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Steroid use and plagiarism: is there a political deterrent?

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

The cover story of CBS "Sunday Morning" on 3 Feb 08 was on steroids, which included a final comment by one Dr. Jeffrey Lenox [spelling?] of Emory University that the political winds of disapproval would be the best deterrent to the use of steroids for sports performance enhancement. Although CBS [Sanjay Gupta was the reporter] set this up as an "alternative" to testing, testing would be a factor in establishing usage, which would lead to political disapproval.

HOWEVER, one notes that in the area of plagiarism, political disapproval does not always work. In the recent saga of Glenn Poshard, current president of SIU and former Congressman, a lot of his defenders did NOT even address the plagiarism, but rather looked at the good he had done. Politic approval is more about balancing all the goods against the bads, and for many Poshard's "goods" outweighed the bads.

In an IPBiz post titled Fear of getting caught not really a plagiarism deterrent concerning "A Tale of Two Citations," IPBiz noted a Nature comment:

But above all, the fear of having some transgression exposed in a public and embarrassing manner could be a very effective deterrent.

This sounds good, but, in the real world, is not necessarily the case. The stories of Poshard, Tribe, and others show it's not necessarily true. The CBS story included a reference to Senator Joe Biden saying it's un-American to do steroids, but, recall, Biden is an admitted plagiarist. There was also a reference to "Steroid-Nation" and Arnold-istas (the current California governor did steroids)

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In passing, Sunday Morning also had a short piece on the funneling of football players: 1.1 million high school players go to 28,000 college players which go to about 100 in the Super Bowl. The story also mentioned that universities get about $2 billion per year from football and quoted Brad Wolverton on the advantages ex-college football players enjoy in the job market. [The earlier steroid story noted that Illinois was going to introduce steroid testing of high school players, joining a few states, including New Jersey, which test high school players for steroids.]

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On plagiarism, also
http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/01/more-plagiarism-at-harvard.html

Full post as published by IPBiz on February 03, 2008 (boomark / email).