Comments for Brain Strain

Comment on Who is the author? by Simon

Simon — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:11:10 +0000

Exactly Waz. If, for whatever reason, I was reading through some essays on The Postmodern Generator while researching another essay (although I don’t know why I’d be looking through random essays looking for a solid reference) I’d just look up the source of the work.

Another of these ‘generator’ sites is this. A number of papers generated from this site have been accepted at academic conferences.

Comment on Who is the author? by warren

warren — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:45:44 +0000

So Simon, what if you were researching one of the obscure titles originally mentioned in the article… would you reference the book? After all it has done the work of compiling all the relevant material, but doesn’t produce an original idea or theory… I find this area very gray, you cannot discount it for the relevance but at the same time you cannot discount it for its accuracy.

Whatever is an uninformed student to do?????

PS… oh crap my layout is fucking up again!

Comment on Who is the author? by Simon

Simon — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:27:48 +0000

I, at least, would never reference such a website unless it was for some cultural/social studies type paper. Or perhaps if I were writing about the code or the general phenomena of the website. As for an essay that it generates, never.

That being said, however, when I was a first year I once asked a T.A. about referencing online sources. I new it was an accepted practice but I was unsure of which websites were considered OK to use. The response that I received was it’s OK to use .org .edu and .gov domains. The Postmodern Generator is found at a .org domain so does it fit this bill?

Yeah it does but this is just poor advice. You can find all sorts of shit on .org domains (and the others too).

Comment on Who is the author? by Nathan

Nathan — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:32:37 +0000

with regards to The Postmodern Generator, I wonder what would happen if a student were to use any article published as part of their bibliography. Though the Blog author suggests that all posts are meaningless, I would argue the content generated nonetheless holds some truth with regard to the subject. I think it is an interesting dilemma.

Comment on Who is the author? by Nathan

Nathan — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:50:11 +0000

this is probably a really mundane question, but… how does his program counteract plagiarism?

Comment on Who is the author? by Simon

Simon — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 06:59:46 +0000

Perhaps the word author isn’t suited to this discourse Waz. Programmer certainly.

Something else that you may enjoy Waz is ‘The Postmodern Generator’, a website that dynamically generates a new Postmodern themed paper on every visit. I’ve just been there and read a very engaging paper titled ‘The Paradigm of Context: The capitalist paradigm of expression and cultural discourse’. You’ll find The Postmodern Generator here.

Comment on Open source philosophy by Simon

Simon — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:03:11 +0000

The following is an interesting article outlining a particular detail of Open Source Philosophy and why we *need* Microsoft Word.

http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/03/06/ooxml-why-the-debate/

Comment on open access expanded by Simon

Simon — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:45:26 +0000

I think that you and Nath would find Noesis quite a useful resource. I’ve been using Noesis for a while now and it is really quite good. Noesis is a search engine for Open Access Philosophy journals. I think that there are around 70 journals that it searches. Anyhow, the URL is - http://noesis.evansville.edu/

Comment on Open source - Open Access by Nathan

Nathan — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 13:37:25 +0000

i heard about this one a little while ago. i thought it was you, waz, that pointed it out to me. anyhow, post ‘em up if you find any more.

i have one here for international journalof baudrillard studies

Comment on Open source - Open Access by Brad Frederiksen

Brad Frederiksen — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 04:51:46 +0000

Macquarie University’s own Anthropology blog also has an entry on the matter.

http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/open-access-online-journals-peer-review/