New Yorker magazine alert thread

& i've read a couple of AD things recently that have been not-amazing, but she's one of the best commentators i think, her prose is exquisite & she always appropriately, accurately directs her anger

I actually find some of her rhetorical formations -- particularly how she'll stretch a GOP talking point to an absurdly literal degree -- to lack empathy and generosity, though why I feel this way when she critiques Republicans I have no idea.

Here's this kid with nothing to live for whose face gets burned off, down to the skull,

tagline 4 ghost rider

Josh otm; that article has been haunting me a bit.

The Atlantic, but a really good companion to Lizza's "Obama Memos": http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/obama-explained/8874/

That Jane Mayer piece scared the shit outta me.

Article on the plagiarist was good, though I found myself wishing it had gone more into the role of the Internet in plagiarism detection. There are so many books on Google Books these days, all searchable to some degree, that modern-day plagiarists are taking a bigger risk than ever.

― jaymc, Friday, February 10, 2012 4:01 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Or maybe that's just taken for granted.

yeah, i assumed that everyone was just googling lines/passages from the dude's book and poems. although it did mention a plagiarism-detection program that is used in academics, i wonder if that works off of a database or just goes through search engines automatically (i presume it's the latter).

xpost Yeah, me too. At first I thought it was, yeah, another story about evil and powerful right wingers who won't go on the record, but I think the message was bigger than that.

xp TurnItIn actually attracted some controversy because their ToS give them an unlimited license to use work submitted to the service as part of their corpus for further plagiarism detection, and students were required to use the service in their classes, I think there was a lawsuit.

Anyway technically speaking what TurnItIn probably does when you upload your paper is check a bunch of n-grams (chunks of words a few sentences long) and checks its index for matches. When it finds matches on an improbably long chunk of words, it flags it.

Basically types in random phrases to google but advanced and automatic.

imna reverse engineer it and sell a product that can write papers for people

im gonna sell people chunks of words

i will sell them dream words and nightmare paragraphs from a red factory in a dead town

that does sound like a pretty good business model

at the very least it's better than the groupon business model

I would not buy a groupon of the groupon business model no

someone help me find that piece from a while ago about duels

I actually read the face transplant story and found it too long, technical stuff got boring after awhile. also if I were blind I wouldn't have that surgery, I prob wouldn't care. I would be much more bummed out by the blindness than not having a face.

most of my life at this point is just staring at computer screens, having a face is kinda overrated. having eyes v. important.

its cool to have both imo

TurnItIn actually attracted some controversy because their ToS give them an unlimited license to use work submitted to the service as part of their corpus for further plagiarism detection, and students were required to use the service in their classes, I think there was a lawsuit.

Anyway technically speaking what TurnItIn probably does when you upload your paper is check a bunch of n-grams (chunks of words a few sentences long) and checks its index for matches. When it finds matches on an improbably long chunk of words, it flags it.

It also assigns a percentage (e.g. "20 percent" of paragraph comes from other sources). We use it at the university all the time.

whats the actionable threshold

Depends on the professor. For the class I'm co-teaching now the primary instructor sets the bar at 25 percent.

I wonder how it would work with everyone saying what they think the teacher or editor or publicist wants them to say.

You get enough people doing that, you're gonna have some innocent--anyway, you're gonna have some convergence.

Finally got the plagiarist issue in late this week, and it turns out that the last fifth of the magazine reprints a bunch of pages from the middle, and upside-down, instead of the actual stuff.

they prob printed it upside down to fool the plagiarism detection software because they copied from the middle of the mag

wut you mean all your issues aren't like that?

It's called "work and turn".

this week's provided my new display name (scavenger hunt you guys)

Haha, yeah I just read that article last night. Kudos.

had so many problems with gopnik's prison essay

let's hear em. i thought it was well voiced and interesting but yes, problematic.

mostly your standard civil libertarian objections, particularly how he apologized for stop-and-frisk as a necessary way to "collect fingerprints" of young people in minority communities. i'm not familiar with zimring's research tbh

yeah that was the big ?
Like we should do stopandfrisk but "less invasively" and that's the answer? He doesn't quite explain what a less invasive form of s&f would be as i recall.

wouldn't mind stop and frisk if performed by Clarence Thomas.

excuse me young man could you tell me is this a pube on my coke

Did anyone mention the article on Madagascar's plowshare tortoises (sub)? Beginning is hott, very much something you Grann stans would appreciate imho.

some good stuff in the new one, mainly the ones about the arms smuggler and the one about altruism in evolutionary biology. shouts and murmurs was kind of amusing again. thought the davos piece would be good but it was fairly boring, which i guess was kind of the point?

Alice Munro!

i have next week off! *rubs hands*

Doggies (sub req'd)!!!

^^

the davos piece would be good but it was fairly boring, which i guess was kind of the point

otm, but i thought that just how boring the davos attendees and event seemed was revealing in a perverse way. "drink up shriners!"

christian marclay profile in the new one is good

The Alice Munro story last week was good - it captured well that pre-feminism, passive-aggressive marriage dynamic of my grandparents' generation.

shouts and murmurs was kind of amusing again.

Yes. I looked up the author -- he's a writer for Colbert.

Looking forward to the Marclay profile -- I don't usually get the magazine until Wed.

best thing this week was the piece about lawrence v. texas and the supreme court overturning anti-sodomy laws. shouts and murmurs (by jack handey) was once again pretty good! are my humor tastes getting more middlebrow?

naw its just jack handy is an genius

When do y'all usually receive it? I don't get mine until Friday or Saturday.

kindle version -> monday morning

i guess ipad comes on monday too tho i never really thought abt it i just open it up and sometimes its there

same here alfred