The ease of correction on the internet

Earlier today, in a post about Detroit acquiring David Price, one had the interesting text:



The Tigers are scoring 4.7 runs per game. With Price pitching six innings, pythagenpat estimates the Pirates would win close to 76 percent of their games. In a best-of-seven series where Price gets two starts that’s 1.57 wins on average. Swap out Smyly for Price and that drops to 67.9 percent, or 1.36 wins.


Later today, this became


The Tigers are scoring 4.7 runs per game. With Price pitching six innings, pythagenpat estimates Detroit would win close to 76 percent of their games. In a best-of-seven series where Price gets two starts that’s 1.57 wins on average. Swap out Smyly for Price and that drops to 67.9 percent, or 1.36 wins.



LexisNexis makes similar un-annotated changes in case law.

Sometimes stuff just vanishes, like Vai Sikahema's harangue against Rutgers football. Since Sikahema's piece, Rutgers is Wrong, Greg Schiano came to, and left, Rutgers, came to, and left, Tampa Bay.

**Separately, from a comment in a thread about plagiarism at the University of North Carolina (Willingham matter)


In 2009, I discovered that a junior colleague had extensively plagiarized her doctoral dissertation. I produced a detailed document providing evidence of the plagiarism and sent it off to the Ivy League university that awarded the doctoral degree. Her supervisor is an internationally known scholar in her discipline.

I followed up every few months resulting in an interesting set of back and forth letters in which the university attempted to explain why it was taking so long to handle an extensively documented plagiarism allegation. [The university handbook indicates a timeline of about 2 months at most.]

At the end of 18 months (late 2010), I received a letter indicating that an investigation had indeed verified that plagiarism had occurred and unspecified sanctions were being put into place.

Last year (2013), it occurred to me to check if any changes had been made to the dissertation in Dissertation Abstracts International database. To my great surprise (and I do mean my _great_ surprise), I found that the dissertation had been extensively altered and the "revised' dissertation had replaced the original dissertation in DAI. No notation was made to indicate that significant changes had been made (e.g. one entire chapter was deleted and replaced with a completely different chapter). DAI specifically indicates on the cover page of each dissertation in its database that any changes made to a dissertation will be noted. Not so in this case. The current dissertation in the DAI database explicitly states that the dissertation was completed in 2003. This is not true. The plagiarized 2003 dissertation has been replaced in DAI with an extensively altered dissertation. The switch was most likely performed in 2010. No notations have been made to alert readers to this switch and all identifying information (UMI number, year of completion as 2003) are unchanged.