Quote of the week

Posted Aug 5, 2006 19:14 UTC (Sat) by millenix (guest, #39711) [Link]

He actually was not using "asian" as a slur as you suggest, but as the most concise representation of differing social norms between scholarly communities in eastern Asian societies and western societies. I don't know how far this extends, but in Chinese tradition, attribution of work receives a far lower priority than correct results and usage.

I ran into this like a brick wall this summer, when I was reading background papers for a research project that I was joining. I noticed a flagrant instance of plagiarism (two complete paragraphs, with no reference at all to the original source), and got very different reactions when I brought this up to different professors. The American born and educated program director was ahgast and suggested that we report this find to the IEEE; my project mentor, of Chinese extraction and education, saw this as perfectly acceptable behaviour, because the semantic contents of the duplicated text were fairly basic knowledge in the particular discipline.