DCP's ongoing problem with plagiarism

[_fetchface]

Who is saying he isn't a scientist? He seems to be trying to rebut the idea that one cannot discuss ideas that one didn't come up with oneself in a really stupid, snarky way. Is someone making that argument?

I'd like to see him just cite his sources for figures and ideas he lifts from others. Seems simple enough to do.

Dan, you can discuss other's ideas, just don't copy their words without attribution. A footnote isn't hard to make.

When I first started college, we got stern warnings. My freshman English teacher was very clear that I would fail and be expelled for doing what Dan did in this writing. Yet he continues to play stupid.

[_Lemmie]

Yes, that's the irony, he is arguing a non-issue to avoid the actual issue, that of plagiarism and his chronic and well-documented theft of intellectual property.

Here's a final look at the original plagiarized work, with DCP's blog entry section, now re-written four times, inserted. Nothing changed:

Earth, along with the other planets, is believed to have been born 4.5 billion years ago as a solidified cloud of dust and gases left over from the creation of the Sun.

Remember that, according to current scientific consensus, the Earth came into being in the same fashion that most if not all other objects in our solar system did, as a solidified cloud of dust particles and gases remaining as “left overs” from the very process that formed the Sun.  (They coalesced because of mutual and ever increasing gravitational attraction.)

For perhaps 500 million years, the interior of Earth stayed solid and relatively cool, perhaps 2,000°F.

For maybe half a billion years, the interior of the planet remained solid and (relatively) cool, perhaps at a balmy temperature of approximately 2,000°F.

The main ingredients, according to the best available evidence, were iron and silicates, with small amounts of other elements, some of them radioactive.

As millions of years passed, energy released by radioactive decay—mostly of uranium, thorium, and potassium—gradually heated Earth, melting some of its constituents. The iron melted before the silicates, and, being heavier, sank toward the center. This forced up the silicates that it found there.

But these conditions couldn’t (and didn’t) last forever. The main components of the Earth’s interior in that epoch, according to currently available evidence and theory, were iron and various silicates — that is, salts combining silicon and oxygen. But there were also small amounts of other elements, including some (notably uranium, thorium, and potassium) that were radioactive.  

As millions of years passed, energy released from those elements by slow radioactive decay gradually heated the Earth, melting some of its constituent materials.  The iron melted before the silicates could and, because it was heavier, it naturally sank toward the center.  In turn, this forced the lighter silicates that its descent displaced to rise up toward the proto-planetary surface.  

After many years, the iron reached the center, almost 4,000 mi deep, and began to accumulate.

After many years, that slowly sinking and coalescing iron reached the center of the still-forming planet — and attained stability — at almost 4,000 miles from the surface.

Finally, the iron in the center accumulated as the core.

Finally, enough iron accumulated at the Earth’s center to become our planet’s core, more or less as we know it today.

No eyes were around at that time to view the turmoil that must have taken place on the face of Earth—gigantic heaves and bubblings on the surface, exploding volcanoes, and flowing lava covering everything in sight.

 By contrast, the face of the Earth was still turbulent and unstable—suffering (as it were) gigantic earthquakes and even occasional sheer liquid bubbling, like simmering oatmeal.  Erupting volcanos pocked the Earth, and flowing lava covered virtually all of it.  Moreover, because the Earth’s protective atmosphere hadn’t yet come into existence, solar rays baked its outer surface and meteors frequently bombarded it.

Around it, a thin but fairly stable crust of solid rock formed as Earth cooled.

But the Earth inevitably began to cool, as everything in the universe is naturally fated to do, and a thin but (again) fairly stable crust of solid rock formed.  

Depressions in the crust were natural basins in which water, rising from the interior of the planet through volcanoes and fissures, collected to form the oceans.

 Of course, that crust wasn’t perfectly smooth.  There were depressions (and elevations) in it.  These formed natural basins.  Meanwhile, water was rising from the interior of the planet through fissures and via volcanic eruptions, and that water collected to form Earth’s primordial seas.

https://www.infoplease.com/science-health/earth/origin-earth

So, after being caught plagiarizing again, followed by 4 re-write attempts, the above DCP insertions (all one continuous paragraph from his blog entry) are still plagiarized from infoplease.

His attempt to add adjectives and adverbs in an attempt to disguise what he is doing has already been discussed in this thread:

It is what BYU's honor code calls "plagiarism mosaic."

https://registrar.BYU.edu/c...

"The borrowing of words, ideas, or data from an original source and blending this original material with one’s own without acknowledging the source."

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/faithpromo ... eret-news/

Keep in mind this is a BYU professor engaging in a BYU honor code violation, not to mention violating infoplease's copyright rules by plagiarizing and posting their material without permission.

[_fetchface]

There is no doubt in my mind that "his" writings were copied and reworked from that site.

I expect that he will soon launch another indignant and snarky defense against some other charge that isn't being made against him to deflect.

Just put some quotation marks and a goddamn footnote, man.

[_Res Ipsa]

Let me get this straight: Peterson basically cut and pasted an article on the web into his blog without identifying it or crediting the author. In other words, he stole. The second time for the same article. When Lemmie catches him, he doesn't do what we all know should be done: identify the article as a quotation, with proper credit. Instead, he revises his blog post multiple times, adding superficial changes that he apparently hopes will transform his copy/paste into his own work. Then he makes a snarky argument that he is entitled to rely on the work of scientists in his blog posts -- but apparently without obligation to identify the work of those scientists and giving them the credit they are due.

