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RE: W3C suckered by Microsoft?

• To: 'Greg Colyer' <greg-xml@e...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: W3C suckered by Microsoft?
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 08:24:41 -0600

It's both.  A mechanism has been developed that 
provides a measurement.  One determines in advance the 
value of that measurement for some process. 

Forgetting is not a crime.  It's a quality 
issue.  But it will also be a political issue 
as those who are members of some polity attempt 
to defend their own against the inevitable 
development and then the results of automated metrics.

Should a programmer receive a performance 
rating for the number of bugs his/her code 
has?  In isolation, no.  Would it make more 
sense if rated against the difficulty of the 
problem they are solving, the language, the 
tools, the libraries?

Some companies doing piece work are marketing 
the measures they make of their engineers' work 
and and productivity.  Should we be questioning 
the value of those numbers?  Or simply the costs 
of work received?  If we only look at the costs 
of goods received, we find ourselves in the 
curious position of a pawnbroker who is pushed 
by his customers into becoming a fence.  Would 
you like the pawnbroker to check the ownership 
and issue a receipt?

len


From: Greg Colyer [mailto:greg-xml@e...]

> http://www.cnn.com/2004/EDUCATION/03/09/college.president.ap/index.html

... which includes the hilarious comment: "I mistakenly assumed notes I 
had made were my own ..."

Sounds suspiciously like an Orwellian forced confession that the emperor 
does have clothes. Is it now a crime to forget something?

As I said, the academic culture of citation is something of a conceit, 
promoted not least because authors get brownie-points for citations. 
Their accuracy is given much less weight than their existence, as I have 
frequently found by following them up.

I would have thought that uncited truth is generally more helpful than, 
for example, cited untruth, but this notion almost runs counter to that 
particular culture. Of course, no-one is disputing that cited truth is 
the ideal, but with limited resources would you be better off spending 
them checking the facts or finding the originator of the perhaps-not-facts?

I suspect that another reason for the obsession with plagiarism is its 
increased detectability rather than its increased incidence. At least 
the web does help one to find "other" sources for an item of 
information, even if it doesn't do much to help establish which (if any) 
may be the "first" source.

Some of the points that have been made are arguments not against the 
bloggers but simply against trusting certain automated analyses (e.g. 
page-ranking) of them.

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