essay about a fake life

How Honest Are People on Social Media?

Social media sites can be breeding grounds for dishonesty..

Posted July 30, 2018 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

Facebook. Twitter. Snapchat. Instagram. Tinder. Match.com.

The world is consuming and interacting with social media at increasingly high rates. According to 2018 data from the Pew Institute [1], the majority of U.S. adults now use YouTube (73 percent) or Facebook (68 percent); of those who use Facebook, more than half check this platform several times a day.

As we engage on social media with greater frequency, we find ourselves sifting through photos of children, commentary about food, and explosive reactions to current political events. This increased media usage and exposure poses the question: How accurate is the information we are getting? More specifically, how honest are people on social media sites?

Honesty and Lying on Social Media

The truth is that people tend to lie on these platforms. How? First, people directly lie about their lives, which is often an effort to make themselves look more desirable or positive. In a study examining 80 online daters, Hancock, Toma, and Ellison [2] found that two thirds of participants lied about their weight by five pounds or more. In a large sample of over 2,000 people in England conducted by Custard.com [3], 43 percent of men admitted to making up facts about themselves and their lives that were not true online.

Even more commonly, people "lie" by presenting an image of themselves and their lives that is imprecise or less than comprehensive, leading the viewer to believe falsehoods. For example, in the Custard.com [4] study, only 18 percent of men and 19 percent of women reported that their Facebook page displayed “a completely accurate reflection” of who they are. Most commonly, participants said that they only shared “non- boring ” aspects of their lives (32 percent) and were not as “active” as their social media accounts appeared (14 percent).

How and Why Does Dishonesty on Social Media Affect Us?

Although selective self-presentation and lying about ourselves on social media may not seem like a surprise (or even a big deal), it can affect us greatly. Why? Humans are naturally social creatures—we crave relationships and social interaction. According to some of the most prominent theories of human nature (e.g., Adlerian psychotherapy ) and a large body of research, social interaction and feeling a sense of belonging to a community are two of the most important predictors of psychological and physical health [5]. Given our social nature, we want to feel connected to people and “in the know” about our friends, family, and even celebrities.

In addition to being social, we appear to have a natural propensity to trust that others are being honest with us. A large body of research suggests that we are programmed to trust others [6]. Although the reasons for our tendency to trust are complex, without interpersonal connectedness and a fundamental belief that those around will support you, protect you, and treat you respectfully, we feel unsafe. In essence, trust is developmentally essential to our feelings of safety and security.

When we engage on social media and our propensity to trust is met with overt lying and less than honest presentations, it can be problematic because we internally presume that what is presented is true. That people are naturally as good-looking as their photos appear on a daily basis. That people’s daily home life is as perfect as the pictures depict. That others have very few gut-wrenching struggles. That people around us are in a habitual state of going on vacation, eating out, and parenting blissfully. This is clearly not true. But although we are less aware of the realities of other peoples' lives, we are well aware of the ways in which our own lives are NOT ideal.

Social Comparison in Social Media

To make matters more complicated, when we internally believe that what we see in social media is true and relevant to us, we are more likely to compare ourselves to it in an internal effort to evaluate ourselves against those around us (e.g., regarding our looks, wealth, significant other, family, etc.). As we do this against the idealized images and unreasonably positive life accounts that tend to permeate social media, we are likely to feel more poorly about ourselves and our lives.

Indeed, a growing body of research suggests that social media use can negatively affect your psychological health, particularly if you compare yourself to the positive images you see online. In a study of 339 college women (Puglia, 2017), the tendency to compare oneself to others was associated with poorer body esteem. Furthermore, in a sub-sample of 58 women in the Puglia study, those with higher levels of Facebook usage displayed lower body satisfaction than those with lower Facebook usage [7]. Similarly, in an experimental study by Vogel and colleagues [8], participants who tended to compare themselves to others more regularly had lower self-esteem , more negative emotions, and a poorer view of themselves after using Facebook than participants who did not tend to compare themselves to others.

The naked truth is this: Most of us now use some form of social media. Research suggests that what people post on social media is not an accurate representation of their lives or who they are. In fact, it may be blatant lies.

Consequently, when engaging with social media, it is critical to remind yourself that what you see is not an accurate picture of reality. Don't compare yourself to the images of friends, colleagues, or celebrities. Remind yourself that it is just a snapshot of their life—and one that they want you to see.

Copyright Cortney S. Warren, Ph.D., ABPP

[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/03/01/social-media-use-in-2018/

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221515634_The_truth_about_lyin…

[3] https://www.custard.co.uk/over-three-quarters-of-brits-say-their-social…

[4] https://www.custard.co.uk/over-three-quarters-of-brits-say-their-social…

[5]for example, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2729718/ ).

[6] https://hbr.org/2009/06/rethinking-trust

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/629b/f1f076f8d5bc203c573d4ba1dad5bb674…

[7] https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/indexablecontent/uuid:82b9b151-0a47-433e-af1f-a…

[8]“…“to others before using Facebook?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886915004079

Cortney Warren, Ph.D., ABPP , is a clinical psychologist and adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV). She is also the author of Letting Go of Your Ex and Lies We Tell Ourselves.

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Reality of Social Media Essay

• February 1, 2023

Reality of Social Media

Reality of Social Media Essay: Introduction

Reality is changing inevitably. What people called reality in the middle-ages is much different than the reality for people in the pre-industrialization era. Similarly, what people called reality before the internet is much different from our reality today. There is a quote from Heraclitus, which remains correct throughout time, and it says, “the only thing that does not change is the change itself”. Not so long before, no one was able to foresee that half of the people in the world would have online identities, whether it is fake or real. Similarly, this rate goes up as high as above 90% in developed areas, where internet connection is not a problem anytime.

Fake is the New Reality

Everyone on social media is miraculously just too happy. Too happy, right? The lives of people on the internet are so flawless and sparkling. However, is it real? Or how real are these perfect lives? People generally do not post their photos on their social media accounts while they are crying or struggling.

Being one of the products of digitalization, social media is in everyday life for billions today. Social media, at the same time, is one of the cornerstones of popular culture, along with consumption and individualization. Social media is not a venue where people display what they experience. It is a place where people post things in their lives that they would like other people to see. Therefore, social media creates a perception of reality, which is fake. Though, this is not a claim that calls the life, which everyone envies and follow, fake. Allen (1993) explains the concept of truth in his work as the information that is obtained, including both good and bad sides of a state or action. Therefore, one displaying only the good in his or her life on social media and hiding the bad is technically lying. There is not a need to show off using items that people do not possess in order for a social media account to be faking. Arfini et al. define online identity as the characterization of a person in a way that they would like it to be (2020). Having a fake life on social media has an effect on real life. This side effect is internal sadness, which leads to some other bigger issues that will be explained later in this essay.

Fake Life to Real Sadness

The examples of the perfect lives on social media accounts were given above. Let us open it up a bit and analyze it more in-depth. Influence is one of the main aspects of human nature. An artist uses another artist’s work as an influence for himself, a scientist bases new studies on a previously proven theory, and a person observes an action or a style in another’s life and copies it or improves his or her own style. There is even a concept we call a “role model”, which means copying or varying the life, achievements, or ideas of someone accomplished.

However, the role models of yesterday were way too different than the sources of influence of today. Remember Marie Curie, who influenced many young women into the world of science. Michael Jordan, the idol for another NBA superstar Kobe Bryant. Or Nikola Tesla, who influenced countless engineers to develop new gadgets. Now, having a look at the role models of today, the difference is obvious. 8 out of 10 accounts on any social media platform contains the tag “influencer” in it. Is it that easy to influence people today? Or since the population in the world has boosted excessively, so that humanity needs more and more icons to get influenced? Or are we all just faking? Leaving the cheap influencers on social media, let us have a look at the celebrities who people see as role model for themselves. Kim Kardashian, a barbie-doll woman whose all capabilities are fighting with her family members on TV and spending a tremendous amount of money on nonsense items. Justin Bieber, a male child singer with an ordinary voice, and now as he is an adult, he is able to pose half-naked. Elon Musk, an ordinary engineer who made a lot of money in an easy way thanks to his luck, and now acting as a genius. These examples of made-up role models are countless. However, the point is that these people are not worth being role models, as well as the people who own a million-follower social media account.

These sources of influence are another factor that brings the fake reality of popular culture into existence. Everyone could be Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, or Elon Musk. It does not necessarily require talent or intelligence. However, at the same time, not everyone could be one of them since they do not have the advantage that those people had in the beginning, or they are not chosen to be figures of the popular culture. This means there are two types of inputs in the market of popular culture. These two inputs that popular culture consumes are the worshipped and the worshippers. 50 years from now, none of these figures or the ones who admire them, or even the platforms used today, will be remembered, just like a singing superstar of the time on a VHS cassette.

The concept of social media, the fake reality that it creates, and the figures it uses to create this fake reality have been introduced and explained up to this point. Lastly, let us have a look at the final outcome of these. As it was explained before, social media creates a fake reality where everyone is happy, and it creates role models that everyone loves and want to be similar to. As a result of these, people feel poor, helpless, alone, or unaccomplished as soon as they move their eyes away from the screen of their devices (Jurgenson, 2011). The final product of this setup is sadness. The aim of this popular culture marketing strategy is to make people more worthless so that they would follow their role models more and imitate them. As a result, the popular culture will be more popular and richer. People who lose their connection with the perception of reality of the world tend to start living in this fake, flawless, and sparkling life. Which leads to alienation. Maté (2020) defines alienation in his speech as the lack of ability of people in society to socially interact.

Reality Essay: Conclusion

The result of alienation is a strategy that is kind of similar to the divide and rule policy of offensive totalitarian leaders. People are pulled off the society one by one using a number of sources on the internet, and these sources we call social media are all very easy to control since every single platform is directed by a headquarters of its own. Singled out people start to drown in a whirlpool of fake reality and feeling of inadequacy. The alienation comes as the final step of all these processes. Today’s youth read less than half of the youth of the 80s and the 90s. The vast majority of young adults are interested neither in politics nor in economics, and these two determines the way they live their real, physical life. The social interaction of people in real life, such as on the street or a bar/café, is at the lowest level possible. No one has trust in another, and no one opens up with the fear of revealing their weaknesses. This is the overall result of popular culture and social media. This is pure alienation from society. This is the alienation of the whole society.

Allen, B. (1993). Truth in philosophy. Harvard University Press.

Arfini, S., Botta Parandera, L., Gazzaniga, C., Maggioni, N., & Tacchino, A. (2020). Online identity crisis identity issues in online communities. Minds and Machines. doi:10.1007/s11023-020-09542-7

Maté, G. (2020, February 7). How society makes you feel alienated – Gabor Maté. YouTube. Retrieved February 12, 2021, from https://youtube.com/

Jurgenson, N. (2011). Digital dualism versus augmented reality. The Society Pages, 24.

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The fake life of Social Media influencers

Article Contents

Social Media has made our lives much simpler.

With the touch of a button, we can send our message across the world.

With the help of social media, it is much easier to connect to people.

Social Media has brought the world to our fingertips. With the advent of Social media came the influencers.

Influencers are popular celebrities with a huge fan following, more prominently, actors.

The main job of a Social Media influencer is to get more followers to whom they can advertise their endorsed products.

They also get paid by the Social Media platforms for the advertisements their viewers see.

Lives of Influencers

On face value, the lives of Social Media influencers look flamboyant and luxurious.

