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I tracked down my impostor

theguardian.com

101–110 of 248 posts

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#101
post #61
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My daughter is in 5th grade, attending school virtually due to the pandemic, and she has all her submitted assignments automatically verified by plagiarism checkers. In fact, she's encouraged to use online plagiarism checkers herself before submission to avoid false positives.

My partner finds it frustrating that she has to edit out “false positives” even when she knows damn well she hasn’t plagiarised.

Editors have to do that already, so if she doesn't have an editor, it probably is her job.

In High School, I did a (very) short co-op copyrighting for a radio station. At the time I thought it was pretty ridiculous that I had to basically reword everything to mean the same thing, but differently. As a grown-up and seeing the same stories in different papers struck me as ultra-lazy, and then I realized why all that copyrighting had to be done.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#104
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep waiting for someone to find a plagiarism checker retained a copy of their work and sue for copyright infringement.

Of course they retain a copy; that's part of how they detect plagiarism. It's been ruled fair use in the US [1], and if it hadn't it would be in the terms and conditions. You can opt out of retention on TurnItIn, but it's the default. [1] https://www.turnitin.com/blog/top-15-misconceptions-about-tu...

I think that ruling is only for the Fourth Circuit.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#105
post #5

Is there any verification of this story? The way it ends with "As told to Amy Sedghi" makes me think this is some spoken word story rather than some journalistic recounting of events.

Malcolm X's autobiography is "as told to Alex Haley". I believe it's a common phrase used when an article is written by a journalist, but from the first-person perspective of the interviewee.

Yes. Some other well-known ones are Richard Feynman's Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman and What do you care what other people think?, which are "as told to Ralph Leighton".

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#106
I have been a victim of this, and it is still an ongoing matter. If you don't want to find yourself a victim of these kinds of people, then you better keep these two links as a reference, and always take them to heart:

Narcissists Online: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-on...

What to Remember When Dealing with a Narcissist: http://www.issendai.com/psychology/narcissism/narcissists-wh...

People who do this sort of stuff have narcissistic traits at minimum, which of course is an armchair diagnosis. But, these people really do not need to meet the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. All you need to know is that they are people who will harm you in some incredibly hurtful way, because they have contempt for you being yourself.

Some of these people have antisocial traits, and are malignant narcissists. Some of them outright have both narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder.

Regardless, these people tend to masquerade as "entrepreneurs", "researchers", "thinkers", "doers", or as "authors", when their entire works are just plagiarized material from others. People make entire livings off of such grifts and it becomes a central identity, if not their only identity. Of course, it is always about getting the next award or accolade, even though it is "empty" to them because they have intrinsically low self-esteem and an unbelievably fragile ego. But, of course they would never want you to know that.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#108
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? Hopefully he didn't get them purely for the scam. He could genuinely like the tatts and general style of the guy. Hipster kitsch isn't even that unique.

That's what I was thinking. The picture reminded me of that one story about a Hipster going after some website over an article claiming all Hipster look alike that he found used his picture without permission ... only to find out that it wasn't him. From the pictures of him and his colleague it seems that the people who study tattoos are into getting tattoos as well, I find it absolutely plausible that the guy got th…

He had both a flower on his hand and the letters tattooed on his knuckles. Know More isn't a particularly common knuckle tattoo and to also have the same style of flower on the hand is definitely suspect.

Even that type of flower as a hand tattoo isn't very common.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#109
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given he's a UK prof if he was told the paper was given an 'A' in the UK that can be anywhere from 70-100, while in the US it is 90-100. He might have initially split the difference, and then corrected it/was corrected for the article.

> in the US it is 90-100 In a science or engineering class, it might be everything above 40%.

In a high priced private US university, you may get an A just for showing up.

Re: I tracked down my impostor

#110
post #39

Getting the same tattoos as your target? That's one dedicated identity thief.

From the twitter link posted here it seems that "their" field of study is tattoos. The video of the talk of the impostor has a slide in the background with Victorian era tattoos. Seems like they both take them very seriously.
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