Alice Walker: “There is an attempt, fueled by corporations that sell meat, drugs, religion and other life choices, to control the population’s way of eating, worshipping, and expressing the desire to create something different.”
Alice Walker: Writing What’s Right – Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics.
“Wikipedia does not want to risk some rogue editor inventing history. It relies instead on the passion of thousands of people who constantly check on each other and cite books or articles in their footnotes. It’s a fairly sophisticated version of crowd-sourcing, many people providing bits information.
And that process really bothered labor historian Timothy Messer-Kruse. He believed he had the truth, primary documents, right in his hands, but couldn’t shove it past the crowd.”
A number of studies have spotted a worrisome trend: although the number of scientific journals and articles published is increasing each year, the rate of papers being retracted as invalid is increasing even faster. Some of these are being retracted due to obvious ethical lapses—fraudulent data or plagiarism—but some past studies have suggested errors and technical problems were the cause of the majority of problems.
A new analysis, released by PNAS, shows this rosy picture probably isn’t true. Researchers like to portray their retractions as being the result of errors, but a lot of these same papers turn out to be fraudulent when fully investigated. If there’s any good news here, it’s that a limited number of labs 38, to be exact are responsible for a third of the fraudulent papers that end up being retracted.
via Research fraud exploded over the last decade | Ars Technica.
October’s Baseball Firsts!
Even though we are now getting into Football season, there are a few great Baseball moments in History as well that occurred in the Month of October. Come check them out at the Todd Library’s monthly display. Babe Ruth Calls his Shot, World Series 1932, Maris breaks Ruth’s Home Run Record 1961, Robinson named Baseball’s 1st Black Major League Manager 1974,and Bonds breaks season Home Run record 2001.