@blochwave Interesting... apparently no attribution

I am of course assuming that the lead author D R Grimes and the user DRG are the same person :-)

Such pressure, saying something after 3 consecutive stars

@blochwave @SjoerdC.deVries and then we complain about students asking for their HW done here! What a low ethics standard

I think SE sites require attribution. And he is funded by Microsoft Research. We could at least embarrass him.

pretty shady sruff

stuff

Posted a comment in his question

@belisarius What's the limit to that?

(I'm reading the "attribution required" think on the SE blog, I'll ask again if it's still unclear to me)

@Rojo Well, I think you should attribute every piece of information that isn't originally yours. That's what a referee enforces.

@belisarius But we are talking about a plot that he had created halfway, but wanted it slightly modified but didn't know how to do it, asked, and then slightly modified again himself, right?

@Rojo I can only speculate about how he's done it. But for sure he asked for help, and found it here

@belisarius so one should be careful to give attribution to anything done being helped by a question here?

There must be a limit. Otherwise...

@Rojo You should give attributions and cite prior art. That's the rule, yes. Otherwise one day you'll find yourself discovering the steam engine by accident

@Rojo Private letters and communications in general also require attribution

@belisarius Say in the process of working on some data I come to the site, search for a question about some Dataset thing, that helps out in the process. Attribution required?

I understand the need for attribution, I just don't have a good feel about where it should stop, or most importantantly why.

@Rojo The criteria should be the same as when you base part of your work on any printed material.

@belisarius Well, I wouldn't attribute the MMA docs on something I wanted to do but didn't know how

perhaps unless it was a "neat examples" thing

or something taken from their datasets

@Rojo Mma docs doesn't require attribution. SE sites do

@Rojo See for example functions.wolfram.com/About/citation.html

from Wolfram.com

@belisarius Thanks, I don't know much about all this and perhaps its time I did. It feels reasonable to attribute the information you are basing your work on. But I am not sure about having to attribute any kind of help on how to implement what you already know you want to do

@Rojo I understand the edges are somewhat blurred. But the author shouldn't ask for help if he isn't going to attribute it. I have seen many cases of attribution just because the author has discussed an issue with someone.

@belisarius Ah, so it's more an issue of attributing what others specifically did "for you".

even in books!

If the author had found the help while looking for previous questions, it would be different

?

Nah, its not about that. Anyway, as you said, blurred edges

@Rojo It's different only if it's not directly related to your work in a direct way.

Any referee will enforce you to cite prior art, even if you haven't made use of it

@belisarius I guess the fact of having a prior similarly looking picture in a SE answer makes it count as prior art

@Rojo Probably not. Unless you asked for it :)

@belisarius He should have asked for an implementation in the kernel :)

@Rojo It's like those questions about homework you see here. Ten questions about the same problem. After how many of them do you consider that the HW wasn't done by the student?

@belisarius After 1 it wasn't entirely done by the student

@Rojo Yup. That's the point. When you sign a paper you are saying that all the non-attributed work is yours

@Rojo Of course you can get better answers here

@belisarius Uhmm thanks. I got side tracked while googling :)

@Rojo I call it "procrastigoogling"

@belisarius I suffer from PCGD

@Rojo Before the internet era (do you remember that?) that happened to me each time I opened a good encyclopaedia (The Britannica mostly). Now it happens everyday.

@belisarius Doesn't it matter if you share the code or not? In principle we cannot know if he used eldo's solution or some other solution to generate the image, and the image was his idea to begin with. He only needed help with the implementation. If you publish code that someone else has written for you, then I agree it should be attributed though.

On this site SE says that they only require attribution if content is republished. But he didn't republish any of the content.

@Pickett Following that way of reasoning, if you need to plot say, the Fermi surface for a new material and you ask here how to do it and then you publish only the extraordinary result you don't need to acknowledge the author. Others behave differently. See for example the drawing attribution here biblioteca.cab.cnea.gov.ar/labiblioteca/…

this discussion is starting to smell like the beginnings of a witch hunt... OP might very well be innocent. You don't know if they actually used Eldo's code... maybe seeing the answers gave him a different idea and he used that. Maybe he created a prototype and then had a professional do it in Photoshop... the list is endless. Please exercise caution and don't harass the OP.

@belisarius Extraordinary results are a different thing. This was not that. Let's say I want to draw a sphere but in a language with which I am not familiar, and so I had to ask for help. Now I have to attribute this ordinary looking sphere to a forum because I had to ask for help? That to me would raise eyebrows: "The guy can't draw sphere?!" I do not agree that something that you have to ask for help about is not trivial enough to go unreferenced. I think it falls under that category.

Or let's say it was very difficult to draw a sphere in that language; then it could happen that the image itself is so trivial that I don't have to give reference to whoever helped me, but if I shared the code of course I would have to give it a reference since the code is not trivial.

@Pickett Well, may be. Show me any book illustration without attribution and I'll concede

@belisarius The nature of such images is that we can never know if someone else made them, because it is believable that the author made them himself.

@Pickett Yup. Well, I think it's not fair to be so strict about such a simple thing. I'll remove my comment

Done. I leaved only the link, for posterity

@rm-rf It was purely academic, nothing like a "witch hunt". I removed my original comment so it remains clear for all.

@Pickett Although It might be sort of sensitive to have such a clear reuse of a given answer on the site, especially in an academic setting, I'd still think this episode in the context of whether the "copied" illustration actually constitutes a "work", which at least in many European legal codes requires certain sort of unique skill or intuition. I have my strong doubts if it does have much of that in this case.

Er. Be free to attempt parsing that ramble. :)

@kirma I agree.

(But we should also be aware that this is not a question about law but about academic ethics.)

@Pickett True, true.

@rm-rf Indeed, I only posted it because I was sure I'd seen it before somewhere!

No other motive, just caught my eye.

The toad has spoken