They seem to have the ‘Picture Perfect’ lives, with a fixed schedule, a perfect professional and personal life, and all the luxuries that a person wishes for.

People envy their perfect lives, their good looks and wish they also lived a life like the influencers.

Sometimes, people obsess over celebrity lives so much that they try to imitate them, and then become sad and anxious when it does not work out properly.

Their videos and cringe dances become popular overnight.

   (courtesy: digitalmarket.asia)    

There is another side of these Social Media Influencers.

They are the best examples for the “fake it till you make it” attitude.

Even though their lives look ideal from the outside, in reality, their lives are far from ideal .

They suffer from substance abuse , family issues, or personal issues, which are usually well hidden from the outside world.

Sometimes, they become too egoistic due to their popularity, that they end up in unwanted scandals and controversies.

One must always remember that influencers are paid for looking at acting perfect.

They extract revenue from each and every fan of theirs.

Toxic Fan Following

They also know that their followers and fans will go to any extent to support them.

Hence, they try to polarize their fans by endorsing a particular ideology.

These influencers sometimes endorse controversial skincare, beauty and wellness products that have skewed views on the ideal body size and skin colour.

Their followers look at their advertisements and promotions and get carried away by the idealism these influencers market.

People start hating their bodies and have a negative body image.

But the truth is that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes.

Beauty does not mean a pretty face and a size zero figure; beauty is the idea of accepting oneself.

The skewed beauty standards in our country are due to these ‘fake’ influencers.

Follow Motivational Speakers instead!

It’s high time we stop following these fake influencers.

Instead of following these fake Social Media influencers, we must follow entrepreneurs and scholars.

Following entrepreneurs gives us a sneak peek on their business lives, and scholars give us the inspiration to perform better.

One can also follow prominent sportsmen of various different sports, and learn life lessons from them.

Nowadays, Motivational Speaking is gaining traction .

There are numerous Motivational Speakers, holding events in TED , TEDx and various other platforms.

By following them, we can bring positive improvements to our lives.

There are YouTubers that cover topics such as Geography, Business, Yoga, Wellness, etc.

Start following them. They usually cover important abstract topics that will be very useful to you.

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What do you think?

Written by Creig Luke

very helpful and informative…keep it up

keep up the good work!

really true! a unique article indeed

A very important issue that we need to look at.

Thanks a lot!

well written!

Informative!

Nice revelation of the reality of the lives of social media influences. Well written.

Reality very beautifully told. Loved it. Keep it up.

The work and the life of the social media influencers are correctly pointed out in the start. The issues they face tell us that they are humans at the end, like all of us. Appreciated how you mentioned how their toxicity and actions impacts the lives of others. The solutions at the end, are very useful.

Great work Creig. I really appreciate how you have bought the toxic side of social media influencers. I agree with you that it’s better to follow motivational speakers instead. However there are really good social media influencers out there who are doing actual good work through the platform they have. Again, therevis always an imbalance between actual influencing and creating a toxic environment. I personally think it’s really about who we choose to follow on social media so that they have a positive influence on us and how we let them influence us. Thank you for the amazing work. I look forward to read and learn more from you!

loved how you redirected the getting influenced part to the motivational speakers. Although i’d still appreciate all the work social media influencers do. they don’t let their personal issues come in the way of their work. you should atch “the social dilemma’ on netflix to understand social media better. amazing work!!

Nice article, in detail describes how the illusion of perfect lives on social media leads us to making comparisons and having feelings of jealously. However, what is imp is for us to understand that we shouldn’t be unduly influenced by these creators and their lives are more or less similar to ours, they are normal people like us. Quite an informative piece!

The truth has been revealed. Wanted to read an article on it so bad. This was everything I wanted to know.

very informative

Nicely written

very good article!

a must read

thanks for writing …this is so wonderful article..loved it 🙂

I feel that even some motivational speakers have a level of controversy surrounding them, it seems hard to trust anything online!

very very informative … keep writing:)

Crisp and to-the-point!!! You’ve beautifully unveiled the ugly truth.

In recent times, the impact of social media influencers has become a very important topic of discussion. It is really great of you to shed light on such issues!

I think you did a great job!

Absolutely loved this! I really liked how instead of simply pointing out the toxicity of social media influencers, you also humanized them – talked about the personal issues that they might be going through. Many a time people pretend to live a life that others want so that others won’t discover the fact that their life isn’t really as conventionally “perfect” as they make it seem, it stems from insecurity mostly. It was a wonderful read!

Such an honest and we’ll written article. I am glad that you brought up the toxic life of social influencers into light. We often tend to blindly follow people without thinking through. We are blinded by the outer image of people and gets carried away by their external appearances. We should learn to focus more on productive and motivational TED talks as it can be very useful for us in the future. I am waiting for more such informative writeups from you.

Hey Creig, loved how you took up this issue, whether its their perfect lives or toxic fan following or the unsavory practices they follow!

If you could have elaborated on how to spot a fake influencer, that would have been great! Also, trying to find authentic information about an influencer beyond social media would help us to know their authenticity, wouldn’t it? Just a thought. You could have also elaborated a little on how an influencer’s daily routine is difficult to carry, even if he or she is authentic, so people thinking to become one would know the reality.

It’s an interesting topic that you have choosen to write about. While I agree that there is indeed a toxic side to social media influencers, i believe there are a whole lot of influencers who genuinely work for the betterment of people. Similarly there is a toxic side to motivation speakers. I believe it has more to do with how much we let ourselves be influenced by either side. Moderation is extremely important especially when consuming social media and related stimulants.

You have added great points to the article and the issue that you have brought out is very very important. Our lives are entangled in this web called social media. Even if we try to come out of it, sometimes we fail. You are right, there are various toxic social media influencers but we cannot forget the fact that there are various positive and good social media Influencers as well. Like you said, they are imposing a personal or particular ideology on people. In this article, you have not given the other perspective which does not give the reader a choice to choose or prepare a solution for themselves. You can improvise your article by adding both perspectives and leave it on the reader’s part.

Really an amazing article. You presented it nicely and clearly. Keep doing. All the best.

Good topic chosen however it was not elaborate properly i felt. Try including more topics next time. ❤️

informative.

Keep it up!

Keep writing!

Keep posting!

People envy their perfect lives , their good looks and wish they also lived a life like the influencers . Sometimes, people obsess over celebrity lives so much that they try to imitate them, and then become sad and anxious when it does not work out properly. Their videos and cringe dances become popular overnight.Nice information.

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What an Audacious Hoax Reveals About Academia

Three scholars wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions.

Over the past 12 months, three scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—wrote 20 fake papers using fashionable jargon to argue for ridiculous conclusions, and tried to get them placed in high-profile journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. Their success rate was remarkable: By the time they took their experiment public late on Tuesday, seven of their articles had been accepted for publication by ostensibly serious peer-reviewed journals. Seven more were still going through various stages of the review process. Only six had been rejected.

We’ve been here before.

In the late 1990s, Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, began a soon-to-be-infamous article by setting out some of his core beliefs:

that there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in “eternal” physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the “objective” procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.

Sokal went on to “disprove” his credo in fashionable jargon. “Feminist and poststructuralist critiques have demystified the substantive content of mainstream Western scientific practice, revealing the ideology of domination concealed behind the façade of ‘objectivity,’” he claimed. “It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ‘reality,’ no less than social ‘reality,’ is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.”

Further reading: It’s surprisingly easy to get a fake paper published in an academic journal

Next, Sokal sent off this jabber to Social Text , an academic journal that was, at the time, a leading intellectual forum for famous scholars including Edward Said, Oskar Negt, Nancy Fraser, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière. * It was published.

In the eyes of his supporters, what came to be known as the Sokal Hoax seemed to prove the most damning charges that critics of postmodernism had long leveled against it. Postmodern discourse is so meaningless, they claimed, that not even “experts” can distinguish between people who make sincere claims and those who compose deliberate gibberish.

In the months after Sokal went public, Social Text was much ridiculed. But its influence—and that of the larger “deconstructivist” mode of inquiry it propagated—continued to grow. Indeed, many academic departments that devote themselves to the study of particular ethnic, religious, and sexual groups are deeply inflected by some of Social Text ’s core beliefs, including the radical subjectivity of knowledge.

That’s why Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian set out to rerun the original hoax, only on a much larger scale. Call it Sokal Squared.

Generally speaking, the journals that fell for Sokal Squared publish respected scholars from respected programs. For example, Gender, Place and Culture , which accepted one of the hoax papers, has in the past months published work from professors at UCLA, Temple, Penn State, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Manchester, and Berlin’s Humboldt University, among many others.

Further reading: The research pirates of the dark web

The sheer craziness of the papers the authors concocted makes this fact all the more shocking. One of their papers reads like a straightforward riff on the Sokal Hoax. Dismissing “western astronomy” as sexist and imperialist, it makes a case for physics departments to study feminist astrology—or practice interpretative dance—instead:

Other means superior to the natural sciences exist to extract alternative knowledges about stars and enriching astronomy, including ethnography and other social science methodologies, careful examination of the intersection of extant astrologies from around the globe, incorporation of mythological narratives and modern feminist analysis of them, feminist interpretative dance (especially with regard to the movements of the stars and their astrological significance), and direct application of feminist and postcolonial discourses concerning alternative knowledges and cultural narratives.

The paper that was published in Gender, Place and Culture seems downright silly. “Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon” claims to be based on in situ observation of canine rape culture in a Portland dog park. “Do dogs suffer oppression based upon (perceived) gender?” the paper asks.

Yet another paper has a rather more sinister hue. In “Rubbing One Out: Defining Metasexual Violence of Objectification Through Nonconsensual Masturbation,” the fictitious author argues that men who masturbate while thinking about a woman without her consent are perpetrators of sexual violence:

By drawing upon empirical studies of psychological harms of objectification, especially through depersonalization, and exploring severel veins of theoretical literature on nonphysical forms of sexual violence, this articles seeks to situate non-concensual male autoerotic fantasizing about women as a form of metasexual violence that depersonalizes her, injures her being on an affective level, contributes to consequent harms of objectification and rape culture, and can appropriate her identity for the purpose of male sexual gratification.

Sokal Squared doesn’t just expose the low standards of the journals that publish this kind of dreck, though. It also demonstrates the extent to which many of them are willing to license discrimination if it serves ostensibly progressive goals. This tendency becomes most evident in an article that advocates extreme measures to redress the “privilege” of white students. Exhorting college professors to enact forms of “experiential reparations,” the paper suggests telling privileged students to stay silent, or even binding them to the floor in chains. If students protest, educators are told to

take considerable care not to validate privilege, sympathize with, or reinforce it and in so doing, recenter the needs of privileged groups at the expense of marginalized ones. The reactionary verbal protestations of those who oppose the progressive stack are verbal behaviors and defensive mechanisms that mask the fragility inherent to those inculcated in privilege.

Like just about everything else in this depressing national moment, Sokal Squared is already being used as ammunition in the great American culture war. Many conservatives who are deeply hostile to the science of climate change, and who dismiss out of hand the studies that attest to deep injustices in our society, are using Sokol Squared to smear all academics as biased culture warriors. The Federalist , a right-wing news and commentary site, went so far as to spread the apparent ideological bias of a few journals in one particular corner of academia to most professors, the mainstream media, and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Further reading: How scholars hack the world of academic publishing

These attacks are empirically incorrect and intellectually dishonest. There are many fields of academia that have absolutely no patience for nonsense. While the hoaxers did manage to place articles in some of the most influential academic journals in the cluster of fields that focus on dealing with issues of race, gender, and identity, they have not penetrated the leading journals of more traditional disciplines. As a number of academics pointed out on Twitter, for example, all of the papers submitted to sociology journals were rejected. For now, it remains unlikely that the American Sociological Review or the American Political Science Review would have fallen for anything resembling “Our Struggle Is My Struggle,” a paper modeled on the infamous book with a similar title.

