Talk:Ian Ayres

Untitled

Neutral Point of View? This article reads a bit like an ad! AleXd (talk) 03:59, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Personal Life

Does he have a son? From his nytimes freakanomics blog at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/author/iayres/

"Ian Ayres March 31, 2008, 1:49 pm Purim and Penelope

By Ian Ayres

My son and I recently returned from Israel where we had the chance to spend Purim in Jerusalem. Purim is a bit like Halloween — kids and parents dress up in costumes. And while there aren’t door-to-door “trick-or-treats,” there is a tradition of giving kids candies. Our cab driver even offered us Purim chocolate.

So it was on a beautiful warm Sunday that we got to see happy Orthodox families stroll around the Old City in full Purim regalia.

But Henry and I were floored when we passed a 6-year-old who was walking along smoking in front of his mom and dad. Not every child was smoking. But we saw three different groups that had kids — with ages ranging from about six to 13 — who were smoking. And to be clear, I’m not talking about the candy cigarettes of my youth. These kids were lighting up tobacco. Read more … " —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.234.110.4 (talk) 07:38, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Daughter

From Chapter 8, page 192, of Ayres' "SuperCrunchers" book:

"Here's a fable that happens to be true. Once upon a time, I went for a hike with my daugther Anna, who was eight years old at the time. Anna is a talkative girl who is, much to my consternation, developing fashion sense. She's also an intricate planner . . . " —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.234.110.4 (talk) 03:24, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Partner

From p 210 of "Supercrunchers" "I remember when my partner, Jennifer, and I were expecting for the first time--back in 1994. Back then, women were first told the probability of Down syndrome based on their age."

Plagiarism Controversy

I am no fan if Ian Ayres, but I have looked into this. Ian Ayres is guilty of "credited paraphrasing" not plagiarism. Plagiarism is where you copy someone else's work passing it off as your own. What Ayres did was paraphrase other people's work in the text, and credit them in the endnotes. It would have looked better if Ayres had put in exact quotes and source citations in the text, but then Supercrunchers would have read like an academic paper and not a popularization of an academic subject. Maybe academics should stop trying to be pop non-fiction writers (Freakonomics, Freedomonomics, Supercrunchers). The last academic author who could do that well was Isaac Asimov.Naaman Brown (talk) 14:32, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

• My (undone) parenthetical comment in the article "(although the original authors were cited in the endnotes)" to the sentence beginning "The Yale Daily News...." was based on this: "Although Ayres uses endnotes to cite his sources, sentences from many of those sources were printed without quotation marks or other in-text attributions."--June Torbati, "Law professor borrows text for book" Yale Daily News 4 Oct 07. My intent was to make that sentence a fair summary of the Torbati article. 76.5.140.33 (talk) 15:43, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

If it is to go back cleanup and keep it neutralCablespy (talk) 19:38, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

• It's been a year, so locating my copy of the Torbati article, follow up checks, etc may take some time.Naaman Brown (talk) 15:43, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps I was too lenient about Ayres' plagiarism unquoted quotes with attribution in the endnotes. "Harvard Crimson" complained that Larry Tribe had been caught in the kind of plagiarism that would get an undergrad or graduate student suspended or expelled, but the professor got off lightly. His explanation was that to write a book for a lay audience, he had not followed the strict attribution practices he followed in his academic work. However, 143 pages of historical sections of Tribe's book were Reader's Digest versions of 298 pages of a book by Henry Abraham.

Charles Ogletree also was caught in one of his books plagiarising from a collection of essays. Ogletree admitted his book contained six paragraphs almost verbatim, took full responsibility, and blamed his research assistants.

Harvard Law School student handbook describes plagiarism by students and the consequences: one student was suspended; one was suspended and not allowed back; the third had already graduated so his degree was rescinded. One would hope professors were held to a higher standard.

(Details on the Harvard cases above plagiarised paraphrased from Jewish Word Review 5 May 2010.)

Naaman Brown (talk) 20:28, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Biography

Talk about bio stuff-- I have bound volumes of the Hilltop school newspaper that supports everything stated here. (I also remember Ayres because I went to Pem Day too). He was a good guy, and I was not really making fun, just having fun. He did write the article cited "Black Like Me" which was clever and original although not politically correct. That is really why I cited it. I thought , and still think it was a remarkable thing for a high school kid to do at that time. He was an intellectual even then. He may not want the whole world to know, but what the hey, he was not even 18 then, and this is the internet. And, its true. And, Pem Day is a big part of who he is, imo, and should be in the article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.42.16.236 (talk) 21:03, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Again re the "claim" that John Griffin not Ayres wrote "Black Like Me." Besides the fact that I put the citation on the claim (the Hilltop, 1977 edition) it is not defacement, it is a sourced citation. Of course Ayres did not write THE NOVEL. Ayres wrote an oped piece for the school paper that I remember 31 years later with the catchy title suggested by the novel already published. I will not repost (readers can look at the history if they wish) but the TRUE story is that Ian was executive editor of the Hilltop and wrote an oped piece which is politically incorrect as hell (like Mel Brooks movies and a lot of other great things from the 70s) but truly memorable. It was one of MANY oped pieces I recall from that paper and how many high schools can make that claim? Ask Ian about it if you know him. Ask him if he ever eschews lucubration. Ian liked to stir the pot in a clever or intellectual way and marked on his PSAT that he was black, and got lots of extra college offers (this was before affirmative action was struck down). Thus, the title for the column. I imagine Ian would be slightly embarassed about the piece, although I also imagine he became more liberal in college at Yale as a lot of kids did. Its not illegal, and it did show spunk, and it did not hurt anyone, and I can say definitively that his work at Pem Day made him worthy of admission to Yale no matter what his skin color (which is white by the way). I don't really think I "defaced " anyone by recalling a 31 year old piece that he truly wrote, although out of respect for him I won't repost it any longer, since he has continued to accomplish in college and beyond. I have not seen Ian since then, and was not really close friends with him then, although we certainly knew each other in a small school. I would say whoever took the lines out and accused me of defacing ought to relax and "enjoy life more." I am proud of Ian, as well as other equally successful people from Pem Day (too many to name here) and hope the rest of your life is better. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.65.51.171 (talk) 00:30, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

material removed

I've removed the plagiarism controversy - and would invite editors to re-write it in a more neutral fashion. It needs to show that there were endnotes, and that the subject asserts this was an honest mistake. This article [1] paints asomewhat different picture from that we were offering here. --Scott Mac (Doc) 15:48, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Leonhardt would disagree. As Inside Higher Ed pointed out, there appears to be a problem in academia of researchers copying into their commonplace book items that interest them, then when they write on the subject, copy the material without paying close attention to whose words are whose. In the overall view of Ayres' career, the plagiarism issue is overblown here, which happens a lot: the text of the Wikipedia John Lott article of 19:38 18 Oct 2004 was 3149 words of which: 818 were bio and discussion of his book "More Guns Less Crime" and 2331 were "Criticisms of Lott’s Credibility" on two minor issues, the criticism largely driven by gun politics. Ayres' plagiarism issue should neither be removed nor blown out of proportion. Naaman Brown (talk) 15:04, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Copy editing, citation formatting, standardizing dates

Heads up: I was working on the Concealed carry in the U.S. article, which led me here. I am going to do some copyediting, citation formatting, and standardizing of dates, etc. per MOS. Lightbreather (talk) 23:42, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Done. Also, this ties in with previous discussions: I pared down the Controversy section. A couple of the source citations were extraneous, and one wasn't (McCullough) really germane. Some statements were generalized, so I attributed them (to Soltan and Dorf). Lightbreather (talk) 02:45, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

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