oxman

Missing from all the attack-dog defenses is: what did Oxman ever do to help fire Claudine Gay?

Neither Oxman nor any member of MIT will be substantially impacted by the end of all this.

But let's assume Oxman and Gay are equal on both scholarly output and extent of plagiarism.

I took a quick look at a related Oxman paper [1] and it is a mess.

Back to the point I was making: BI didn't choose Oxman due to her academic position.

Bringing Oxman into it seems like it's aimed at halting that progress.

I find myself sympathetic to people like Oxman that are catching strays.

The cumulative effect of the volume of plagiarism and general disorganization of thought is that it's quite difficult to tell what Oxman wrote, let alone understood, at all.

> Oxman acknowledged she had failed to properly cite some of her work.

As for Neri Oxman, the kind of word salad she spit out is definitely reminiscent of cargo cult behavior, but the motivation is different: if you're in a cult, you're a believer, whereas it's not clear to me that Oxman believes her own nonsense, and in any event she seems to tend to borrow stuff from other fields and does not presume to contribute to those fields.

In one of the most technical passages of the work I found, which concerns, like, the vibe of constructing Voronoi diagrams on manifolds, Oxman seems to come close to suggesting that differential geometry might be a thing people could study.

Given that this was the original motivation for this whole thing, from my point of view, BI did a great service in pushing back on this agenda, and looking at Oxman as an exemplar of a white academic (recent academic who became famous for her academic work, whatever) was the perfect way to do this.

The "plagiarism" that was found in Gary's work is much less serious than the plagiarism found in Oxman's work.

Wife of guy moralizing about plagiarism and making sweeping racialized claims is quite relevant, not to mention that it's belittling to Oxman to reduce her solely to "wife of Ackman".

Both the Gay and Oxman plagiarism cases have some plagiarized passages being defended by saying "well, she did cite the source, it should have been in quotes but still..." So the passage uses the exact words used in the source, sometimes even an exact quote, and there's a cite, but no quotes to indicate that not just the concept or fact is being cited but the actual passage is taken from the source.

Excuse me, but maybe read the article (and the links to several articles published on Neri Oxman).

Great, so we're on the same page that investigating Oxman's academic output was an effective tactic for BI.

The article points out that Oxman's definition of Euclidean distance is jumbled nonsense.