Burning Some Leitners, As A Treat

My joy at the idea of Armand truthers is only interrupted by war-flashbacks of another tv show in which the text of previous seasons existed in-universe in book form.

I understand that 'Yefreitor' is a modifier added to a rank when you refuse a promotion. And that 'Detective' works basically the same way (except that the way you acquire it is kess clear). But I'm still unsure about satellite-officer. Is it a modifier ? Because no one is calling Jean anything else. We know that you become Satellite-officer if your partner is promoted and 'you rise with him'. But does it replace your actual rank? Are all Satellite-officer equals? MacLaine is also a Satellite-officer, but his partner is a sergeant, so does Jean outrank him even though their titles are EXACTLY THE SAME? How do people know?

And if it is a modifier if another rank, why not say the rank like they do with Yefreitor? Like Lieutenant-Satellite.

It's just such a weird rank to have. Have they been promoted but they have to keep the Satellite designation to remember where they come from? You can be a Lieutenant[normal], a Lieutenant [Yefreitor][complimentory] or a Lieutenant [Satellite][derogatory] ? How do you get rid of the modifier that says 'you're not that good but this other guy is, so... ' ?If you change partner, are you demoted? To a rank below? To the last rank that you held on your own?

Incredibly confusing hierarchical system.

there is a wasp’s nest in my attic

Since we're all talking about plagiarism now, I'd like to share this video which came out last year about a paper accepted at the CVPR 2022:

For the people not in the know, the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference is the biggest conference in computer science. Last year, in 2022, the paper featured in the video got accepted. A few days later, this video was posted. The first author, a PhD student, apologized and the paper was retracted and removed from the proceedings. Hilariously, the first reaction of the co-authors, including a professor at the Seoul National University, was to say that they had nothing to do with it.

My point here is that scientific papers are not rigorously checked for plagiarism, and a background in academia tells you absolutely nothing about whether or not someone will be diligent in avoiding plagiarism. The biggest difference is that there are consequences if you're caught.

I also don't want people to be too harsh on the first author of this paper, or to think the situation is equivalent to the whole Somerton debacle. For starters, you don't get paid for publishing papers, you (or more commonly your university) pay the publishers. But the phrase publish or perish exists for a reason, and everyone in the field wants to get published in the CVPR, because it's supposed to show that you're great at research. Additionally, the number of papers and the prestige of the venues they're published in criteria on which you will be evaluated as a researcher and a university employee.

The way I see it, there are basically two kinds of plagiarism that are shown in the video. The first one concerns sentences that are lifted completely unchanged from other papers. This is bad, and it is plagiarism, but I can see how this would happen. Most instances of this appear in the introduction and on background information, so if you're insecure about your mastery of English and it's not about your contribution anyway, I can understand how you would take the shortcut of copy-pasting and tell yourself that it's just so that the rest of the paper makes sense, and why waste time on phrasing things differently if others have done it already, and it's not like there are a million way to write these equations anyways.

Let me be clear. I don't approve, or condone. It's still erasing the work of the people who took the time and pain to phrase these things. It's still plagiarism. But I understand how you could get to that point.

The second kind of plagiarism is a way bigger deal in my opinion. At 0:37 , we can see that one of the contributions of the paper is also lifted from another paper. Egregiously, the passage includes "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first [...]" , which is a hell of a thing to copy-paste. So this is not only lazily passing other people's words as your own, it's also pretending that you're making a contribution you damn well know other people have already done. I also wasn't able to find a version of the plagiarized article that had been published in a peer-reviewed venue, which might mean that the authors submitted it, got rejected, and published it on arXiv (an website on which authors can put their papers so that they're accessible to the public, but doesn't "count" as a publication because it's not peer-reviewed. You can also put papers that are under review or have been published on there as long as you're careful with the copyrights and double-blind process). And then parts of it were published in the CVPR under someone else's name.

I think there's also a third kind of plagiarism going on here, one that is incredibly common in academia, but that is not shown in the video. That's the FIVE other authors, including a professor, who were apparently happy to add their name to the paper but obviously didn't do anything meaningful since they didn't notice how much plagiarism was going on.

Because I can’t deal with life today (and it’s not even noon! Yay!) here’s another batch of my bullshit.

They're right, you know. There is more. FAR more ...

But for now, here ya go. Welcome back. 😈

A small update: A few hours later, here are the two other comments that make up the top 3.

So the trailer for Our Flag Means Death Season 2 just went live on youtube, and this is the top comment. I agree with it wholeheartedly.

Obsessed with the first season of Malevolent, still. They literally share a single brain cell. They’re both the same flavor of narcissistic, except one is a fragment of an eternal eldritch god and the other is Just A Guy. One is a monster (kind of) and the other is like, the opposite of a monsterfucker, he thinks he can Fix Him. Neither of them have ever been this vulnerable before and their solution is to just pretend it’s not happening. They would kill for each other. They will die for each other. They make terrible decisions and blame each other for the consequences. They imprint their own personality traits on each other like hickeys. They want each other out of their lives this very instant. They wouldn’t know what to do with themselves alone. If they both had mouths they would definitely have kissed AND bitten each other days ago. They have only known each other for a week.