By the same token, many leftists are willing to grasp at straws to defend journals and fields of inquiry that they regard as morally righteous. Some have dismissed Sokal Squared by pointing out that many disciplines, from economics to psychology, have in the past years also faced crises of confidence. Others have simply cited the conservative instrumentalization of Sokal Squared as a reason to ignore it. “Academics,” Alison Phipps wrote on Twitter, “please stand by colleagues in Gender Studies/Critical Race Studies/Fat Studies & other areas targeted by this journal article hoax. This is a coordinated attack from the right.”

That too is intellectually dishonest. For one, Lindsay, Pluckrose and Boghossian describe themselves as left-leaning liberals. For another, it is nonsensical to insist that nonsense scholarship doesn’t matter because you don’t like the motives of the people who exposed it, or because some other forms of scholarship may also contain nonsense. If certain fields of study cannot reliably differentiate between real scholarship and noxious bloviating, they become deeply suspect. And if they are so invested in overcoming injustice that they are willing to embrace rank cruelty as long as it is presented in the right kind of progressive jargon, they are worsening the problems they purport to address.

It would, then, be all too easy to draw the wrong inferences from Sokal Squared. The lesson is neither that all fields of academia should be mistrusted nor that the study of race, gender, or sexuality is unimportant. As Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian point out, their experiment would be far less worrisome if these fields of study didn’t have such great relevance.

But if we are to be serious about remedying discrimination, racism, and sexism, we can’t ignore the uncomfortable truth these hoaxers have revealed: Some academic emperors—the ones who supposedly have the most to say about these crucial topics—have no clothes.

* This article originally stated that Social Text was a peer-reviewed journal. We regret the error.

Fake academic papers are on the rise: why they’re a danger and how to stop them

Professor of Methodology and Integrity, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

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Lex Bouter is the founding chair of the World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation and co-chair of the 8th WCRI in Athens, 2-5 June 2024.

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In the 1800s, British colonists in India set about trying to reduce the cobra population, which was making life and trade very difficult in Delhi. They began to pay a bounty for dead cobras. The strategy very quickly resulted in the widespread breeding of cobras for cash .

This danger of unintended consequences is sometimes referred to as the “ cobra effect ”. It can also be well summed up by Goodhardt’s Law , named after British economist Charles Goodhart. He stated that, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The cobra effect has taken root in the world of research. The “publish or perish” culture, which values publications and citations above all, has resulted in its own myriad of “cobra breeding programmes”. That includes the widespread practice of questionable research practices, like playing up the impact of research findings to make work more attractive to publishers.

It’s also led to the rise of paper mills, criminal organisations that sell academic authorship. A report on the subject describes paper mills as (the)

process by which manufactured manuscripts are submitted to a journal for a fee on behalf of researchers with the purpose of providing an easy publication for them, or to offer authorship for sale.

These fake papers have serious consequences for research and its impact on society. Not all fake papers are retracted. And even those that are often still make their way into systematic literature reviews which are, in turn, used to draw up policy guidelines, clinical guidelines, and funding agendas.

How paper mills work

Paper mills rely on the desperation of researchers — often young, often overworked, often on the peripheries of academia struggling to overcome the high obstacles to entry — to fuel their business model.

They are frighteningly successful. The website of one such company based in Latvia advertises the publication of more than 12,650 articles since its launch in 2012. In an analysis of just two journals jointly conducted by the Committee on Publications Ethics and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, more than half of the 3440 article submissions over a two-year period were found to be fake.

It is estimated that all journals, irrespective of discipline, experience a steeply rising number of fake paper submissions. Currently the rate is about 2%. That may sound small. But, given the large and growing amount of scholarly publications it means that a lot of fake papers are published. Each of these can seriously damage patients, society or nature when applied in practice.

The fight against fake papers

Many individuals and organisations are fighting back against paper mills.

The scientific community is lucky enough to have several “fake paper detectives” who volunteer their time to root out fake papers from the literature. Elizabeth Bik , for instance, is a Dutch microbiologist turned science integrity consultant. She dedicates much of her time to searching the biomedical literature for manipulated photographic images or plagiarised text. There are others doing this work , too.

Organisations such as PubPeer and Retraction Watch also play vital roles in flagging fake papers and pressuring publishers to retract them.

These and other initiatives, like the STM Integrity Hub and United2Act , in which publishers collaborate with other stakeholders, are trying to make a difference.

But this is a deeply ingrained problem. The use of generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT will help the detectives – but will also likely result in more fake papers which are now more easy to produce and more difficult or even impossible to detect.

Stop paying for dead cobras

They key to changing this culture is a switch in researcher assessment.

Researchers must be acknowledged and rewarded for responsible research practices: a focus on transparency and accountability, high quality teaching, good supervision, and excellent peer review. This will extend the scope of activities that yield “career points” and shift the emphasis of assessment from quantity to quality.

Fortunately, several initiatives and strategies already exist to focus on a balanced set of performance indicators that matter. The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment , established in 2012, calls on the research community to recognise and reward various research outputs, beyond just publication. The Hong Kong Principles , formulated and endorsed at the 6th World Conference in Research Integrity in 2019, encourage research evaluations that incentivise responsible research practices while minimise perverse incentives that drive practices like purchasing authorship or falsifying data.

These issues, as well as others related to protecting the integrity of research and building trust in it, will also be discussed during the 8th World Conference on Research Integrity in Athens, Greece in June this year.

Practices under the umbrella of “ Open Science ” will be pivotal to making the research process more transparent and researchers more accountable. Open Science is the umbrella term for a movement consisting of initiatives to make scholarly research more transparent and equitable, ranging from open access publication to citizen science.

Open Methods, for example, involves the pre-registration of a study design’s essential features before its start. A registered report containing the introduction and methods section is submitted to a journal before data collection starts. It is subsequently accepted or rejected based on the relevance of the research, as well as the methodology’s strength.

The added benefit of a registered report is that reviewer feedback on the methodology can still change the study methods, as the data collection hasn’t started. Research can then begin without pressure to achieve positive results, removing the incentive to tweak or falsify data.

Peer review

Peer reviewers are an important line of defence against the publication of fatally flawed or fake papers. In this system, quality assurance of a paper is done on a completely voluntary and often anonymous basis by an expert in the relevant field or subject.

However, the person doing the review work receives no credit or reward. It’s crucial that this sort of “invisible” work in academia be recognised, celebrated and included among the criteria for promotion. This can contribute substantially to detecting questionable research practices (or worse) before publication.

It will incentivise good peer review, so fewer suspect articles pass through the process, and it will also open more paths to success in academia – thus breaking up the toxic publish-or-perish culture.

This article is based on a presentation given by the lead author at Stellenbosch University, South Africa on 12 February 2024. Natalie Simon, a communications consultant specialising in research who is part of the communications team for the 8th World Conference on Research Integrity and is also currently completing an MPhil in Science and Technology Studies at Stellenbosch University, co-authored this article.

• Academic journals
• Research integrity
• Academic research
• Publish or perish
• Fake journals
• Paper mills
• Open Science movement

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Steve Jobs Deathbed Speech

Apple co-founder steve jobs did not leave behind a deathbed warning about how the "non-stop pursuit of wealth will only turn a person into a twisted being, just like me.", published nov. 7, 2015.

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In November 2015, a rumor began circulating on social media that when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs passed away at age 56 in 2011, he delivered a speech or left behind a deathbed essay about the meaning of life.

One of the earliest iterations of this rumor we've found was published on gkindshivani.wordpress.com under the title "DID YOU KNOW WHAT WERE THE LAST WORDS OF STEVE JOBS?":

"I reached the pinnacle of success in the business world. In others' eyes, my life is an epitome of success. However, aside from work, I have little joy. In the end, wealth is only a fact of life that I am accustomed to. At this moment, lying on the sick bed and recalling my whole life, I realize that all the recognition and wealth that I took so much pride in, have paled and become meaningless in the face of impending death. In the darkness, I look at the green lights from the life supporting machines and hear the humming mechanical sounds, I can feel the breath of god of death drawing closer ... Now I know, when we have accumulated sufficient wealth to last our lifetime, we should pursue other matters that are unrelated to wealth ... Should be something that is more important: Perhaps relationships, perhaps art, perhaps a dream from younger days Non-stop pursuing of wealth will only turn a person into a twisted being, just like me. God gave us the senses to let us feel the love in everyone’s heart, not the illusions brought about by wealth. The wealth I have won in my life I cannot bring with me. What I can bring is only the memories precipitated by love. That's the true riches which will follow you, accompany you, giving you strength and light to go on. Love can travel a thousand miles. Life has no limit. Go where you want to go. Reach the height you want to reach. It is all in your heart and in your hands. What is the most expensive bed in the world? Sick bed ... You can employ someone to drive the car for you, make money for you but you cannot have someone to bear the sickness for you. Material things lost can be found. But there is one thing that can never be found when it is lost — Life. When a person goes into the operating room, he will realize that there is one book that he has yet to finish reading — Book of Healthy Life. Whichever stage in life we are at right now, with time, we will face the day when the curtain comes down. Treasure Love for your family, love for your spouse, love for your friends. Treat yourself well. Cherish others."

Although Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, the above-quoted essay didn't begin circulating online until November 2015, was not published anywhere outside of unofficial social media accounts and low-traffic blogs, and has not been confirmed by anyone close to the founder of Apple.

Furthermore, after Steve Jobs passed away on 5 October 2011, his sister Mona Simpson remarked on her brother's final words while delivering his eulogy:

Steve's final words, hours earlier, were monosyllables, repeated three times. Before embarking, he'd looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life's partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them. Steve's final words were: OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

While the above-quoted essay does not represent either Steve Jobs' final words nor remarks he made (in either oral or written form) at any time during his life, his biographer Walter Isaacson did record Jobs' expressing regret at the end of his life about how he raised his children:

"I wanted my kids to know me," Mr Isaacson recalled Mr Jobs saying, in a posthumous tribute the biographer wrote for Time magazine. "I wasn't always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did." "He was very human. He was so much more of a real person than most people know. That's what made him so great," he added. "Steve made choices. I asked him if he was glad that he had kids, and he said, 'It's 10,000 times better than anything I've ever done'." It wasn't always thus. In the early stages of his career, Jobs, who was adopted, denied being the father of Lisa and insisted in court documents that he was "sterile and infertile". He acknowledged paternity when she was six, and they were later reconciled.

By Dan Evon

Dan Evon is a former writer for Snopes.

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Buying College Essays Is Now Easier Than Ever. But Buyer Beware

Tovia Smith

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it. Angela Hsieh/NPR hide caption

Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market for essays that students can buy and turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

As the recent college admissions scandal is shedding light on how parents are cheating and bribing their children's way into college, schools are also focusing on how some students may be cheating their way through college. Concern is growing about a burgeoning online market that makes it easier than ever for students to buy essays written by others to turn in as their own work. And schools are trying new tools to catch it.

