We’ve recently had a thread where someone realized that you should be careful what you type on the SDMB, because it gets saved and can be accessed later by anyone. Thisd is true for other websites and message boards as well. As I noted in that thread, it’s just one more reason to be polite and discreet. Words to live by.
But it turns out that the Internet can still rake you over the coals by reaching back into your Pre-Internet writings and splashing them up on the World Wide Web for anyone to see. All it requires is for some third party to scan or type your previously-written (and maybe previously-published) work and post it. Two examples of this have happened to me.
One of these was a fragment of a history of my undergrad years that I gave to th Historian of the place I used to live. I only gave them portions of the work, not the whole thing (Thank God). but apparently they put that up on a website from my old House. A childhood acquaintannce Googled himself, and found a passing reference to himself in my writings (which he recognized as mine). Good thing I try to stay circumspect in my released writings.
The other one is my bachelor’s thesis! It’s online in its entirety! The college library usually only puts M.S. and Ph.D. these online, but my Bachelor’s thesis must have been sufficiently off-the-wall that they couldn’t resist. I think I’m pleased with this, but it feels a bit like someone selling the KTLA episodes of MST3K – all your youthful style is exposed for the world to see.
So if you’ve ever written or published anything – heck , if anyone gets hold of your old journals or letters – your past can magically appear in Cyberspace without your knowledge or permission.
This message brought to you by Paranoia, Inc. – We’re Everywhere!
Only mildy-related, but my SDMB thread “My Bladder Knows I’m Home” has been ripped off and now appears all over on various weblogs, live journals and other message boards. :mad:
I spent hours and days deleting my posts from the archive of a particular newsgroup (not porn), thinking that was the end of them. Then Google bought the archives, and they’re back and you can’t delete them. Bastards.
Cal, even if you don’t want to tell us how to see your papers, can you at least tell us who does this? I’m guessing it’s not the universities themselves, but some third party organization that puts all this up on the Net, right?
Actually, I’d be interested to read my Ph. D. dissertation on-line.
I have a copy, of course, but since I wrote it on a mainframe computer (it was the very first Ph. D. dissertation in my department to be written on any sort of a computer–this was in the 1980s), I never got a floppy or any e-version of it.
Anyway, the other day someone in her late 80s said she’d love to read the diss but needs to have it in large print and I thought “well, THAT sucks,” but if it were available on-line, I could just resize it, no?
Anyone know how to start tracking this stuff down?
Your Ph.D. thesis, I’ll guarantee, is in the collection of University Microforms in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You can get anyone’s Ph.D. thesis from a US University there. They’ll print out hard copies (But, alas for your sight-impaired friend, the copies I’ve gotten from them are actually smaller than to originals).
I haven’t kept up with them. Maybe you can get digital copies from them via the Internet and Blow Them Up to Poster Size now.
If you copyright your works, are you protected then? (You can do the poor man’s copyright of mailing a copyright back to yourself and letting the postmark on the unopened envelope work as your cheap protection. At least, that is what my professor friend told me. )
Your thesis, cal, is simply awesome. Me understand. Shirley feel smart.
Thanks, Sirl.
But my point wasn’t to brag – it’s alarm that even my pre-Internet scribblings (and pictures, probably, although my Modelling shots still haven’t surfaced on the 'net) have made it onto the Internet, and a warning that yours may do so, too.
In one of Asimov’s stories, a back-in-time TV set gets invented. Big deal – there are a lot of stories like that. But at the end of the Asimov one, some says “I Hope you like living in a glass fishbowl”, since everything that anyone has ever done in the past is now capable of being recalled and viewed, and reviewed.
We ain’t there, but we’re closer than I figured we’d be.
Alas, the only dissertations available in PDF format date from 1997 on; anything earlier has only the abstract available online (if that). Unbound paper copies can be ordered for $38/copy, softcover for $47/copy, and hardcover for $59/copy.
I have access through a university subscription, but I don’t think you need that to order the paper copies. It might be necessary to download the free PDFs, though.
You know, this had never occurred to me. I don’t know why.
I did some searches on phrases from some of my threads, and was pleasantly surprised to learn other folks have posted my writing on their blogs or message boards. The vast majority of them give attribution, or even a link to the thread or teemings, which is nice.
However, a few jerks have passed my writing off as their own. I’m lookin’ particularly at you, Raynard_the_Fox. I’m amazed that you’d have the audacity to do this kind of crap. Especially when the rest of your writing on that board is around a fifth-grade level. It contrasts sharply with my stuff, which is at an eighth-grade level, occasionally hitting the rarified air of ninth-grade. Sheesh, man. How pathetic must you be to pass off one Internet loser’s writing as your own?
A silly Wheel of Time parody I wrote when I was 13 or 14 is still out there with my full name on it, since I was dumb enough to use it at the time. Argh.
There are several people out there with the same name, in roughly the same field, as me. Chances are they will get blamed for any of my indiscretions! (Sorry, guys.)
According to Google, I won the Colorado lottery but they gave the money to some guy who just happens to have my name. I want my $3million, but they won’t give it to me. I did find some magazine articles I published, but they were way down on the list.
