Another day, some more learning.

[active_apathy]

Learning is fun, normally.

Today's learning was... special. We got to spend a four hour class on references and citations, yey, and so I couldn't help but think I have to attribute carefully because nostalgia can make you sad.

This is obviously useful, for two important reasons. One is because academic offences are an evil unto themselves, and get a small slice of the special hell. The other is that - eventually - some folk may come to rely on my supreme talents of knowing referencing to help keep them from committing academic offences.

Happily, the teacher of this particular class suggests that so long as a reference list looks right, no-one's really going to care. This is certainly good news, but not the kind of hypothesis I plan to exist, because, well, offences. That are academic. Because those? Bad. Very bad.

And then it was off to learn about data projectors. Yay data projectors. I've forgotten most of what was said about them, but, well, data projectors. You don't need to have a clue what you're on about when you've got a slideshow.

Unless you're using 35mm slides, for they are the work of incomprehensible evil doing its very best to frighten the absolute Nyarlathotep out of Cthulhu. So, um, yay data projectors.

And that's about it for today. See? I can post daily entries.

Comments

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

Just don't forget that dada projectors can electrofry you!

("dada" is a typo, but I am leaving it in. Nyeh!)

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

OhnoeZZZZZZ!

[deepfishy.livejournal.com]

It's true - I had several different referencing systems from different departments (and even between different lecturers within a department), and as long as it's consistent within the paper and you get all the relevant information in, nobody cares. I also had to make up a suitably academic-looking way to reference Buffy episodes, because none of the usual systems seemed to mention television.

But, yes, academic offences BAD.

[active-apathy.livejournal.com]

Academic offences very bad. Making other people commit academic offences not so bad from a personal standpoint, but worthy of pretend ritual suicide on moral grounds.

[ohmysyzygy.livejournal.com]

Ever save a webpage and lose all sense of clue of what the addy was you took it down from?

Ever reference "Google with key words: "Globalisation, African, Context." ?

No?

Pity, I'm looking to start a university expulsoin club, so far I'm the only member who falls in the plagiarism subcommittee

[actionreplay.livejournal.com]

well, the exception as regards the reference list is a thesis examiner. It's generally a good idea to a) refer to something written by your examiner somewhere and b) get it right. (a) can be achieved by refering to just about everything you can imagine in the literature survey :-).

Luckily for my sanity, page references were only required in comp sci publications for books, not papers...