It's not hard to understand the temptation for students. The pressure is enormous, the stakes are high and, for some, writing at a college level is a huge leap.

"We didn't really have a format to follow, so I was kind of lost on what to do," says one college freshman, who struggled recently with an English assignment. One night, when she was feeling particularly overwhelmed, she tweeted her frustration.

"It was like, 'Someone, please help me write my essay!' " she recalls. She ended her tweet with a crying emoji. Within a few minutes, she had a half-dozen offers of help.

"I can write it for you," they tweeted back. "Send us the prompt!"

The student, who asked that her name not be used for fear of repercussions at school, chose one that asked for $10 per page, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

"For me, it was just that the work was piling up," she explains. "As soon as I finish some big assignment, I get assigned more things, more homework for math, more homework for English. Some papers have to be six or 10 pages long. ... And even though I do my best to manage, the deadlines come closer and closer, and it's just ... the pressure."

In the cat-and-mouse game of academic cheating, students these days know that if they plagiarize, they're likely to get caught by computer programs that automatically compare essays against a massive database of other writings. So now, buying an original essay can seem like a good workaround.

"Technically, I don't think it's cheating," the student says. "Because you're paying someone to write an essay, which they don't plagiarize, and they write everything on their own."

Her logic, of course, ignores the question of whether she's plagiarizing. When pressed, she begins to stammer.

"That's just a difficult question to answer," she says. "I don't know how to feel about that. It's kind of like a gray area. It's maybe on the edge, kind of?"

Besides she adds, she probably won't use all of it.

Other students justify essay buying as the only way to keep up. They figure that everyone is doing it one way or another — whether they're purchasing help online or getting it from family or friends.

"Oh yeah, collaboration at its finest," cracks Boston University freshman Grace Saathoff. While she says she would never do it herself, she's not really fazed by others doing it. She agrees with her friends that it has pretty much become socially acceptable.

"I have a friend who writes essays and sells them," says Danielle Delafuente, another Boston University freshman. "And my other friend buys them. He's just like, 'I can't handle it. I have five papers at once. I need her to do two of them, and I'll do the other three.' It's a time management thing."

The war on contract cheating

"It breaks my heart that this is where we're at," sighs Ashley Finley, senior adviser to the president for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. She says campuses are abuzz about how to curb the rise in what they call contract cheating. Obviously, students buying essays is not new, but Finley says that what used to be mostly limited to small-scale side hustles has mushroomed on the internet to become a global industry of so-called essay mills. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but research suggests that up to 16 percent of students have paid someone to do their work and that the number is rising.

"Definitely, this is really getting more and more serious," Finley says. "It's part of the brave new world for sure."

The essay mills market aggressively online, with slickly produced videos inviting students to "Get instant help with your assignment" and imploring them: "Don't lag behind," "Join the majority" and "Don't worry, be happy."

"They're very crafty," says Tricia Bertram Gallant, director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California in San Diego and a board member of the International Center for Academic Integrity.

The companies are equally brazen offline — leafleting on campuses, posting flyers in toilet stalls and flying banners over Florida beaches during spring break. Companies have also been known to bait students with emails that look like they're from official college help centers. And they pay social media influencers to sing the praises of their services, and they post testimonials from people they say are happy customers.

"I hired a service to write my paper and I got a 90 on it!" gloats one. "Save your time, and have extra time to party!" advises another.

"It's very much a seduction," says Bertram Gallant. "So you can maybe see why students could get drawn into the contract cheating world."

YouTube has been cracking down on essay mills; it says it has pulled thousands of videos that violate its policies against promoting dishonest behavior.

But new videos constantly pop up, and their hard sell flies in the face of their small-print warnings that their essays should be used only as a guide, not a final product.

Several essay mills declined or didn't respond to requests to be interviewed by NPR. But one answered questions by email and offered up one of its writers to explain her role in the company, called EduBirdie.

"Yes, just like the little birdie that's there to help you in your education," explains April Short, a former grade school teacher from Australia who's now based in Philadelphia. She has been writing for a year and a half for the company, which bills itself as a "professional essay writing service for students who can't even."

Some students just want some "foundational research" to get started or a little "polish" to finish up, Short says. But the idea that many others may be taking a paper written completely by her and turning it in as their own doesn't keep her up at night.

"These kids are so time poor," she says, and they're "missing out on opportunities of travel and internships because they're studying and writing papers." Relieving students of some of that burden, she figures, allows them to become more "well-rounded."

"I don't necessarily think that being able to create an essay is going to be a defining factor in a very long career, so it's not something that bothers me," says Short. Indeed, she thinks students who hire writers are demonstrating resourcefulness and creativity. "I actually applaud students that look for options to get the job done and get it done well," she says.

"This just shows you the extent of our ability to rationalize all kinds of bad things we do," sighs Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. The rise in contract cheating is especially worrisome, he says, because when it comes to dishonest behavior, more begets more. As he puts it, it's not just about "a few bad apples."

Felicity Huffman And 12 Other Parents To Plead Guilty In College Cheating Scandal

"Instead, what we have is a lot ... of blemished apples, and we take our cues for our behavior from the social world around us," he says. "We know officially what is right and what's wrong. But really what's driving our behavior is what we see others around us doing" or, Ariely adds, what we perceive them to be doing. So even the proliferation of advertising for essays mills can have a pernicious effect, he says, by fueling the perception that "everyone's doing it."

A few nations have recently proposed or passed laws outlawing essay mills, and more than a dozen U.S. states have laws on the books against them. But prosecuting essay mills, which are often based overseas in Pakistan, Kenya and Ukraine, for example, is complicated. And most educators are loath to criminalize students' behavior.

"Yes, they're serious mistakes. They're egregious mistakes," says Cath Ellis, an associate dean and integrity officer at the University of New South Wales, where students were among the hundreds alleged to have bought essays in a massive scandal in Australia in 2014.

"But we're educational institutions," she adds. "We've got to give students the opportunity to learn from these mistakes. That's our responsibility. And that's better in our hands than in the hands of the police and the courts."

Staying one step ahead

In the war on contract cheating, some schools see new technology as their best weapon and their best shot to stay one step ahead of unscrupulous students. The company that makes the Turnitin plagiarism detection software has just upped its game with a new program called Authorship Investigate.

The software first inspects a document's metadata, like when it was created, by whom it was created and how many times it was reopened and re-edited. Turnitin's vice president for product management, Bill Loller, says sometimes it's as simple as looking at the document's name. Essay mills typically name their documents something like "Order Number 123," and students have been known to actually submit it that way. "You would be amazed at how frequently that happens," says Loller.

Using cutting-edge linguistic forensics, the software also evaluates the level of writing and its style.

"Think of it as a writing fingerprint," Loller says. The software looks at hundreds of telltale characteristics of an essay, like whether the author double spaces after a period or writes with Oxford commas or semicolons. It all gets instantly compared against a student's other work, and, Loller says, suspicions can be confirmed — or alleviated — in minutes.

"At the end of the day, you get to a really good determination on whether the student wrote what they submitted or not," he says, "and you get it really quickly."

Coventry University in the U.K. has been testing out a beta version of the software, and Irene Glendinning, the school's academic manager for student experience, agrees that the software has the potential to give schools a leg up on cheating students. After the software is officially adopted, "we'll see a spike in the number of cases we find, and we'll have a very hard few years," she says. "But then the message will get through to students that we've got the tools now to find these things out." Then, Glendinning hopes, students might consider contract cheating to be as risky as plagiarizing.

In the meantime, schools are trying to spread the word that buying essays is risky in other ways as well.

Professor Ariely says that when he posed as a student and ordered papers from several companies, much of it was "gibberish" and about a third of it was actually plagiarized.

Even worse, when he complained to the company and demanded his money back, they resorted to blackmail. Still believing him to be a student, the company threatened to tell his school he was cheating. Others say companies have also attempted to shake down students for more money, threatening to rat them out if they didn't pay up.

The lesson, Ariely says, is "buyer beware."

But ultimately, experts say, many desperate students may not be deterred by the risks — whether from shady businesses or from new technology.

Bertram Gallant, of UC San Diego, says the right way to dissuade students from buying essays is to remind them why it's wrong.

"If we engage in a technological arms race with the students, we won't win," she says. "What are we going to do when Google glasses start to look like regular glasses and a student wears them into an exam? Are we going to tell them they can't wear their glasses because we're afraid they might be sending the exam out to someone else who is sending them back the answers?"

The solution, Bertram Gallant says, has to be about "creating a culture where integrity and ethics matter" and where education is valued more than grades. Only then will students believe that cheating on essays is only cheating themselves.

Essays About Life: Top 5 Examples Plus 7 Prompts

Life envelops various meanings; if you are writing essays about life, discover our comprehensive guide with examples and prompts to help you with your essay.

What is life? You can ask anyone; I assure you, no two people will have the same answer. How we define life relies on our beliefs and priorities. One can say that life is the capacity for growth or the time between birth and death. Others can share that life is the constant pursuit of purpose and fulfillment. Life is a broad topic that inspires scholars, poets, and many others. It stimulates discussions that encourage diverse perspectives and interpretations. 

5 Essay Examples

1. essay on life by anonymous on toppr.com, 2. the theme of life, existence and consciousness by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 3. compassion can save life by anonymous on papersowl.com, 4. a life of consumption vs. a life of self-realization by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 5. you only live once: a motto for life by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. what is the true meaning of life, 2. my life purpose, 3. what makes life special, 4. how to appreciate life, 5. books about life, 6. how to live a healthy life, 7. my idea of a perfect life.

“…quality of Life carries huge importance. Above all, the ultimate purpose should be to live a meaningful life. A meaningful life is one which allows us to connect with our deeper self.”

The author defines life as something that differentiates man from inorganic matter. It’s an aspect that processes and examines a person’s actions that develop through growth. For some, life is a pain because of failures and struggles, but it’s temporary. For the writer, life’s challenges help us move forward, be strong, and live to the fullest. You can also check out these essays about utopia .

“… Kafka defines the dangers of depending on art for life. The hunger artist expresses his dissatisfaction with the world by using himself and not an external canvas to create his artwork, forcing a lack of separation between the artist and his art. Therefore, instead of the art depending on the audience, the artist depends on the audience, meaning when the audience’s appreciation for work dwindles, their appreciation for the artist diminishes as well, leading to the hunger artist’s death.”

The essay talks about “ A Hunger Artist ” by Franz Kafka, who describes his views on life through art. The author analyzes Kafka’s fictional main character and his anxieties and frustrations about life and the world. This perception shows how much he suffered as an artist and how unhappy he was. Through the essay, the writer effectively explains Kafka’s conclusion that artists’ survival should not depend on their art.

“Compassion is that feeling that we’ve all experienced at some point in our lives. When we know that there is someone that really cares for us. Compassion comes from that moment when we can see the world through another person’s eyes.”

The author is a nurse who believes that to be professional, they need to be compassionate and treat their patients with respect, empathy, and dignity. One can show compassion through small actions such as talking and listening to patients’ grievances. In conclusion, compassion can save a person’s life by accepting everyone regardless of race, gender, etc.

“… A life of self-realization is more preferable and beneficial in comparison with a life on consumption. At the same time, this statement may be objected as person’s consumption leads to his or her happiness.”

The author examines Jon Elster’s theory to find out what makes a person happy and what people should think and feel about their material belongings. The essay mentions a list of common activities that make us feel happy and satisfied, such as buying new things. The writer explains that Elster’s statement about the prevalence of self-realization in consumption will always trigger intense debate.

