The 2025 commencement speaker at Smith College admitted plagiarizing her speech and then relinquished her honorary degree

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smith College held its 147th commencement on May 18, 2025. An article by Darin Zullo at Boston.com on May 20, 2025 about it is titled Smith College commencement speaker returns honorary degree after plagiarizing her speech. It linked to a letter by Sarah Willie-LeBreton at Presidential Letters: Follow-Up to Commencement 2025 on May 20, 2025 which stated that:

 

“I must share with you, however, that it has come to our attention that one of our honorary degree recipients—musician Evelyn M. Harris—borrowed much of her speech to graduates and their families from the commencement speeches of others without the attribution typical of and central to the ideals of academic integrity. 

In conversations about this after the event, Ms. Harris was forthcoming about her choices while also acknowledging that she sought to infuse the words of others with her own emotional valence. With appreciation for the requirement of academic integrity so central to the values of Smith, Ms. Harris has chosen to relinquish her honorary degree.” 

This event also was discussed by Jonathan Bailey at Plagiarism Today on May 21, 2025 in another article titled Graduation Speaker Plagiarizes Speech, Returns Honorary Degree. He has a section about other incidents titled The Long, Sad History of Commencement Plagiarism.

 

 My cartoon used a scroll adapted from OpenClipArt.  

 

 

Does pushing that button really do anything?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an interesting article by Justin Pot at Popular Science on May 24, 2026 titled 3 buttons that don’t actually do anything. Pushbuttons that don’t do anything immediately would have been a better title. His examples are pedestrian crosswalk buttons, elevator door close buttons, and office wall thermostat buttons.

 

A pedestrian crosswalk button at an intersection, like the one shown above, might activate the cycle for a walk light. But during peak traffic hours it might not do anything, because the crosswalk light cycle is being automatically included.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elevator door close buttons don’t act immediately - because the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) calls for a time delay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And changing the temperature setting on an office wall thermostat may not have any effect at all. There is a Wikipedia article titled placebo buttons about that topic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But I have never seen a nonfunctional button marked like the one shown above.

 

The thermostat and elevator buttons were modified from images at Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Do Disfluencies Increase With Age? Evidence From a Sequential Corpus Study

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a detailed article by Eleonora J. Beier, Suphasiree Chantavarin, and Fernanda Ferreira at Psychology and Aging on March 27, 2026 (pages 203 to 218) titled Do Disfluencies Increase With Age? Evidence From a Sequential Corpus Study of Disfluencies. In their fifth paragraph they explain what they focused on:

 

“Disfluencies have been identified at different levels of production, such as prosodic (e.g., improper stress), lexical (e.g., repetitions), and syntactic (e.g., phrase revisions). Other types of disfluencies include filled pauses (e.g., um, uh), lexical fillers (e.g., well, you know), and silent pauses. In addition, fluency can be assessed by measuring a person’s speech rate, or the speed with which they talk. In this study, we focus on filled pauses (um, uh), repeats (e.g., went to the the store), and repairs (e.g., I think- I believe that …), as well as speech rate.”

 

The abstract says:

 

“Speech disfluencies such as repeated words and pauses provide information about the cognitive systems underlying speech production. Understanding whether older age leads to changes in speech fluency can therefore help characterize the robustness of these systems over the life span. Older adults have been assumed to be more disfluent, but current evidence is minimal and contradictory. Particularly noteworthy is the lack of longitudinal data that would help establish whether a given individual’s disfluency rates change over time. This study examines changes in disfluency rates through a sequential design with a longitudinal component, involving the analysis of 325 recorded interviews conducted with 91 individuals at several points in their lives, spanning the ages of 20–94 years. We analyzed the speech of these individuals to assess the extent to which they became more disfluent in later interviews. We found that, with older age, individuals spoke more slowly and repeated more words. However, older age was not associated with other types of disfluencies such as filled pauses (uh’s and um’s) and repairs.

 

Overall, this study provides evidence that, although age itself is not a strong predictor of disfluencies, age leads to changes in other speech characteristics among some individuals (i.e., speech rate and indicators of lexical and syntactic complexity), and those changes in turn predict the production of disfluencies over the life span. These findings help resolve previous inconsistencies in this literature and set the stage for future experimental work on the cognitive mechanisms underlying changes in speech production in healthy aging.”

