Had a class where the cutoff was 17 years IIRC so it’s entirely possible that sources from the 90s aren’t accepted in their class.
Yeah, I looked at this and wondered what was so surprising about the text; I’m the same age as this incredible paper and I’ve regularly had professors that wouldn’t accept something that old. To be honest, what I landed on is OOP is also a ‘94 baby who’s teaching their first class.
Calling 90’s “late 1900s” is mega weird for anyone who isn’t really young
Being born in 2000 would make you 23 years old today… which means you could feasibly have graduated college by then. So maybe less weird than you think.
I’ve never heard of this and… why? You shouldn’t cite your sources if they’re too old? What? I get that you should try to find more recent sources for certain things, so the age of a source can be relevant if we’ve learned more in the meantime… but having a cut off is stupid. Evaluate the sources and if it’s outdated information criticize that.
It’s not that you shouldn’t cite them, it’s that you shouldn’t use them as a source at all because they’re considered unreliable for the subject you’re working on.
Depending on the point you’ve reached in your learning career, you might not be equipped to detect and criticize an outdated source.
Some fields also evolve so quickly that what was considered a fact just 20 years ago might have been superseded 5 years later and again 5 years later so the only info that’s considered reliable is about 10 years old and everything else must be ignored unless you’re working on a review of the evolution of knowledge in that field.
And what do you do if you want to reference how fast the field moves, or why certain methods are not done anymore, but where found ‘good enough’ back in the days. You would still have to use the old source and cite them…
An absolute cut off doesn’t teach you anything…a guidance, how to identify good sources from bad or outdated ones would be much better
It depends on the field.
In an intro to physics course, I’ve cited the Principia before without issues.
I’ve also cited the Cyropaedia in a philosophy course.
I got a significant penalty for citing a 2013 article for a software design paper.
Reminds me of someone asking how to cite the Bible. Whether or not you can just go “John 3:16” or “His Majesty King James VI of Scotland and I of England, Ireland and France - 1611 ‘Authorised Version’ Translation of The Bible - John Chapter Three Section 16”
Although if you were directly quoting it, I think stating the translation would be more important than if you were referencing it.
The Bible, The Lord; 0 AD
Be bold, dare your teacher to dock you points for it.
I don’t believe we have a single book in the bible written in 0 CE. I’m docking points for incorrectly citing the publication date on the book you reference. /s
Translations are important, and with the Cyropaedia I did need to use the translation. For the Principia, because I wanted to flex, I provided my own translation. I could have cited the text book, but that would be less fun.
What do you do to write for physics, philosophy and software design papers?
Not OP, but attend undergrad. When I was in undergrad I specialized in chemistry, but I still needed to take breadth requirement courses in humanities and social sciences. So I did papers in chemistry, physics, statistics, political theory, ancient Greek history, and English throughout my undergrad.
I’m working on my third bachelor’s degree.
A degree in the classics pays absolute shit, and math teachers are still paid shit, albeit slightly more than Starbucks. It turns out I hate children more than anticipated.
Okay, that is painful.
However, I think I’m going to start telling people that I was born in the mid-1900s.
What’s the cutoff? My instinct is 1975 but then that gives a 50 year period for ‘mid’ and only 25 each for ‘early’/‘late’. So is the cutoff between mid and late 1966?
I feel like early, middle and late aren’t continuous, and there’s gaps.
I don’t think 1932 is early or mid 1900s.
Kinda like how young, old and middle aged don’t have an immediate cutoff. A 31 year old is neither young nor middle aged, and a 54 year old is past middle aged, but they aren’t old yet.
Funny how you see gaps. I feel they overlap. For decades Like 31-34 is early 30s, 33-37 is mid, and 38 39 are late. (Late being a smaller interval because everyone likes it that way.)
I think the about the same proportions work for centuries.
But I definitely see gaps in being young, old, and middle-age.
Hmm, I normally say (since I turned 30) that 0-29 are young, 30-59 is middle aged, and 60-89 is old (90+ is super old/ancient 😆).
Automatic F for apostrophe abuse
I don’t have a lot of pet peeves when it comes to grammar, but pluralizing dates and acronyms with apostrophes is definitely one of them.
We started Chronicles of Narnia at bedtime last night. The first line is that it takes place when the reader’s grandfather was a child. I flipped to the copyright page and did some math. Found myself having to do a lot of prefacing with the little one. “Okay, so there used to be like no electricity at all anywhere ever. Not that long ago. Even though everything you see is electronic…”
My daughter likes the old Looney Tunes cartoons. But there are a lot of things mentioned or shown in those cartoons that don’t exist anymore and it’s been fun having to explain what certain things are. There was a one cartoon where my daughter asked why there would be a knob on a car’s dash that said “choke”. I have a very old car that has a carburetor (long story) so thankfully I could show her, but even that old bucket of bolts has an automatic choke.
Another cartoon had a sort of proto-Elmer Fudd that was taking pictures of wildlife, and I had to explain what all this equipment was he had with him. He had a camera that used a squeeze bulb for the shutter and had a hood to cover the operator.
For me, I think it’s interesting that in the original Star Trek, there were no screens with text on them. There were screens, but they showed video or images instead of text. That’s because back when ol’ Bill Shatner was on the camera putting commas in places they don’t belong, there was no such thing as a computer screen with text. You entered data into a computer with a teletype, and it gave your answers back on a printout.