“Appreciate the moment you’ve been given and appreciate the people you’ve been given to spend it with, because no matter how beautiful or tragic a moment is, it always ends. So hold on a little tighter, smile a little bigger, cry a little harder, laugh a little louder, forgive a little quicker, and love a whole lot deeper because these are the moments you will remember when you’re old and wishing you could rewind time.”

This essay explains that some things and events only happen once in a person’s life. The author encourages teenagers to enjoy the little things in their life and do what they love as much as they can. When they turn into adults, they will no longer have the luxury to do whatever they want.

The author suggests doing something meaningful as a stress reliever, trusting people, refusing to give up on the things that make you happy, and dying with beautiful memories. For help with your essays, check out our round-up of the best essay checkers .

7 Prompts for Essays About Life

Life encompasses many values and depends on one’s perception. For most, life is about reaching achievements to make themselves feel alive. Use this prompt to compile different meanings of life and provide a background on why a person defines life as they do.

Take Joseph Campbell’s, “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning, and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer,” for example. This quote pertains to his belief that an individual is responsible for giving life meaning. 

For this prompt, share with your readers your current purpose in life. It can be as simple as helping your siblings graduate or something grand, such as changing a national law to make a better world. You can ask others about their life purpose to include in your essay and give your opinion on why your answers are different or similar.

Life is a fascinating subject, as each person has a unique concept. How someone lives depends on many factors, such as opportunities, upbringing, and philosophies. All of these elements affect what we consider “special.”

Share what you think makes life special. For instance, talk about your relationships, such as your close-knit family or best friends. Write about the times when you thought life was worth living. You might also be interested in these essays about yourself .

Life in itself is a gift. However, most of us follow a routine of “wake up, work (or study), sleep, repeat.” Our constant need to survive makes us take things for granted. When we endlessly repeat a routine, life becomes mundane. For this prompt, offer tips on how to avoid a monotonous life, such as keeping a gratitude journal or traveling.

Many literary pieces use life as their subject. If you have a favorite book about life, recommend it to your readers by summarizing the content and sharing how the book influenced your outlook on life. You can suggest more than one book and explain why everyone should read them.

For example, Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” reminds its readers to live in the moment and never fear failure.

To be healthy doesn’t only pertain to our physical condition. It also refers to our mental, spiritual, and emotional well-being. To live a happy and full life, individuals must strive to be healthy in all areas. For this prompt, list ways to achieve a healthy life. Section your essay and present activities to improve health, such as eating healthy foods, talking with friends, etc.

No one has a perfect life, but describe what it’ll be like if you do. Start with the material things, such as your house, clothes, etc. Then, move to how you connect with others. In your conclusion, answer whether you’re willing to exchange your current life for the “perfect life” you described and why.  See our essay writing tips to learn more!

Maria Caballero is a freelance writer who has been writing since high school. She believes that to be a writer doesn't only refer to excellent syntax and semantics but also knowing how to weave words together to communicate to any reader effectively.

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Visual Essay: My Life as a Fake

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Introduction

The array of design work presented on the following pages is comprised of a set of images I created as part of my professional practice between 2003 and 2006. They emerged as I engaged in the process of designing covers for novels written by the contemporary Australian author Peter Carey.

Often considered merely catalytic to what will emerge as the final outcome of the design process, graphic explorations such as these are often discarded. However, when they are preserved and intentionally displayed, they constitute a visual and ontological representation of the ideas that occur during the design process and inform its progression. [1] Reflection on these various test pieces guided a form of analysis, “a designerly way of knowing,” [2] that allowed me to examine how materially-led explorations with paper could enable the translation of abstract design concepts into visual forms.

The first half of this visual narrative depicts the design process that guided the development of the cover designs for the first Australian edition of Peter Carey’s novel My Life as a Fake on behalf of Random House in 2003. The second half recounts my engagement in the design process that resulted in a more recent—2006—version of the cover design for the same novel, but this latter version was designed for Random House as an integral part of a series of nine covers for books authored by Peter Carey.

This visual narrative is an example of asserting the idea of transmediation, (transfer to a different medium), within the context of a specific graphic design project. By intentionally changing the materials with which I was designing, I employed a strategy to promote ideatic renewal (Stamm, 2013). [3] As described in a 2007 article by Aaron Seymour that was published in ‘Eye Magazine’ about my design work for the covers of Carey’s books, this intentional paradigm shift enabled me to “Do it again (Seymour, 2007).” [4]

My Life as a Fake, 2003

The plot of the novel is centered on a series of actions set in motion in the mid 20th century by a frustrated poet named Christopher Chubb, who perpetrates a literary hoax in Australia by creating poetry authored by a fictitious, working class Australian poet named Bob McCorkle. Chubb creates McCorkle and his work to demean and disrupt modernist poetic doctrine and to humiliate an editor who has rejected his work, and who Chubb regards as pompous. The poetry Chubb writes under McCorkle’s name is compiled into a manuscript that, as the plot of the book progresses, becomes symbolic of the dubiousness and false pretention that pervades many of the characters and the world they inhabit. Eventually, amidst all of the posing and fakery, a man emerges who successfully and monstrously passes himself off as Bob McCorkle, and becomes the only character in the book who emerges as genuine.

When I first received the manuscript for My Life as a Fake , it came to me on approximately 250 sheets of A4-sized, 80gsm (grams per square meter) Bond typing paper. This is a ubiquitous tool in publishing in Australia, New Zealand and much of western Europe. Being cheap, available and conceptually relevant—Chubb typed the fictitious McCorkle’s poetry on the same type of paper—I decided to experiment with white pages of Bond during my design process, and much of it involved my investigation of its physical properties and image-making potential.

Viewed as a sequence, the images signify depictions of the choices I made that guided the direction of the design for this piece and that also offer visual evidence of Schön’s theory of “refection-in-action.” [5]

Displayed more or less chronologically, the narrative begins with sketches (depicted in Figures 1 through 4) that recorded my thoughts [6] during my initial study of Carey’s manuscript. Recording the iterative progression from literal to abstract concepts, the sketches reflect my intention to achieve an experimental result. For example, Chubb is initially rendered as a person with arms, legs and a face (as shown in Figures 1 and 2), and later, in order to express characteristics that are temperamental rather than physical, Chubb is realized as a smudge (as shown in Figure 3), and also as two characters to portray his schizoid nature (as shown in Figure 4).

Sketching my thoughts about various means to visually communicate the book’s essential themes onto paper gave them visible presence, and made them physically tangible enough for me to manipulate and hybridize more easily. This aided my conceptual development process by providing evidence that could facilitate the process of critical appraisal. [7] Inspired by Carey’s reference to “sparagmos,”a concept from Greek mythology that implies dismemberment, or tearing things apart, the later sketches are attempts to encode this concept visually [8] by allowing the composition to be dominated by an apparently haphazard arrangement of pieces of Bond paper (as shown in Figures 5–7). The pages appear to be thrown up and are being dismembered in mid-air.

Additional reflection on these sketches enabled me to realize that these falling pages could be encoded on a further level and composed to simulate [9] a despairing author’s face (as shown in Figure 6). Satisfied that this concept was inherent to both the fictional themes being explored in Carey’s narrative as well as in the material—the Bond paper—being tested, the second half of the narrative illustrates a transmediation process, from sketching to material testing (as shown in Figures 8–16).

These images demonstrate how haptic experiments (in this case, literally involving material handling) facilitated the creation of an abstraction of a face that I created from pieces of backlit Bond paper. Figure 8 depicts one of my tests that involved overlapping pieces of Bond paper to render this illusion. This type of test is an example of materially-driven visual encoding. [10] One piece placed horizontally at the top of the composition signifies the forehead, two splayed pieces placed in the midst of the composition signify the cheeks, and one piece placed below these implies a chin or a neck. The areas of overlap contribute two eyes, a nose and a mouth. The fact that none of the pieces is arranged in “perfect” vertical or horizontal alignment helps to visually communicate that the persona being rendered is anything but a well-adjusted citizen of a modernist society.

Subsequent experiments proved the paper’s ability to hold a curl and cast a shadow when lit by a single source of light (as shown in Figures 10-12). These images demonstrate how particular placements of these curls within the abstract rendition of a facial structure could be used to encode various expressions.

Given its recognizable structure and long history of being abstracted in a variety of materials and across a diverse array of mediums, I surmised the face in these designs would be decoded quite easily by the intended audience [11] for this piece. I also surmised that this audience would be less apt to decode the reference to a literary manuscript typed on Bond paper, although I didn’t consider this necessary to the success of the design. As this design is unpublished as of this writing, these predictions remain untested.

Typographic tests (as shown in Figures 11 and 12) provided an alternate design direction to my idea of arranging pieces of Bond paper to create the perception of faces. Starting with graphic representations of a spare, empty page, (as shown in Figures 14 and 15), I trialed overlaid placements of pieces of paper containing portions of letterforms and noticed that since they were the same color as the background, this gave the effect of corroding the page edges and fracturing the surface of the design (as shown in Figure 16). Decoding these material behaviors as I designed, I made an intellectual connection between the appearance of this fragmentation, the creative challenge of writing, and “sparagmos.” Considering the sophistication of Carey’s prose, this less figurative, more abstract option depicted in Figure 16 was the one proposed to the publisher.

• Cross, N. (2007). Designerly ways of knowing. Basel : London: Birkhäuser ; Springer distributor.
• Downton, P. (2003). Design research. Melbourne: RMIT Publishing.
• Goldschmidt, G. (2003). “The Backtalk of Self-Generated Sketches.” Design Issues, 19(1), 72-88. doi:10.1162/074793603762667728
• Gursoy, B. (2015). Visualizing making: Shapes, materials, and actions. (Report). 41, 29. doi:10.1016/j.destud.2015.08.007
• Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner : how professionals think in action. Aldershot: Avebury.
• Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman . New Haven & London: Yale Universtiy Press.
• Seymour, A. (2007). “Do it Again.” Eye Magazine, 17(65).
• Stamm, M. (2013). Reflecting reflection(s) – Epistemologies of Creativity in Creative Practice Research. In J. V. a. B. Pak (Ed.): LUCA, Sint-Lucas School of Architecture (Ghent, Belgium).
• Tyler, A. C. (1992). “Shaping belief: The role of audience in visual communication” (Vol. Design Issues 9, pp. 21-29).
• Viray, E. (2011). Why Material Design? (Vol. Material Design, Informing Architecture by Materiality, pp. 8-10). Switzerland: Birkhåuser GmbH.
• Walwin, J., & Krokatsis, H. (2006). You’ll never know : drawing and random interference. London: Hayward Gallery.

Jenny Grigg is an Australian graphic designer, a lecturer in visual communication at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and a Ph.D. candidate at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University. Since graduating from the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, Jenny has held several professional graphic design positions. These include stints as Art Director at Rolling Stone Magazine Australia, Art Director at HQ Magazine and MTV Australia. After a year in London designing for Pentagram and Faber & Faber, she became the Creative Director for Harper Collins Publishing in Sydney. Jenny continues to operate her design practice and is an Industry Fellow at RMIT University.

Designing graphic materials to support and promote the work of authors such as Peter Carey—Australia’s best-known contemporary novelist—and on behalf of clients such as Granta Portobello Books in London, her creative inception begins with a deeply probative analysis of a given author’s written words. As a Ph.D. candidate, she has begun to make use of the variety of epistemological understandings she has been able to cultivate by doing this.

