Random Daily Banter

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Pinno718

Legendary Member
Pdfs are non editable.

Yeah, after all, his clients are dodgy and will manipulate the totals.
 
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briantrumpet

briantrumpet

Timewaster
Yeah, I've worded that poorly. PDFs are editable, but if it's invoicing you really wouldn't want to be sending one out that was.

Thankfully my 'print run' is small enough (and pupils' parents lovely enough) they'd not pull that stunt. Well, if they did, they'd be looking for a new teacher.
 
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Ian H

Shaman
My vehicle tax reminder contains this helpful info.
PXL_20260608_160906583.jpg
 
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briantrumpet

briantrumpet

Timewaster
More nicheness. But I've never understood why people use a separate bit of software to do citations. Type quote, type foot/endnote, type reference in bibliography. It's no more complicated whether your study is 2,000, 20,000 or 200,000 words.

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briantrumpet

briantrumpet

Timewaster
Dilemma of the day: should I point out to an author who's just had a text published that there's a glaring typo, especially that she's made the pdf a free giveaway for a fortnight? Seems a bit mean, so I think I'll skip the dilemma and let someone else do it.

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briantrumpet

briantrumpet

Timewaster
Oh dear, will carry on reading, but looks like she needed someone to proofread, or if someone did, to do it better.

"Augustine’s arguments on the nature and consequences of lying became the orthodoxy of Europe for the next millennia." What does she mean by "millennia"? Seems a weird way to say '2000 years', if she meant that. Or to say 'to the present day'. Or does she mean 'millennium'. Not good from an academic.
 
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briantrumpet

briantrumpet

Timewaster
In this one you are wrong. Software like Zotero, End Note or BibTeX have been around for a very long time. They are bibliography management systems, not AI citation imagining systems.

I know it is/they are management systems for endnotes and bibliographies, but I genuinely can't see the point. Doing them manually is not only easy & quick enough if you do it as you go, it helps cement them in your understanding of the argument. Even when I was doing my tiny 1,800-word MA essays, I'd often get to 3000 words of typed in quotations before I started writing my own argument, with each one referenced in the bibliography as I went. So I'd have to lose probably 2500 words once the essay was written, but none of that was wasted effort.

The OP saying people are basically lying when they say they do them manually has now deleted the post. Because obvoiously he was wrong.
 

C R

Legendary Member
I know it is/they are management systems for endnotes and bibliographies, but I genuinely can't see the point. Doing them manually is not only easy & quick enough if you do it as you go, it helps cement them in your understanding of the argument. Even when I was doing my tiny 1,800-word MA essays, I'd often get to 3000 words of typed in quotations before I started writing my own argument, with each one referenced in the bibliography as I went. So I'd have to lose probably 2500 words once the essay was written, but none of that was wasted effort.

The OP saying people are basically lying when they say they do them manually has now deleted the post. Because obvoiously he was wrong.

Trivial example of why doing the referencing manually is neither easy nor quick. Imagine that I am writing a review on some light scattering method that has now been in use for going on thirty years, and I probably have around 150 papers and 10 or 12 books to discuss. The journal I will be submitting to uses numerical order, each paper is cited in the order it is mentioned. I've written my first draft of the introduction, which starts something like

This super duper method was developed by Weitz and coworkers (1-4) ... blah blah (5). The theoretical basis was developed by Chaikin (6-8) ... blah, blah.... Later development of the approach outlined in 7 lead Schmidt to modify the set up used in 3 and 5 (9).

And create the bibliography as I go along following your suggestion. Now, I realise that Culpeper's theoretical work was a precursor to Chaikin's, and happened before 5 was published. Now all my references 5 and above need to move up by one, and I have to chase through what I have written to make sure that everywhere I was citing the old 5, I am now citing 6 and so on. And this is with only a paragraph and nine papers. Only a masochist would write a 40 page review with 150 references and not use a bibliography management tool.
 
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