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I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

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Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#101

Post by mysterydip »

matwood wrote: post #87
matsemann wrote: post #63

Off topic, but on Friday the minister of Science and Higher Education in Norway had to step down, after someone found out about 22 % of her master thesis was plagiarized. Why did someone look into this? Because she and her department is taking a case against a student to our highest court about "self plagiarism", which everyone thinks is unfair. So quite ironic she was the real plagiarist. And then media jumped on th…

> So quite ironic she was the real plagiarist. "A man does not look behind the door unless he has stood there himself." - W.E.B. Du Bois

aka "Takes one to know one"

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#102

Post by cool_dude85 »

optimalsolver wrote: post #58
7thaccount wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they find real plagiarism that was obviously fraudulent or did someone cite an author improperly. I know in academic circles it's basically the same, but some things I've seen recently accusing people of plagiarism are just draconian IMO like they cited the person, but screwed up the quotes somehow.

>some things I've seen recently accusing people of plagiarism are just draconian IMO like they cited the person, but screwed up the quotes somehow Can you provide an example of an incident like this?

Both the Gay and Oxman plagiarism cases have some plagiarized passages being defended by saying "well, she did cite the source, it should have been in quotes but still..." So the passage uses the exact words used in the source, sometimes even an exact quote, and there's a cite, but no quotes to indicate that not just the concept or fact is being cited but the actual passage is taken from the source.

Whether this is "screwing up the quotes" or not depends on your perspective.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#103

Post by [deleted] »

matsemann wrote: post #63

Off topic, but on Friday the minister of Science and Higher Education in Norway had to step down, after someone found out about 22 % of her master thesis was plagiarized. Why did someone look into this? Because she and her department is taking a case against a student to our highest court about "self plagiarism", which everyone thinks is unfair. So quite ironic she was the real plagiarist. And then media jumped on th…

[deleted]

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#104

Post by stemlord »

rerdavies wrote: post #55
Havoc wrote: post #43

If it wasn't for the dates I'd say that's LLM completion at play. If you think about copilot etc...that would produce the same pattern. Fragments being obviously matching existing work. Not sure I'd go quite as far as calling an author a plagiarist on the basis of specific short fragments matching. It would need bit more of an overarching say plotline matching or similar. Who here hasn't copied some code off stack ov…

Never copy code off stack overflow!

Why not? What if the answer is linked to via comment?

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#105

Post by gigatexal »

plagiarist wrote: post #91
gigatexal wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh these guys are so exhausting. My favorite was Grant Cardone — the real estate mogul who’s said he’d be ashamed if he made 400k a year. All of them and his ilk peddling this you can get rich fast stuff are disgusting.

Aren't some of these schemes actually possible but only if you are a scumbags? It's somehow always get a ballon mortgage to buy multi-family housing and raise the rents by 100%, or buy dilapidated shacks and get section 8 money while putting nothing in to improve squalid conditions.

Exactly. And especially with real estate and landording the quickest schemes are the most immoral / shady.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#106

Post by arnsholt »

sesm wrote: post #92
matsemann wrote: post #63

Off topic, but on Friday the minister of Science and Higher Education in Norway had to step down, after someone found out about 22 % of her master thesis was plagiarized. Why did someone look into this? Because she and her department is taking a case against a student to our highest court about "self plagiarism", which everyone thinks is unfair. So quite ironic she was the real plagiarist. And then media jumped on th…

Isn't it a common practice for one's Masters/PhD thesis to be a compilation of several articles that were published while working on the thesis?

It is. In this case though, we're talking the wholesale lifting of entire passages of text from other people's theses. I think the tally is up to 22% currently of her thesis being copied without attribution from other sources.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#107

Post by matthewdgreen »

haizhung wrote: post #90
toxik wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot copy from yourself. Reusing material and passing it off as new, no matter its author, is plagiarism.

+1, my layman’s understanding of this was: Assume you write a bachelor thesis on topic X. Then, move universities (or professors, whatever), and write more or less the same thesis again to get a masters degree. That’s self plagiarism.

The problem with that is that it’s academic dishonesty. You’re turning in work for academic credit that you didn’t do. Transfer the self-plagiarism situation to another context, say you self-publish a book and re-use some material from another book you wrote. The fact of self-plagiarism may still exist but in this new context it’s not clear that the harm does (whereas copying another writer’s words is still clearly harmful.)

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#108

Post by smcameron »

mellosouls wrote: post #71

I've read a couple of Dawson books in the John Milton series but gave up as The Grey Man covers similar ground and seems mostly better crafted. Not to excuse anything but would be interesting to understand if some of this is potentially a result of using automated tools; I don't actually know what pulp writers use in their work.

And The Gray Man (by Mark Greaney) was awful, just a series of events seemingly conceived to demonstrate that the protagonist was indeed a badass, over and over. After awhile, the protagonist became Steven Seagal in my mind's eye. Had to quit before I finished.

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#109

Post by lr1970 »

nefrix wrote: post #66
matsemann wrote: post #63

Off topic, but on Friday the minister of Science and Higher Education in Norway had to step down, after someone found out about 22 % of her master thesis was plagiarized. Why did someone look into this? Because she and her department is taking a case against a student to our highest court about "self plagiarism", which everyone thinks is unfair. So quite ironic she was the real plagiarist. And then media jumped on th…

I thought this is happening only in Romania, but looks like is been a common practice for politicians all over.

Plagiarism is a form of lying. Politicians are liars. No surprise that plagiarism in political circles is rampant. Quite often such MS and PhD thesis are written by "ghost writers" for a fee. Politicians are busy advancing their political careers and a degree is needed just for its title not its content. PhD as a modern form of aristocratic title :-)

Re: I believe bestselling author Mark Dawson is a serial plagiarist

#110

Post by ssl-3 »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #53
burnished wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that fraud?

Artificially inflating sales numbers to get higher on bestseller lists seems like an intentional deception to secure unfair gain. How is that not fraud?

He did buy those books, though -- correct? Were those not real sales of real books that were paid for with real money?

There's no implication that he crossed out a number on a report before artificially enhancing it by increasing it by 400, is there?

I feel that both of these examples are reprehensible in this context, but that only one of them rises to the level of fraud.

(I mean: There are companies performing stock buybacks all the time for various reasons, and some of those reasons can include improving the market's perception of that stock's value.)

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