She is currently conducting collective case study research about various forms of graphic design ideation (the formulation of ideas). Specifically, she is researching how professionals use materialistic approaches to guide regenerative, creative processes in graphic design practice.

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Essay: Deepfakes – history, examples, uses and risks

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Introduction

In the world of the internet and computers, one’s identity is the most important. Deepfake is a combination of “deep learning” and “fake”, deepfakes are hyper-realistic videos digitally manipulated to depict people saying and doing things that never actually happened (Taulli,2019). In other words, deepfakes use facial mapping technology and AI that swaps the face of a person on a video into the face of another person (Li 2019). It is not only limited to editing pictures and making it look like someone else, but deepfake can also and have been used in manipulating videos and audios.

Deepfakes’ history can be traced back to the 19th century when photo editing and manipulation was introduced. It soon went from still pictures to motion pictures and eventually into videos in the 20th century. The early program was a video rewrite program published in 1997 which replaced the audio track of the video. The synthesizing Obama program was published in 2017 which changed the audio track of former president Barack Obama. The term deepfakes were particularly famous because of a Reddit user named “deepfake”. There has been the development of many other apps and websites which easily allow users to change the voice and video/picture.

Although the idea of deepfakes seems to be a bad idea, it also has many positive uses in many industries, movies, and digital communications. Movie makers will be able to recreate classic scenes in movies, create new movies starring long-dead actors, make use of special effects and advanced face editing in post-production, and improve amateur videos to professional quality (FOX05; GRD07 The technology behind deepfakes enables multiplayer games and virtual chat worlds with increased telepresence (Solsman 2019), natural-sounding and -looking smart assistants (Li 2019) and digital doubles of people. This helps to develop better human relationships and interaction online (Evans). It can be used by an individual to remember them of the lost ones. Businesses are interested in the potential of brand-applicable deepfake technology, as it can transform e-commerce and advertising in significant ways. For example, brands can contract supermodels who are not really supermodels, and show fashion outfits on a variety of models with different skin tones, heights, and weights (Li 2019).

Risks and dangers

Deepfakes are a major threat to our society because they can be manipulated very easily. People largely depend on the internet to get their information and any misleading information can not only lead to misunderstanding but also can cause chaos and disbalance the political and social condition. It is highly probably that the journalism industry is going to have to face a massive consumer trust issue due to deepfakes (Andrews,2019). Deepfakes are likely to hamper digital literacy and citizens’ trust toward authority-provided information, as fake videos showing government officials saying things that never happened make people doubt authorities . Deepfakes pose a greater threat than “traditional” fake news because they are harder to spot and people are inclined to believe the fake is real (O’Brien 2018).

Anyone can produce deepfake if they have skills and knowledge about the technology being used. As there are increased numbers of apps that are easily available, it becomes easier as they can be produced locally. Some people may do it because of their hobby. Political players, activists, actors and television companies are the largest producers of deepfake. Deepfakes are also produced by the porn industry and this is one of the widest uses of deepfakes. Individuals are mostly interested in making pornographic content using deepfake and use AI videos to form online humor and help in the development of the deepfake. Meme producers also use deepfakes to make entertaining projects and memes. Using AI to make trolls and weaponizing them is also found in practice. There are also cases where deepfakes were produced by scammers to scam people and generate fake audios and pictures to conduct financial crimes. Technologies are emerging which can easily allow deepfake in real-time video calls too. App development and programmers are continuously working in making deepfake more efficient.

Many deepfakes focus on celebrities, politicians, and corporate leaders because the internet is packed with source photos and videos of them from which to build the large image stockpiles required to train an AI deepfake system (Li 2019). There has been the use of deepfake for porn revenge, political influences, and personal influence. It is easy to produce the deepfakes of celebrities because a wide variety of pictures and media sources are easily available for those people. Although most of those media files are used to make memes, pranks, and goofs, there are few which have been misused by deepfakes. You can easily find actors in movies or shows which they never performed because of deepfakes. A deepfake might show, for example, Nicolas Cage acting in movies in which he has never starred in, such as Indiana Jones or Terminator 2 (Dickson 2018).

Examples of harmful deepfakes, however, are also popping up increasingly. Deepfake technology enables celebrity and revenge porn, that is, involuntary pornography using images of celebrities and non-celebrities, which are shared on social networks without their consent (Solsman 2019). Thus, celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson have been featured on deepfaked adult movies, in which their faces have been superimposed over porn stars’ faces (Solsman 2019). There is also a video of former President Barack Obama discussing with president Donald trump which never actually happened.

In 2019, Nancy Pelosi went viral because of the altered video which was slowed down to make her sound intoxicated. Facebook refused to turn down this video and a new video of Mark Zuckerberg was developed in which he talks about the truth of Facebook and who owns the future. In a 2018 deepfake video, Donald Trump offered advice to the people of Belgium about climate change. The video was created by a Belgian political party “sp.a” to attract people to sign an online petition calling on the Belgian government to take more urgent climate action. The video provoked outrage about the American president meddling in a foreign country with Belgium’s climate policy (Li 2019).

Better Call Trump: Money Laundering 101 is a straight-up parody. It takes a scene from the hugely popular Breaking Bad series and introduces Donald Trump as James McGill – who later took on the pseudonym Saul Goodman in the spin-off series Better Call Saul A video pasting the face of Yang Mi, one of China’s best-known contemporary actors, into 1983 Hong Kong television drama The Legend of The Condor Heroes went viral, racking up a reported 240 million views before it was removed by Chinese authorities.

Combating deepfake

There must be new corporate laws and policies to combat deepfake. Regulations and legislation are the most obvious means against it At present, deepfakes are not specifically addressed by civil or criminal laws, although legal experts have suggested adapting current laws to cover libel, defamation, identity fraud, or impersonating a government official using deepfakes (Waters 2019). Virginia state law against revenge porn recently made distributing “falsely created” images and videos a misdemeanor, and thus expanded the law to include deepfakes (Al-Heeti 2019). There must be new laws regarding copyright and privacy issues caused by deepfakes.

However, deepfakes can do better than harm, so an appropriate legal solution is to be created. For example, politicians can commit not to use illicit digital campaign tactics or spread disinformation such as deepfakes in their election campaigns (Li 2019). Social media plays a big role in all the deepfakes as most of the deepfakes are circulated via social networks. There must be a way to report deepfakes if it is not appropriate for society. While few social media firms have policies yet about deepfakes, they should collaborate to prevent their platforms from being weaponized for disinformation, and thus proactively enforce transparent, shared policies to block and remove deepfakes. Reddit and Pornhub have banned deepfake porn and other non-consensual pornography, and act upon users’ flagging of such material.

Education and training are crucial for combatting deepfakes. Despite considerable news coverage and concerns presented by authorities, the threat of deep fakes has not yet been reckoned with by the public (Li 2019). There is a need to raise general awareness about AI and its misuse. There is a whole new area of social engineering created because of the deepfake. Technology can be used against technology. The authenticity of a deepfake should be verified before making it public Finally, technology can prevent the creation of deepfakes by inserting “noise” into photos or videos. This noise is imperceptible to the human eye, but prevents the visual material from being used in automated deepfake software.

Deepfakes are hyper-realistic videos digitally manipulated to depict people saying and doing things that never happened. Deepfakes are created using AI, that is, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) that pit discriminative and generative algorithms against one another to fine-tune performance with every repetition, and thereby produce a convincing fake (Fletcher, 2018; Spivak, 2019). They can quickly spread around the public through any social media platforms. Deepfakes are used not only in a bad way but has helped many industries and personnel. Proper rules and regulations are to be implemented to make sure that this technology is not misused. We need to be aware of cybercrimes that are possible because of deepfakes. Various cases connected to deepfakes have already been registered and those cases should be used to combat the misuse of deepfake.

• Atodiresei, C.-S., Tănăselea, A., & Iftene, A. 2018. Identifying Fake News and Fake Users on Twitter. Procedia Computer Science, 126: 451–461. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2018.07.279
• Fletcher, J. 2018. Deepfakes, Artificial Intelligence, and Some Kind of Dystopia: The New Faces of Online Post-Fact Performance. Theatre Journal, 70(4): 455–471. Project MUSE, https://doi:10.1353/tj.2018.0097
• Atanasova, P., Nakov, P., Màrquez, L., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Karadzhov, G., Mihaylova, T., Mohtarami, M., & Glass, J. 2019. Automatic Fact-Checking Using Context and Discourse Information. Journal of Data and Information Quality, 11(3): Article 12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3297722
• Cybenko, A. K., & Cybenko, G. 2018. AI and Fake News. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 33(5): 3–7. https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIS.2018.2877280
• Joe Andrews (Jul 2019). Fake news is real — A.I. is going to make it much worse. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/12/fake-news-is-real-ai-is-going-to-make-it-much-worse.html
• Tom Tauli (Jun 2019). Deepfake: What You Need To Know. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomtaulli/2019/06/15/deepfake-what-you-need-to-know/#7433f566704d
• Hao Li, November 2019. The Emergence of Deepfake Technology: A Review. https://timreview.ca/article/1282
• Joan E. Solsman, may 2019. Samsung deepfake AI could fabricate a video of you from a single profile pic. https://www.cnet.com/news/samsung-ai-deepfake-can-fabricate-a-video-of-you-from-a-single-photo-mona-lisa-cheapfake-dumbfake/
• Carther Evans, April 2018. Spotting fake news in a world with manipulated video. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spotting-fake-news-in-a-world-with-manipulated-video/
• Sara Ashley O’Brien, 2018. Deepfakes are coming. Is Big Tech ready? https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/08/technology/deepfakes-countermeasures-facebook-twitter-youtube/index.html
• Ben Dickson, 2018. When AI Blurs the Line Between Reality and Fiction. https://www.pcmag.com/news/when-ai-blurs-the-line-between-reality-and-fiction
• Richard Waters, 2019. Rising tide of online deepfakes bring opportunities as well as risk. https://www.ft.com/content/1dd069ba-8df7-11e9-a1c1-51bf8f989972
• Abrar Al-Heeti, Sharing deepfake revenge porn is now a crime in Virginia. https://www.cnet.com/news/sharing-deepfake-revenge-porn-is-now-a-misdemeanor-in-virginia/

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• EXPLORE Random Article

How to Fake an Answer to an Essay Question

Last Updated: October 27, 2021

This article was co-authored by Megan Morgan, PhD . Megan Morgan is a Graduate Program Academic Advisor in the School of Public & International Affairs at the University of Georgia. She earned her PhD in English from the University of Georgia in 2015. This article has been viewed 23,043 times.

Many of us have had the experience of sitting in a classroom or lecture hall, staring at an essay question without the faintest idea how we'll compose an answer, even if we've studied. Essays require more creativity of test-takers and offer fewer boundaries for those unfamiliar with the material. The good news, however, is that the open-ended nature of essay exams offers a variety of opportunities to salvage your grade, even when you feel unprepared. Some methods require a few minutes of advance preparation, while others are useful strategies to tuck away in case of future academic emergency. Use a combination of these methods to ensure that even when you "fake" an answer you aren't just wasting time and pencil lead.

