A consideration of academic misconduct in the creative disciplines: From inspiration to imitation and acceptable incorporation

When the issue of students obtaining unfair academic advantage is discussed, the focus is, virtually always on text based material concerning inadequate attribution or more blatant, but possibly inadvertent, passing off. A 2008 conference concerning plagiarism held had only two, from over thirty, sessions, keynotes and workshops, focused specifically on issues of plagiarism from within the creative, visual, art and design disciplines. The purpose of this paper is to outline many of the issues of misrepresentation with particular reference to vocational education in creative disciplines and to propose a route that may be followed to clarify matters for specific subject grouping and institutions. It is asserted that this approach, if formalised, can, lead to the establishment of agreed verifiable standards and thus improve the quality of the student work created (Porter 2009). This paper does not focus upon text based misconduct but upon issues of academic misconduct specifically associated with images, ideas and intellectual property within the creative disciplines of art and design

Creating presentable PowerPoint presentations (including reference to students with dyslexia or who do not have English as their first language)

This guide aims to enlighten presenters in the art of effective visual presentations to enable the audience to view the presentation as an enhancement rather than a substitution

Two Notions of Naturalness

My aim in this paper is twofold: (i) to distinguish two notions of naturalness employed in BSM physics and (ii) to argue that recognizing this distinction has methodological consequences. One notion of naturalness is an "autonomy of scales" requirement: it prohibits sensitive dependence of an effective field theory's low-energy observables on precise specification of the theory's description of cutoff-scale physics. I will argue that considerations from the general structure of effective field theory provide justification for the role this notion of naturalness has played in BSM model construction. A second, distinct notion construes naturalness as a statistical principle requiring that the values of the parameters in an effective field theory be "likely" given some appropriately chosen measure on some appropriately circumscribed space of models. I argue that these two notions are historically and conceptually related but are motivated by distinct theoretical considerations and admit of distinct kinds of solution.Comment: 34 pages, 1 figur

Specimen poetics: botany, reanimation, and the Romantic collection

This essay argues that the modern literary anthology—and specifically its aspiration to delimit both aesthetic merit and historical representativeness—emerged as a response to changes in eighteenth-century botanical collecting, description, and illustration. A dramatic upsurge in botanical metaphors for poetic collections around 1800 was triggered by shifts in the geographies, aims, and representational practices of botany in the previous century. Yoking Linnaean taxonomy and Buffonian vitalism to Hogarth’s line of beauty, late eighteenth-century botanical illustrations imbued plucked, pressed specimens with a new vitality. Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789, 1791) translated the aesthetic reanimations of visual art into a collection of poetic specimens, spurring compilations that promote a vitalist standard of literary value. By rejecting aesthetic reanimation as the figurative ground for poetic collecting, Charlotte Smith and Robert Southey forward an alternative historical model of literary merit, one grounded in the succession and continuity of representative literary types. These competing metrics for selection and valuation underwrite the anthology as we know it today

[Review of] Toni Morrison. Song of Solomon: The Flight of Afro-American Life

Song of Solomon can only be viewed as a tribute to the artistic and cultural genius of Ms. Toni Morrison. I, as reviewer and want-to-be-rich writer, am studious and intent throughout my reading of her novel. I am amazed, gratified and satisfied. I am fully amazed that she pulls it through; this wealth of characterization and plot. This is a novel of growing into manhood. It is at once the tale of man-to-man relationships and man-to-woman relationships in the Afro-American community where there is an essential struggle simply to be: There is in Song of Solomon mystery, romance and intrigue. The Song catalogues the fundamental struggle for integrity of the Black being in this American land. I am grateful, that Ms. Morrison does not enter into the fabric of this torn garment with stock-issue characters. I am thoroughly satisfied upon completion of the novel, that there is nothing left undone, there is no string untied. Song of Solomon is a masterpiece of fiction