Wegner is, but I want to.
Here is the personality measure he got published in 1979’s American Psychologist 33 : the Hidden Brain Damage Scale
Brockhaus freelancer suspected of plagiarizing Wikipedia article
Sunday, May 8th, 2005One might say this is a case of “Man bites dog,” which would hardly be newsworthy the other way around. Wikipedia contributors plagiarize from other sources all the time; not knowing or not caring enough to properly reference their research, or engaging in wholesale copyright violation which is only caught with great effort or, worse yet, only when the original author complains.
However. Wikipedia does take every copyvio claim extremely seriously, and acts as quickly as is humanly possible to take down alleged copyvios while investigating their copyright status. With these caveats, on to the story!
I thought of various euphemistic ways to title this piece (and the contextual translations I am writing on the subject), but there’s no beating around the bush.
A freelancer for Brockhaus Online last week submitted an article on the newly-elected Pope Benedict XVI. A Wikipedian who saw the result noticed its similarity to the German Wikipedia article; comparison of the freelancer’s article (submitted April 27) with a version of the Wikipedia article from April 26 indicated that he almost certainly copied sections directly from the Wikipedia article — without acknowledging the original or complying with its license (reusers must let the readers know that some of the content they are reading is available under a free license).
Unfortunately, Brockhaus’s initial reaction was a mild “we’ll look into this,” and “we checked the submission for correctness and found it to be accurate.” Marco Krohn, a Brockhaus spokesperson, added ‘The similarity of the texts is definitely not coincidental. There are many ways to formulate a criterion which on its own could similarly exclude 100 articles about [Pope] Benedict by different authors.’ The freelancer’s initial reaction (as conveyed by Brockhaus, I believe) was to deny it and suggest that similar base references were used. This hypothesis was somewhat discredited by finding single sentences which were, in the Wikipedia article, the result of collaboration among many users; and which were repeated verbatim in the article submitted to Brockhaus.
For two days after this was discovered, Brockhaus received private feedback from Wikipedia editors about this matter; however, it was also mentioned on a public Wikipedia mailing list. A reporter took the public discussion, and without contacting any of the parties involved, published a long report on the potential scandal (much to everyone’s dismay). Finally, on Friday, Brockhaus commented that ‘mistakes had probably been made,’ and that they would talk with the author next week to clarify the matter; and they removed the controversial article from their site. (PC Welt article)