I can see a middle schooler stubbornly refusing to follow the rules and covering his tracks, but a university professor? I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.

A tip of the hat to Lemmie, for her keen observation, tireless documentation, and prescient thread title. Dean Robbers, how much does it cost to fund a chair at Cassius U.?

[Guest]

Dean Robbers, how much does it cost to fund a chair at Cassius U.?

I second the inquiry of Res Ipsa, Esq. - while noting that appropriately naming such a Chair at Cassius U. could turn out to be more of a challenge than funding it.

[Guest]

Someone should start a parody blog by taking everything Peterson writes, adding a sentence here and there and substituting some synonyms, and passing it off as their own.

I'm quite sure he would have no objection. If he does happen to complain, just change a few more words.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Well. If you google the words 'daniel c. peterson plagiarism' this result will pop up:

https://www.google.com/search?q=daniel+ ... e&ie=UTF-8

Oddly enough the top result is one of his high-octane hate 'reviews' called A Modern Malleus maleficarum. Clocking in at 32 pages of just virulent, vitriolic assholishness, you get the sense he sort just thumbed through the book, picked the odd page here and there to critique, knocked out this odd duck of an essay, and collected a paycheck from BYU, en route to a long and indistinguished career nestled away in academic ingnominy among the foothills of Provo.

As an aside, he starts his reviews with two out in left field quotes that have zero to do with either the material reviewed or his essay. Just goes to show you that no one ever really read his reviews. It was all just nonsense to make the powerbrokers in SLC feel like they were being protected on the flanks.

- Doc

[_Jersey Girl]

Keep in mind this is a BYU professor engaging in a BYU honor code violation, not to mention violating infoplease's copyright rules by plagiarizing and posting their material without permission.

This point is not lost on me. The comparisons you are posting here are a stunning example of academic dishonesty by a BYU professor whose narcissism will not allow him to choose the right.

[_toon]

DCP is currently ignoring a commenter asking about the allegation of plagiarism on the 2019 entry he has now thesaurus-adjusted 4 times while the 2017 plagiarized entry remains unchanged, but today he posted this, tagged onto the end of another entry:

It has been suggested, incidentally, that my notes on science are those of a pretender, and that I’m not really a scientist myself at all.  This is wholly untrue.
 
I read nothing about science, and I never depend upon the research of others.  I don’t learn about the cutting edge of science at second hand.  The notes I post here are wholly original.  When I write about a potentially new species of killer whales, it’s because I myself was braving the harsh winds off the coast of Chile near Cape Horn in order to discover them.  When I mention the finding of a fossilized palm frond on the high Tibetan plateau, I’m the scientist who found it.  (I spend a great deal of time in and around Tibet, pickaxe at the ready)  And when I tell you about a seventh-century BC solar storm?  I was there.  (In my spare moments, when not in Tibet, I experiment with time travel.)
 
So yes, I’m a scientist.  In fact, my scientific achievements are huge, and many people are saying that I’m the greatest scientist of all time.  Probably nobody has ever been more scientific than I am.
 
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... 4375231977

[bolding added]

I don't think infoplease would consider irony to be an acceptable citation for its work. In fact, they seem rather humorless about stealing intellectual property.

Infoplease content cannot be used commercially or on the Web without first obtaining our permission.

https://www.infoplease.com/frequently-a ... rmission30

Has anyone contacted the original author and let him or her know that there's some BYU professor plagiarizing the work. If I were the author, I'd be might pissed. And while I might be able to let it go were it some high school kid or younger, there's no question I'd be contacting BYU were I to find out that it was someone on BYU's payroll.

[Guest]

Unbelievable. 5th version of Peterson's most recent plagiarism is up.

He has literally added a bunch of seemingly random sentences in between the plagiarized parts of his original post, as though that will somehow disguise the intellectual theft. And by random, I do mean random. In support of an Infoplease sentence about iron and silicates, he has added a whole paragraph of sentences about heavy and light elements, the percentages of helium and hydrogen as represented in baryonic matter, 'stellar nuclear fusion' and then somehow segueing into dark energy and dark matter and their percentages in the entire universe of energy.

In an essay meant to discuss the possible new discovery of the oldest organic material ever found.

For another example, also NOT apropos of organic material, he seems quite focused on rock ages. He added this sentence:

"The oldest terrestrial rocks currently known to scientists date to roughly 3.8 billion years before the present."

And in the next paragraph, this one:

"The oldest meteorites and lunar rocks that have been found are about 4.5 billion years old, but the oldest Earth rocks currently known are 3.8 billion years."

And in the next paragraph this:

"With the advent of solid terrestrial rock, perhaps somewhat prior to our oldest evidence from 3.8 billion years ago..."

But in the first added paragraph, he also had this:

"The oldest meteoric rocks that have been discovered are currently dated — apart from the fascinating “Hypatia” stone, which deserves its own discussion — to between 4.5 and 4.6 billion years Ago."

and, SAME paragraph, this!

"The oldest lunar rock thus far dated has been placed at about 4.44 billion years of age." 

Inexplicably, the Moon also makes an appearance in a discussion of terrestrial organic evidence:

"The Moon doesn’t experience plate tectonics and, with neither water nor an atmosphere, it doesn’t experience erosion, either."

All of this extra stuff is literally just inserted around the plagiarized material.

(Meanwhile, the 2017 version of this blog entry remains the same plagiarism it always was.)