 

And their conclusions are:

 

“We have presented results from a corpus study of conversational speech to quantify age-related changes in speech fluency sequentially rather than cross-sectionally. We found that older adults spoke more slowly, consistent with previous reports (Castro & James 2014; Gordon et al., 2019; Horton et al., 2010)

and we observed that they produced more repeated words. At the same time, older adults did not produce more repairs or filled pauses, nor was there an effect of age on all three types of disfluencies combined.

 

Our results show that whether a relationship between age and disfluency is observed depends on the type of disfluency measured, which in turn helps explain previous inconsistent findings. Overall, we suggest that while age is not a strong predictor of fluency measures other than speech rate, there are large individual differences in how other speech characteristics change with age, even in relatively high-functioning older adults, reflecting the trade-off between slower processing speed (Salthouse, 1996; Salthouse & Meinz, 1995) and accumulated vocabulary and language experience (Ramscar et al., 2014). Thus, some individuals slow down their speech as they age—a change associated with higher lexical diversity and the use of less frequent words but also more filled pauses—whereas others do not.

 

Our findings challenge the prevalent assumption that older age leads to more disfluent speech by showing that other changes in speech production (i.e., overall speech rate, word frequency, lexical diversity, and sentence length) are better predictors of disfluencies than age.”

 

The cartoon was modified from the center of an image at Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

An Incidental Comic by Grant Snider about not needing a bookmark

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes a comic strip can show you something very creative. On November 29, 2025 Grant Snider at Incidental Comics had one titled The Best Part with the following dialogue:

 

“The best part

  of reading two books at once:

  don’t need a bookmark.”

 

I illustrated it with an image. On October 11, 2024 I had blogged about A book on creativity from Grant Snider – profusely illustrated by comics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is almost the same geometry as used on couplings for railroad cars, as shown above.

 

A thoughtful book by Marcus Buckingham on how to design love into business

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a thoughtful 2026 book by Marcus Buckingham titled Design Love In: How to unleash the most powerful force in business. Google Books has a preview through page 38. Marcus discusses it in a ChangeThis manifesto on April 8, 2026 titled The Business Case for Love. DLI is his acronym for Design Love In.

 

On page 11 he says:

 

“For leaders to create reliable, repeatable changes in behavior, they must focus on the experience that creates the forces that create the behavior. This means leaders must understand their real job. Leadership is not fundamentally about clarifying expectations or motivating teams or cascading strategies. Leadership is the craft of shaping the experiences that shape human behavior. Leaders – the most effective ones – are experience-makers.

 

This insight reframes leadership entirely. Every moment between a leader and a colleague or a leader and a customer is an experience. The first day on the job is an experience. The weekly check-in is an experience. Sending an email is an experience. Presenting work is an experience. Being recognized, being challenged, being supported – or conversely, being dismissed or ignored – are all experience. What we measure on employee and customer surveys are felt experiences. What we label ‘culture’ is really just the aggregated experiences of the employees. When we say we want to build a strong culture, what we actually mean is that we want to design every touchpoint so carefully that each person has a similar experience. (And culture building is so hard precisely because there are so many touchpoints that have to be designed).

 

Always remember that because leaders create experiences in every moment, they are always shaping the internal forces that shape behavior. The question is not whether you, as a leader, are an experience-maker. You are. The question is whether you’re a skilled one.

 

So to help you build this skill, in part one of the book you’ll learn that love isn’t purely mysterious – that instead, love, when deconstructed, reveals itself to comprise five distinct feelings. These five feelings are sequential. You start with number one and end with number five. The leader with the DLI skill knows how to use this sequence as their blueprint for designing love in to [sic] anything - from onboarding to a team meeting to a customer interaction with a brand.

 

….In part two of the book, you’ll take these insights, this data and these perspectives, and put them into practice. Specifically, you’ll learn the playbook for how to design love in to [sic] the experiences of those you lead and of those you serve.”

