In composition studies, most published discussions of student plagiarism proceed from the assumption that plagiarism occurs as a result of one of two possible motivations: an absence of ethics or an ignorance of citation conventions. Some students don't appreciate academic textual values and therefore deliberately submit work that is not their own; others don't understand academic citation conventions and therefore plagiarize inadvertently. Both of these are negative interpretations, postulating an absence-of either ethics or knowledge-in the plagiarist. A few recent studies, though, identify positive motivations for patchwriting, a textual strategy that has traditionally been classified as plagiarism. Patchwriting involves "copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes" (Howard 233). Describing the textual strategies of Tanya, a student who in traditional pedagogy might be labeled "remedial," Glynda Hull and Mike Rose celebrate her patchwriting as a valuable stage toward becoming an authoritative academic writer: "we depend upon membership in a community for our language, our voices, our very arguments. We forget that we, like Tanya, continually appropriate each other's language to establish group membership, to grow, and to define ourselves in new ways, and that such appropriation is a fundamental part of language use, even as the appearance of our texts belies it" (152).These and other studies describe patchwriting as a pedagogical opportunity, not a juridical problem. They recommend that teachers treat it as an important transitional strategy in the student's progress toward membership in a discourse community. To treat it negatively, as a "problem" to be "cured" or punished, would Rebecca Moore Howard, an assistant professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Writing at Colgate University, teaches composition, rhetoric, and linguistics. She is at work on Standing in the Shadow of Giants, an extended reflection on the applications of authorship theory to composition pedagogy, to be published by Ablex. With Sandra Jamieson, she is author of The Bedford Guide to Teaching Writing in the Disciplines: An Instructor's Desk Reference (1995). COLLEGE ENGLISH, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 7, NOVEMBER 1995 PLAGIARISMS, AUTHORSHIPS, AND THE ACADEMIC DEATH PENALTYbe to undermine its positive intellectual value, thereby obstructing rather than facilitating the learning process. If teachers are to adopt a positive approach, they must be able to do so within the strictures of their universities' regulations on plagiarism. Those regulations, however, typically describe plagiarism in all its forms as a problem for adjudication, and this generalization leaves teachers little space for pedagogical alternatives. In typical college regulations on plagiarism (which are often grouped under headings wherein plagiarism serves as either a synonym for or a subset of "academic dishonesty"), all forms of plagiarism, including patchwriting, are located o...

Asthma is not a single disease, but an umbrella term for a number of distinct diseases, each of which are caused by a distinct underlying pathophysiological mechanism. These discrete disease entities are often labelled as ‘asthma endotypes’. The discovery of different asthma subtypes has moved from subjective approaches in which putative phenotypes are assigned by experts to data-driven ones which incorporate machine learning. This review focuses on the methodological developments of one such machine learning technique—latent class analysis—and how it has contributed to distinguishing asthma and wheezing subtypes in childhood. It also gives a clinical perspective, presenting the findings of studies from the past 5 years that used this approach. The identification of true asthma endotypes may be a crucial step towards understanding their distinct pathophysiological mechanisms, which could ultimately lead to more precise prevention strategies, identification of novel therapeutic targets and the development of effective personalized therapies.

We have previously reported that loss-of-function mutations in the cathepsin C gene (CTSC) result in Papillon-Lefèvre syndrome, an autosomal recessive condition characterized by palmoplantar keratosis and early-onset, severe periodontitis. Others have also reported CTSC mutations in patients with severe prepubertal periodontitis, but without any skin manifestations. The possible role of CTSC variants in more common types of non-mendelian, early-onset, severe periodontitis ("aggressive periodontitis") has not been investigated. In this study, we have investigated the role of CTSC in all three conditions. We demonstrate that PLS is genetically homogeneous and the mutation spectrum that includes three novel mutations (c.386T>A/p.V129E, c.935A>G/p.Q312R, and c.1235A>G/p.Y412C) in 21 PLS families (including eight from our previous study) provides an insight into structure-function relationships of CTSC. Our data also suggest that a complete loss-of-function appears to be necessary for the manifestation of the phenotype, making it unlikely that weak CTSC mutations are a cause of aggressive periodontitis. This was confirmed by analyses of the CTSC activity in 30 subjects with aggressive periodontitis and age-sex matched controls, which demonstrated that there was no significant difference between these two groups (1,728.7 +/- SD 576.8 micro moles/mg/min vs. 1,678.7 +/- SD 527.2 micro moles/mg/min, respectively, p = 0.73). CTSC mutations were detected in only one of two families with prepubertal periodontitis; these did not form a separate functional class with respect to those observed in classical PLS. The affected individuals in the other prepubertal periodontitis family not only lacked CTSC mutations, but in addition did not share the haplotypes at the CTSC locus. These data suggest that prepubertal periodontitis is a genetically heterogeneous disease that, in some families, just represents a partially penetrant PLS.

Instead of focusing on students’ citation of sources, educators should attend to the more fundamental question of how well students understand their sources and whether they are able to write about them without appropriating language from the source. Of the 18 student research texts we studied, none included summary of a source, raising questions about the students’ critical reading practices. Instead of summary, which is highly valued in academic writing and is promoted in composition textbooks, the students paraphrased, copied from, or patchwrote from individual sentences in their sources. Writing from individual sentences places writers in constant jeopardy of working too closely with the language of the source and thus inadvertently plagiarizing; and it also does not compel the writer to understand the source.