Saturday, March 7, 2009

Ibid an Idiot!

If you are going to comment on other people’s blunders and stupidity you had better be able to dish it out to yourself……….

I have been working on a behavior model based on the idea of what I call "entrenched behavior". It sounded like a great term to explain my point, but, like I have found out before, it may have already been used. So I performed a Google Search and there it was.

Damn!

Well out of curiosity I wanted to see how they used it. The web page I went to was a PDF that looked at teaching a science curriculum. In the paper it used the term “entrenched behavior” and cited a “Chinn and Brewer” and then further on down, someone named “Ibid.”

I could find the reference in the back to Chinn and Brewer’s paper called “The role of anomalous data in knowledge acquisition A theoretical framework and implications for Science Instruction” (an interesting read by the way) but I could not find the name of the paper written by this person named “Ibid.”

So I Googled “Ibid entrenched behavior” and looked at the documents, of which all cited this guy named “Ibid” but, for whatever reason, failed to put the name of his or her article in the references.

Strange I thought.

I then went to my University’s library web page and searched for the same parameters. Nothing for any author by the name of “Ibid.”

Weird.

Well maybe there is a Wikipedia entry for the guy and they will list the papers written. So I started to type in Google Search “Ibid” when I noticed it gave me a search parameter of “Ibid definition.” I’ll try that and see where it takes me.....

Ibid: used in referring again to the book, page, etc. cited just before.

Oh..........

Feeling really stupid and wanting company in my stupid boat, I went to my wife and asked her if she knew what “Ibid” meant.

She gave me that look…... and I knew.

……..first comes the knife! “Yes” she replied

……and then the salt! “I learned that in High School”

She just stared at me with that look of “God you are an idiot”

Damn! I hate it when she is right!

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