Running this kind of thing near a university campus is just asking for trouble.

I wonder if Mr. Jones might consider advertising Ottawa U’s classics department by showing students poring over tomes of the classic Lorem ipsum. Or better yet, Pig Latin.

Please look up the definition of plagiarize in any good dictionary. The web edition of Merriam-Webser states the following:

PLAGIARIZE
transitive verb: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own : use (another’s production) without crediting the source.

Note that to plagiarize is to appropriate another’s words or ideas and pass them off as your own. Breslow is not guilty of this. He is recycling his own ideas, in this case republishing his original ideas for a “Perspective”, a type of review. He is guilty of laziness, certainly, and of recycling published material, but this is not plagiarism. And “self-plagiarism”–by definition this is an oxymoron. Publishers may wish to invent a new word for the reuse of one’s own work; but, let’s let plagiarism mean what it has always meant.

Chemjobber, I’m the regular commenter and it’s very hard to get farmers to adopt this technology. They are not willing to change something that works for a new technology, even though the old technology is bad. It’s very frustrating… I know all about it actually. I hope it’s been changing lately, but with pesticide spraying being business as usual as far as I can tell from just reading news sometimes, I doubt it.

Paul, I’ll try to find an example for you, but I’m not sure I can since it’s been a long time that I’ve left the field. Hell, maybe it’s not even true and I just said it in the heat of the moment! I’ll need to call the old boss. I know a big company bought some of his patents and I’m not sure they went anywhere. This company also sells pesticides. But definitely, price cuts and lobbying of crop/wheat bords does happen when we try to compete. There was one time where we were wildly succesful. Stopping all pesticide use in a huge Middle Eastern country on this one crop and substituting it all by a few kilos of our stuff. Complete mating disruption and population collapse after one generation. But these are the kinds of customers who are known to reverse-engineer your blends and might collapse into a civil war or have trade sanctions declared on them. You know… not the ideal. North America has been frustrating. Plus, there is a lack of proper, good research into pheromones of the kind that big chemical company money can provide. Often the blends sold for an insect lack effect because they are missing a minute component that people didn’t bother isolating because they were doing a hack job and never noticed it. You need proper biologists who know what they are doing to isolate these things and sometimes it takes a few thousand dead insects to extract a few nanograms of a very active component. Plus eventually in 30 years the insect is going to evolve to have 5% more of this minor stereoisomer of the main component to have the proper blend (for example).

It was also frustrating to go up against a government scientist who had an inferior product but was supported by his government while we were outsiders. Especially when someone embellishes their results and says their traps capture way more insects than they do. Grrr…. then when a commercial run doesn’t work, they go back to the pesticide without giving us a chance.