Preparing for an Exam When You're Short on Time

• Take a few moments to familiarize yourself with a few key concepts from the units or topics covered since your last exam.
• Avoid becoming bogged down in details when time is limited -- skim quickly through the material, then go back if you have extra time. Look for the "big picture" themes and topics, as these are likely to be helpful when writing an essay answer.
• That being said, pay particular attention to recurring terms or specific jargon. If your instructor frequently refers to a specific term, changes are he or she finds it significant. Review frequently used jargon so you don't find yourself hung up on unfamiliar wording. You'll be disappointed later if you discover you really did know the material, but failed to recognize a key technical term or phrase!

• Do you recognize names, dates, events, concepts, or ideas elsewhere in the test that might be relevant to the essay? Treat the rest of the test as a memory-jog for the essay.
• Can you use an example stated elsewhere in the exam as an example in your essay?
• Once you've finished the non-essay portion of the test, do you feel, based upon your quick review of key topics, like anything big is "missing" from the exam? Chances are that even if you find the language of the essay question confusing, the "missing" topic(s) are what the essay's meant to cover.

Composing an Outline During the Exam

• What is the central topic of this essay? Jot down your best guess, even if you're unsure of the material.
• What type of essay is the teacher requesting? Is your instructor asking you to compare and contrast two ideas, describe a given idea or process, or compose an opinion essay? Note this information so you can compose your essay accordingly.
• If you see terms such as compare , contrast , apply , cause , and relate , your teacher is asking you to demonstrate how ideas are connected.
• Prove , justify , evaluate , respond , assess , support , synthesize , analyze , or argue are all clues your teacher is asking for your interpretation of the material. Keep in mind, however, that even when you're asked to interpret--state your opinion--you'll need to back up your opinion with concrete evidence. [1] X Trustworthy Source University of North Carolina Writing Center UNC's on-campus and online instructional service that provides assistance to students, faculty, and others during the writing process Go to source
• Pay particular attention to adjectives. A history essay, for example, may ask students to describe the political, economic, and social impact of an event. List these adjectives and be sure you address all three.
• Also note requests for specific numbers of examples. A biology essay might ask students to provide three examples of an evolutionary process. Note "three examples" and be sure you address this request -- even if you need to write that you only know two.

Avoiding Common Mistakes of the Unprepared

• Instead of absolute terms, use qualified statements. Rather than proclaiming something the "greatest" or the "worst," try using "among the best" or "perhaps some of the worst." Using qualified statements helps you avoid sounding foolish if you're not quite sure whether an event really was the "greatest," or an idea is, in fact, "the worst" of all time. [3] X Research source
• Don't lose sight of the larger picture. You might not enjoy the current political climate, for example, but calling a particular politician or party "the worst in history" on your politics exam is more likely to elicit a chuckle or an eye-roll than admiration; your teacher knows people have been referring to various politicians and parties as "the worst ever" for hundreds of years.
• Acknowledging that an issue or topic is highly complex can actually work in your favor. Write something like "It would be impossible to fully discuss the complex nature of Topic X in a limited essay, so I will focus on Themes A and B." Your teacher may be more likely to chalk up any omissions to the complicated nature of the subject -- which you've demonstrated you are aware of -- rather than you not knowing the material.

Working Your Way Around to What You do Know

• Which elements might connect to information you do understand?
• How might you compare what little you do know about a given essay topic to a topic you better understand?
• What openings do you see for demonstrating your understanding of the wider subject, even if you're unclear on something specific your teacher seems to be asking?

• Develop an analogy. Perhaps, for example, you recall studying the life cycle of the frog, but your essay question asks you about the life cycle of the salamander. You know they're both amphibians; perhaps your coverage of salamander larvae is a bit fuzzy, but if you can say they're similar to tadpoles and describe tadpole development, you can demonstrate you do have some knowledge of the broader subject.
• Tailor your examples. Your history teacher might be asking about the effect of the Cold War on 1950s popular culture; maybe you only remember how the Cold War impacted government, but you can make a case for how government itself impacts popular culture. State your case with confidence.
• Make use of transition words and phrases. Terms such as therefore , for this reason , it follows that , as a result , because , however , and consequently are tools you can use to direct your reader. These elements serve to highlight what information you are able to provide and may keep your teacher from becoming hung up on deficiencies elsewhere in the essay. [5] X Research source

Expert Q&A

• Some information is better than none at all. Even partial essay credit adds to your overall exam score, so always do what you can. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Learn from your past mistakes. What could you have done differently? Looking over the methods presented above, which ideas would have been most helpful for you? Tailor your approach toward future essay exams accordingly. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Resist the urge to resort to plagiarism, even when you're confronted with a completely unfamiliar essay topic. Plagiarism is any attempt to pass off another's work as your own, whether copying from a classmate, cutting and pasting off a Web site, copying from a book, or using an online essay mill. If you bomb an essay, you may fail the exam. If you're caught plagiarizing, however, you'll not only fail the exam but face additional disciplinary consequences. School policies differ, but common consequences include a zero on the entire exam and a disciplinary note in your academic file. Repeat offenses can bring more serious punishment. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0

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Discussion on Simple Facts of Life

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Published: Aug 16, 2019

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MIT Technology Review

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How I learned to stop worrying and love fake meat

Let’s stop inventing reasons to reject cultured meat and other protein alternatives that could dramatically cut climate emissions.

• James Temple archive page

Fixing our collective meat problem is one of the trickiest challenges in addressing climate change—and for some baffling reason, the world seems intent on making the task even harder.

The latest example occurred last week, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a law banning the production, sale, and transportation of cultured meat across the Sunshine State. 

“Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” DeSantis seethed in a statement.

Alternative meat and animal products—be they lab-grown or plant-based—offer a far more sustainable path to mass-producing protein than raising animals for milk or slaughter. Yet again and again, politicians, dietitians, and even the press continue to devise ways to portray these products as controversial, suspect, or substandard. No matter how good they taste or how much they might reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, there’s always some new obstacle standing in the way—in this case, Governor DeSantis, wearing a not-at-all-uncomfortable smile.  

The new law clearly has nothing to do with the creeping threat of authoritarianism (though for more on that, do check out his administration’s crusade to ban books about gay penguins). First and foremost it is an act of political pandering, a way to coddle Florida’s sizable cattle industry, which he goes on to mention in the statement.

Cultured meat is seen as a threat to the livestock industry because animals are only minimally involved in its production. Companies grow cells originally extracted from animals in a nutrient broth and then form them into nuggets, patties or fillets. The US Department of Agriculture has already given its blessing to two companies , Upside Foods and Good Meat, to begin selling cultured chicken products to consumers. Israel recently became the first nation to sign off on a beef version.

It’s still hard to say if cultured meat will get good enough and cheap enough anytime soon to meaningfully reduce our dependence on cattle, chicken, pigs, sheep, goats, and other animals for our protein and our dining pleasure. And it’s sure to take years before we can produce it in ways that generate significantly lower emissions than standard livestock practices today.

But there are high hopes it could become a cleaner and less cruel way of producing meat, since it wouldn’t require all the land, food, and energy needed to raise, feed, slaughter, and process animals today. One study found that cultured meat could reduce emissions per kilogram of meat 92% by 2030, even if cattle farming also achieves substantial improvements.

Those sorts of gains are essential if we hope to ease the rising dangers of climate change, because meat, dairy, and cheese production are huge contributors to greenhouse-gas emissions.

DeSantis and politicians in other states that may follow suit, including Alabama and Tennessee, are raising the specter of mandated bug-eating and global-elite string-pulling to turn cultured meat into a cultural issue, and kill the industry in its infancy. 

But, again, it’s always something. I’ve heard a host of other arguments across the political spectrum directed against various alternative protein products, which also include plant-based burgers, cheeses, and milks, or even cricket-derived powders and meal bars . Apparently these meat and dairy alternatives shouldn’t be highly processed, mass-produced, or genetically engineered, nor should they ever be as unhealthy as their animal-based counterparts. 

In effect, we are setting up tests that almost no products can pass, when really all we should ask of alternative proteins is that they be safe, taste good, and cut climate pollution.

The meat of the matter

Here’s the problem. 

Livestock production generates more than 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide, making up 14.5% of the world’s overall climate emissions, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Beef, milk, and cheese production are, by far, the biggest problems, representing some 65% of the sector’s emissions. We burn down carbon-dense forests to provide cows with lots of grazing land; then they return the favor by burping up staggering amounts of methane, one of the most powerful greenhouse gases. Florida’s cattle population alone, for example, could generate about 180 million pounds of methane every year, as calculated from standard per-animal emissions . 

In an earlier paper , the World Resources Institute noted that in the average US diet, beef contributed 3% of the calories but almost half the climate pollution from food production. (If you want to take a single action that could meaningfully ease your climate footprint, read that sentence again.)

The added challenge is that the world’s population is both growing and becoming richer, which means more people can afford more meat. 

There are ways to address some of the emissions from livestock production without cultured meat or plant-based burgers, including developing supplements that reduce methane burps and encouraging consumers to simply reduce meat consumption. Even just switching from beef to chicken can make a huge difference .

Let’s clear up one matter, though. I can’t imagine a politician in my lifetime, in the US or most of the world, proposing a ban on meat and expecting to survive the next election. So no, dear reader. No one’s coming for your rib eye. If there’s any attack on personal freedoms and economic liberty here, DeSantis is the one waging it by not allowing Floridians to choose for themselves what they want to eat.

But there is a real problem in need of solving. And the grand hope of companies like Beyond Meat, Upside Foods, Miyoko’s Creamery, and dozens of others is that we can develop meat, milk, and cheese alternatives that are akin to EVs: that is to say, products that are good enough to solve the problem without demanding any sacrifice from consumers or requiring government mandates. (Though subsidies always help.)

The good news is the world is making some real progress in developing substitutes that increasingly taste like, look like, and have (with apologies for the snooty term) the “mouthfeel” of the traditional versions, whether they’ve been developed from animal cells or plants. If they catch on and scale up, it could make a real dent in emissions—with the bonus of reducing animal suffering, environmental damage, and the spillover of animal disease into the human population.

The bad news is we can’t seem to take the wins when we get them. 

The blue cheese blues

For lunch last Friday, I swung by the Butcher’s Son Vegan Delicatessen & Bakery in Berkeley, California, and ordered a vegan Buffalo chicken sandwich with a blue cheese on the side that was developed by Climax Foods , also based in Berkeley.

Late last month, it emerged that the product had, improbably, clinched the cheese category in the blind taste tests of the prestigious Good Food awards, as the Washington Post revealed .

Let’s pause here to note that this is a stunning victory for vegan cheeses, a clear sign that we can use plants to produce top-notch artisanal products, indistinguishable even to the refined palates of expert gourmands. If a product is every bit as tasty and satisfying as the original but can be produced without milking methane-burping animals, that’s a big climate win.

But sadly, that’s not where the story ended.

After word leaked out that the blue cheese was a finalist, if not the winner, the Good Food Foundation seems to have added a rule that didn’t exist when the competition began but which disqualified Climax Blue , the Post reported.

I have no special insights into what unfolded behind the scenes. But it reads at least a little as if the competition concocted an excuse to dethrone a vegan cheese that had bested its animal counterparts and left traditionalists aghast. 

That victory might have done wonders to help promote acceptance of the Climax product, if not the wider category. But now the story is the controversy. And that’s a shame. Because the cheese is actually pretty good. 

I’m no professional foodie, but I do have a lifetime of expertise born of stubbornly refusing to eat any salad dressing other than blue cheese. In my own taste test, I can report it looked and tasted like mild blue cheese, which is all it needs to do.

