On 2023-12-23 2:22 PM, Arthur T. wrote:
> Most filking is theft. Intentional theft. We all stole from the
> original song. So I don't think you have to worry yourself about
> whether you got the idea totally on your own or were influenced by
> Joe's chorus. (But if you *want* to worry yourself, don't let me stop
> you.)

I'm a bit sensitive on the subject of credit and attribution. One of
the bigger advances in my M.Sc. work came about somewhat indirectly from
a suggestion from a colleague. In a simulation of atomic interactions,
there were big discontinuities when the model switched from one
coordinate system to another. My colleague suggested averaging the
forces in some way, which wouldn't have improved matters very much. But
later, when I was thinking about the problem, I realized that using the
derivative of the averages of the forces would... and, as it turned out,
it solved the problem very nicely. By the time I'd completed that work,
I'd almost completely forgotten about my colleague's original
suggestion. It was only when we had a paper accepted and about to be
published that I remembered it, and I mentioned it to my supervisor. He
was pretty upset with me over the matter, and made it clear that my
colleague should have been given some kind of credit in the paper.

The colleague, himself, thought it wasn't a big deal. He'd just made a
suggestion for a change which wouldn't have worked. He felt that since
I'd used that idea as a basis for a much more complex change, and done
all of the work to implement and test it, his contribution wasn't
noteworthy. But I've never forgotten the matter.

(As it turned out, all of my M.Sc. work was essentially made obsolete by
a paper that was published in a journal that arrived in my department
library two days before my thesis defense. My work was *valid* but now
almost entirely irrelevant to the field, though a couple of
computational techniques I'd developed along the way might still be
useful. I don't know if my supervisor or anyone on the defense
committee saw that paper before my defense, but I was sweating over the
issue until my thesis defense was successfully concluded.)

Joel