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Subject:RE: Ethics in Technical Communication From:"walden miller" <wmiller -at- vidiom -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 5 Feb 2001 10:58:32 -0700
bryan writes:
In the article "Welcome to Cyberia" by M. Kadi..., the author starts with a
quote about how
computer networks will change the world. This quote is attributed to
Scientific American magazine and dated 1994. At the end of the article, Kadi
reveals that the quote was really from 1954 and every place the phrase
"computer network" appears it was originally
"television".
What bothers me about this is the (in my opinion) cheap trick that he pulled
of intentionally misquoted in the beginning.
Response:
Academic publications are often a cheap trick.
It sounds like the idea in the article was to compare the claims of
television changing the world in 1954 to the claims of computer networking
today. Ethically, I see nothing wrong in the reprinting of the article with
the changes made as long as the "author" owns up to it. The publishers
obviously saw nothing wrong and they are the one's who are most concerned
with plagiarism. It IS cheap academics in that there is no value added to
the comparison. But it probably got M. Kadi another publication, putting
Kadi that much closer to a job with tenure:-)
wm
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