A beef about burgers

Banning a product or changing a cheese contest’s rules after determining the winner are both bad enough. But the reaction to alternative proteins that has left me most befuddled is the media narrative that formed around the latest generation of plant-based burgers soon after they started getting popular a few years ago. Story after story would note, in the tone of a bold truth-teller revealing something new each time: Did you know these newfangled plant-based burgers aren’t actually all that much healthier than the meat variety? 

To which I would scream at my monitor: THAT WAS NEVER THE POINT!

The world has long been perfectly capable of producing plant-based burgers that are better for you, but the problem is that they tend to taste like plants. The actual innovation with the more recent options like Beyond Burger or Impossible Burger is that they look and taste like the real thing but can be produced with a dramatically smaller climate footprint .

That’s a big enough win in itself. 

If I were a health reporter, maybe I’d focus on these issues too. And if health is your personal priority, you should shop for a different plant-based patty (or I might recommend a nice salad, preferably with blue cheese dressing).

But speaking as a climate reporter, expecting a product to ease global warming, taste like a juicy burger, and also be low in salt, fat, and calories is absurd. You may as well ask a startup to conduct sorcery.

More important, making a plant-based burger healthier for us may also come at the cost of having it taste like a burger. Which would make it that much harder to win over consumers beyond the niche of vegetarians and thus have any meaningful impact on emissions. WHICH IS THE POINT!

It’s incredibly difficult to convince consumers to switch brands and change behaviors, even for a product as basic as toothpaste or toilet paper. Food is trickier still, because it’s deeply entwined with local culture, family traditions, festivals and celebrations. Whether we find a novel food product to be yummy or yucky is subjective and highly subject to suggestion. 

And so I’m ending with a plea. Let’s grant ourselves the best shot possible at solving one of the hardest, most urgent problems before us. Treat bans and political posturing with the ridicule they deserve. Reject the argument that any single product must, or can, solve all the problems related to food, health, and the environment.

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Student’s Essay Leads Her to Global Symposium in Switzerland

Batten graduating MPP student Khalila Karefa-Kargbo recently returned from the St. Gallen Symposium in Switzerland where she was one of only 100 students from around the world qualifying through its Global Essay Competition to participate as a Leader of Tomorrow .

Now in its 53rd iteration, the symposium is held annually at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, outside Zurich, as a forum for international and intergenerational dialogue on economic, political and social issues. The theme for this year’s symposium focused on scarcity. The essay competition in which Karefa-Kargbo competed asked participants to address the question: “Striving for more or thriving with less – What pressing scarcity do you see, and how do you suggest to tackle it?”

In a bit of a departure from traditional topics, Karefa-Kargbo focused on what she sees as a rising scarcity of “recognizing the inherent humanity that binds us together.”

“I had a few ideas about more tangible topics, but around January as I was reading the news and talking to people, this idea came to me and I felt like I could put something really cool together by going more abstract,” said Karefa-Kargbo this week after her return from overseas.

As to the experience of spending the week attending panels and taking part in one-on-one discussions with global leaders and fellow “leaders of tomorrow,” Karefa-Kargbo said her greatest takeaway is that one person really can make a big difference.

“Many people I met really trusted themselves to do scary and hard things, like moving to a strange country for school or starting their own business, even when they were not sure if it would pay off. It was incredible meeting others who were struggling, like me, to envision the future, but were confident it would all work out. It was great getting to know others like me and realizing that I can be the author of my own life.”

Two of Karefa-Kargbo’s favorite speakers from the week included former Malian presidential candidate Niankoro Yéah Samaké and Lindiwe Mazibuko, public leader, writer, academic fellow and CEO of Futurelect .  She was also inspired by the symposium’s focus on intergenerational leadership and the valuable wisdom she gained through collectively looking at how the world currently looks and the vision of how it could look.

"I was struck by the fact that the total number of elected officials and parliamentarians in the whole world is only about 46,000. Of this number less than 30% are women and less than 3 percent are under 30. This showcases how our elected leaders don’t truly represent the world order, but also the capacity for change and the potential for representation to make a change."

After final exercises, Karefa-Kargbo is headed to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to spend time with family before returning to McLean, Virginia, to work for Capital One. For the long-term, she intends to stay connected with Leaders of Tomorrow.

Karefa-Kargbo’s essay can be viewed here .

Stay Up To Date with the Latest Batten News and Events

To the moms all alone on Mother's Day, I see you and you are enough.

Most of my 14 years of motherhood felt like Mother’s Day was spent alone, including some of the years I was married.

Every May, when the second Sunday in May comes around, I think of the women who are where I was in multiple places of my mother journey: scared, alone and envious of the moms with a supportive partner at home.

This year, I've written a letter to every single mother struggling to celebrate herself today, who feels inferior to the other families she sees.

When the flowers don't come, when there are no "thank yous," when there is no one posting our picture, I want us to remember where our gift truly lies.

To our kids, this is the life and this love is enough. So, we can raise our glass.

Dear, single mom on Mother's Day

Maybe you woke up a little early today to give yourself the gift of solitude. There is no one to tag in at the end of the day. It’s exhausting.

You might get a few minutes before feelings of inadequacy come flooding in. You are reminded of all the things you can't do, never seeing all that you have. You wonder how a single-parent home is affecting your kids, who will be down in a matter of moments.

Then, the day will begin just like any other day.

Maybe there were once flowers waiting for you. Maybe there were never flowers at all. You may find crumpled up Mother's Day art in your kids' backpack today, but they may not recognize that there should be anything to celebrate.

You will prepare every meal, answer every request, create every moment, wipe every tear and calm every fear. But your requests will be left unmet, your moments 60 seconds at a time, your tears wiped by your own hand and your fears, ever ponding.

Yet every day you show up and you do it, maybe with a little envy for the two-parent home down the street, because it's hard to be a full-time parent and a full-time provider. You can't possibly do either perfectly well.

If you're feeling discouraged today, seeing only your lack, look inside.

You are the creator of all the good that you see.

Tonight, when you tuck in your kids, witness your gifts.

There may have not been anything on the table this morning, you may have cleaned up the house and cooked every meal, but there is peace in the room. There is joy on their faces. There is a tangible love providing security like the blanket wrapped around their feet.

Your family is not inferior.

You are enough. Your kids know it, and some day someone else will too.

But it has to start with you.

My son was feeling left behind: What kids with autistic siblings want you to know.

Your married friend may be struggling, too

Single mothers should know that married mothers aren't necessarily better supported. Sure, they may have flowers, but just like you, they have learned how to water themselves.

There were Mother's Days when all I felt was hollow. There were flowers, photos, dinners and lots of hugs, but it obscured a darker reality. Presence doesn't equal support. Lonely doesn't equal alone.

Knowing my "enoughness" led me back into singleness and back to the mother I've always been. So, cherish where you are and never trade your peace for support. Recognize yourself and celebrate this day.

Last year, I bought myself a bouquet of wildflowers, and this year, I bought myself a few.

My gift is this home I've created and the peace I feel at night. Sure, it may be a little messy, but it is far from inferior.

When I release my kids into the world, they will take this love that they've been given and begin planting it in places of their own, definitely better than if they had grown up in our broken two-parent home.

Yet I know that you, like me, may have a desire to share your life with someone. Just make sure that they are a seer too, a seer of your worth and your "enoughness," on more than just this special day.

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Paul Krugman

Meat, Freedom and Ron DeSantis

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

It’s possible to grow meat in a lab — to cultivate animal cells without an animal and turn them into something people can eat. However, that process is difficult and expensive. And at the moment, lab-grown meat isn’t commercially available and probably won’t be for a long time, if ever.

Still, if and when lab-grown meat, also sometimes referred to as cultured meat, makes it onto the market at less than outrageous prices, a significant number of people will probably buy it. Some will do so on ethical grounds, preferring not to have animals killed to grace their dinner plates. Others will do so in the belief that growing meat in labs does less damage to the environment than devoting acres and acres to animal grazing. And it’s at least possible that lab-grown meat will eventually be cheaper than meat from animals.

And if some people choose to consume lab-grown meat, why not? It’s a free country, right?

Not if the likes of Ron DeSantis have their way. Recently DeSantis, back to work as governor of Florida after the spectacular failure of his presidential campaign, signed a bill banning the production or sale of lab-grown meat in his state. Similar legislation is under consideration in several states.

On one level, this could be seen as a trivial story — a crackdown on an industry that doesn’t even exist yet. But the new Florida law is a perfect illustration of how crony capitalism, culture war, conspiracy theorizing and rejection of science have been merged — ground together, you might say — in a way that largely defines American conservatism today.

First, it puts the lie to any claim that the right is the side standing firm for limited government; government doesn’t get much more intrusive than having politicians tell you what you can and can’t eat.

Who’s behind the ban? Remember when a group of Texas ranchers sued Oprah Winfrey over a show warning about the risks of mad cow disease that they said cost them millions? It’s hard to imagine that today, meat industry fears about losing market share to lab meat aren’t playing a role. And such concerns about market share aren’t necessarily silly. Look at the rise of plant-based milk, which in 2020 accounted for 15 percent of the milk market.

But politicians who claim to worship free markets should be vehemently opposed to any attempt to suppress innovation when it might hurt established interests, which is what this amounts to. Why aren’t they?

Part of the answer, of course, is that many never truly believed in freedom — only freedom for some. Beyond that, however, meat consumption, like almost everything else, has been caught up in the culture wars.

You saw this coming years ago if you were following the most trenchant source of social observation in our times: episodes of “The Simpsons.” Way back in 1995, Lisa Simpson, having decided to become a vegetarian, was forced to sit through a classroom video titled “Meat and You: Partners in Freedom.”

Sure enough, eating or claiming to eat lots of meat has become a badge of allegiance on the right, especially among the MAGA crowd. Donald Trump Jr. once tweeted , “I’m pretty sure I ate 4 pounds of red meat yesterday,” improbable for someone who isn’t a sumo wrestler .

But even if you’re someone who insists that “real” Americans eat lots of meat, why must the meat be supplied by killing animals if an alternative becomes available? Opponents of lab-grown meat like to talk about the industrial look of cultured meat production, but what do they imagine many modern meat processing facilities look like?

And then there are the conspiracy theories. It’s a fact that getting protein from beef involves a lot more greenhouse gas emissions than getting it from other sources. It’s also a fact that under President Biden, the United States has finally been taking serious action on climate change. But in the fever swamp of the right, which these days is a pretty sizable bloc of Republican commentators and politicians, opposition to Biden’s eminently reasonable climate policy has resulted in an assortment of wild claims, including one that Biden was going to put limits on Americans’ burger consumption.

And have you heard about how global elites are going to force us to start eating insects ?

By the way, I’m not a vegetarian and have no intention of eating bugs. But I respect other people’s choices — which right-wing politicians increasingly don’t.

And aside from demonstrating that many right-wingers are actually enemies, not defenders, of freedom, the lab-meat story is yet another indicator of the decline of American conservatism as a principled movement.

Look, I’m not an admirer of Ronald Reagan, who I believe did a lot of harm as president, but at least Reaganism was about real policy issues like tax rates and regulation. The people who cast themselves as Reagan’s successors, however, seem uninterested in serious policymaking. For a lot of them, politics is a form of live-action role play. It’s not even about “owning” those they term the elites; it’s about perpetually jousting with a fantasy version of what elites supposedly want.

But while they may not care about reality, reality cares about them. Their deep unseriousness can do — and is already doing — a great deal of damage to America and the world.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @ PaulKrugman