nodalpoint.org - Slideshare nodalpoint tag - Comments

Interview with Slideshare founder Jon Boutelle

mrugeshsingh — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 01:30:33 -0400

Jon Boutelle was born in Boston and grew up on a farm in Massachusetts. A degree holder in Psychology from the Brown University, RI,
he along with Rashmi Sinha and Amit Ranjan have been on the helm of SlideShare along with the rest of the team based in Delhi and the US.
Read more about it at http://www.loscreador.com/2007/06/16/interview-with-slideshare-founder-j...

Fair use in Scientific Blogging

Duncan — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:52:08 -0400

One for the scoop!

Animesh — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 13:34:27 -0400

Neil and Brian, I have one fact coming from my Professor. I will hide the names here though. Someone applied for a faculty post with papers in a niche` which falls in my Professor's area of expertise. Now my Professor thought if this guy has so many publication in his field, how he has never heard the name? So he did some paper and ref. checks. He found out that all the papers were almost same in content to the papers from some well know guys in the field! This got checked because my Professor took pain to analyze, so many of them must be going unchecked. Because if someone is smart enough he/she can read all the good papers and grasp the meaning without going through the pain/talent to be the one to write them. I guess this must be just tip of ice-berg if not less.
The point is that simply a blast like thing won't do guys, it has to be some language parser which understands content.

we like an argument

Neil — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 12:00:44 -0400

Argument is good. I play the role devil's advocate around here.

Having posted the previous comment, I recalled the time when I discovered an exact copy of my website, with very minor changes, at someone else's website. They were too dumb to realise that my content was dynamic and had just grabbed the rendered HTML, so much of it was broken. I cared that time, I can tell you. They received an angry email with veiled legal threats and the site came down pretty quick.

You make good points - clearly there is harmless plagiarism and rather less harmless plagiarism. I suspect that there's an awful lot of the former and a rather tiny amount of the latter. If anyone has a good "plagiarism ruined my life" story to share, let's hear it.

Creative Commons and other Licenses

dalloliogm — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:09:05 -0400

I look forward to the ability to "BLAST" my future manuscript's text against articles in PubMedCentral so that I can prevent my own unintentional plagiarism and provide proper citation to earlier scientists.

Well, you can try this: http://invention.swmed.edu/etblast/index.shtml . I don't know if it works ;).

Not to be too argumentative, but what if someone more senior than you acquires your slides, and presents them widely to your field without attribution?

What you're saying is right, but I think one should always use a CreativeCommons or GNU/GPL-like license when sharing his work on Internet.

---

WHO AM I?
Your name is , seeker.

http://genome.imim.es/~giovanni

Plagiarism is damaging

BrianHaugen — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 09:10:17 -0400

Not to be too argumentative, but what if someone more senior than you acquires your slides, and presents them widely to your field without attribution?

What if someone applying for the same job used your slides when they gave a talk at their interview, then you show up with nearly identical slides? Who should the interview committe believe?

What if someone takes a figure from your talk and uses in a journal publication, unattributed? Isn't your work worth something?

I guess these are probably hyperbolic examples and I am sorry if it comes out argumentative, but if we expand our talk from slide presentations to include journal publications, plagiarism is rampant. That article notes that most of it was short passages, and probably unintentional. I would agree that such plagiarism is likely harmless, but still undesirable.

It seems that the tenure track process is becoming quite arduous and highly dependent upon the number of citations and respective impact factors. If the number of citations and their impact factor are replaced with the proposed h-index, someone failing to cite your publications would be direct harm to someone seeking tenure. I look forward to the ability to "BLAST" my future manuscript's text against articles in PubMedCentral so that I can prevent my own unintentional plagiarism and provide proper citation to earlier scientists.

Plagiarism damages not only the individuals involved, but also undermines the integrity of the mass of literature for all of science. Imagine a paper that forms the basis for a whole new field, so it becomes highly-referenced. What if a key concept taken from earlier work by others remained uncited (even unintentionally) in this article? Researchers would then cite this article for originating a new idea, breaking the chain of literature and thought back to its original source.

I hope I haven't been too hyberbolic here, but I think the potential damages of plagiarism should not be taken lightly, especially if one aims for a tenured faculty position.

Plagiarism

Neil — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 09:57:32 -0400

I think plagiarism is one of those concepts that we'll have to redefine for the information age. In a world of freely-available digital information, it's just going to happen. With regard to online resources authored by other people, clearly the "correct" thing to do is acknowledge the source, for instance when "borrowing" a slide from someone. But really, what does it matter? I'm hardly going to know if someone uses my slide without acknowledgement and I don't really care. If they go onto a brilliant career thanks to a talk that used my slide - I still don't really care. If no harm comes to me through their action (e.g. loss of "reputation", whatever that is), what do I care?

Now if a paper appears in a journal and I recognise whole paragraphs from one of my papers without acknowledgement, that's a different matter. Or if a student hands in an essay with whole paragraphs lifted from a book that I've read - also different. But again - is anyone really getting hurt? It's not as though the author of the original source has really lost anything - their work is still out there.

I don't know - am I missing something? It just seems to me that the whole notion of plagiarism is a bunch of huffing and puffing and wounded egos and codes of honour but at the end of the day: is anyone really damaged? It all seems a bit silly.

What about Plagiarism

Animesh — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 04:42:56 -0400

I will agree with Neil that wait till the work is published, or may be till you communicate. But the bigger challenge is how to stop plagiarism? It is rampant in my country.
Anyways Jason thanks for those slides, I liked the 'comparative-genomics-with-gmod-and-bioperl' a lot.

paranoia

Neil — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 20:39:06 -0400

I'm not paranoid - they really are out to get me.

I've never heard of someone being scooped from an uploaded presentation, but it wouldn't surprise me. I've heard of scooping from posters and talks seen at meetings. I guess the rule is: don't make it public if it's unpublished and you aim to publish it soon.

Cool!

jason — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 17:53:58 -0400

Added a few. I have tried to make PDF of my slides available from websites as well.

I'm not this paranoid, but has anyone actually ever gotten scooped by putting up data/ideas from a talk?

Slideshare nodalpoint tag

Neil — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 03:42:10 -0400

I've just got around to trying out Slideshare and I noticed a small collection of presentations under the bioinformatics tag - including several from the "usual suspects". A suggestion: how about when Nodalpoint users upload to Slideshare, they include "nodalpoint" as a tag? That way we get to learn more about what everyone is working on. If you have pre-made presentations that you're willing to share, it's a quick and easy way for us all to get an idea of the collective expertise here.