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A table of mine, shown above, summarizes the five feelings of love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marcus has a series of nine graphics starting on page 17  (which I have summarized above in another table) which compare the Current mindSET with the corresponding DLI mindMOVE.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But, as shown above, his curious choice of graphics put the Current mindSET at the upper left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For Cartesian coordinates we would expect that to be at the lower left (Quadrant III) and the DLI mindMOVE at the upper right (Quadrant I), as is shown in my revision.

 

The falling in love cartoon came from OpenClipArt.

 

 

How long have the political insults of calling Democrats either Dumocrats or Dumbocrats been around?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Donald J. Trump is not very original. An article by Patrick Reilly in the New York Post on May 15, 2026 titled Trump delights in savage new nickname for Democrats while revealing who inspired it described his supposedly originating Dumocrat.

 

But an article by Alyssa Ray at The Wrap on May 26, 2026 said Jimmy Kimmel Mocks Trump for Thinking He Came Up with ‘Dumocrats’ Line: ‘It was on The Simpsons in 1994’ | Video. That 13-minute video at Jimmy Kimmel Live on May 26. 2026 is titled Trump Skips Don Jr’s Wedding, Attacks DUMOCRATS on Memorial Day & Claims His Physical Went PERFECTLY. A 1:08 YouTube video clip by Luke Baker on May 27, 2026 is titled The Simpsons: Dumbocrats. The episode was in Simpsons Season 6, titled Sideshow Bob Roberts, and first aired back on October 9, 1994.

 

Is that the first use for Dumocrats? No! I searched at Google Books and found it in a Fortune magazine (Volume 58, 1958 - page 154) that refers to a monthly magazine called the Milner Dumocrat.

 

What about the similar term Dumbocrats? It turned up in an article by William Tucker in the American Spectator for May 1998 on page 26 titled Byting the hand that feeds us which said:

“The group heading up this opposition are known as Democrats, but let's call them by a more appropriate name, Dumbocrats.”

But my Google Books searches found that Dumbocrat also showed up way earlier. It was in the United States Review (Volume 199, 1927) on page 24 and then in The New Republic on September 12, 1928 in page 93. That insult is almost a century old! (And the Disney cartoon movie Dumbo only came out in 1941).

 

 

A book about what we eat with a global history of food

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Via interlibrary loan from the Twin Falls Public Library I got a 344-page 2025 book by Pierre Singaravelou and Sylvain Venayre (editors) titled What We Eat: A global history of food. There are 88 brief un-numbered chapters with the following titles, which I have been skimming:

 

Acheke, Bagels, Baguette, Banh Mi, Barbecue, Beer, Beet Sugar, Cassoulet, Caviar, Ceviche, Champagne, Charcuterie, Chicory, Chile con Carne, Chili Pepper, Chorba, Christmas Pudding, Coca-Cola, Coffee, Condensed Milk (Sweetened), Cornflakes, Couscous, Curry, Dafina, Dim Sum, Dogmeat, Doner Kebab, Feijoada, Fish and Chips, Fish Sauce (Nuoc Mam), Food Coloring and Preservatives, Freeze-Dried Foods, French Fries, Gin, Guacamole, Hamburger, Harissa, Hedgehog Stew, Hot Dogs, Hummus, Ice Cubes, Indomie, Injera, Ketchup, Lato, Maki, Margarine, Mate, Matzah, Mayonnaise, Naan, Noodles and Macaroni, Olive Oil, Orangina, Oyster, Palm Oil, Parmesan Cheese, Pepper, Pet Food and Treats, Pho, Pizza, Poke, Port Wine, Raki, Ramen, Rooibos, Roquefort, Rum, Sake, Salt, Sandwich, Sardines (Canned), Singapore Noodles, Soy Sauce, Spam. Sparkling Water, Suhi, Tapioca, Tea and Chai, Tikka, Tofu, Turkish Delight, Vanilla and Vanillan, Vodka, Whiskey, Wine, Yak Butter, and Yogurt.

 

It really should have been subtitled A Global History of Food and Drink, since there are 18 chapters about beverages.

 

This book is a good starting point for doing a speech about a food or foods, possibly including a demonstration. But not all the information in it is correct. The chapter on ramen has a paragraph on page 253 which claims that:

 

“A few years after the end of the American occupation, an invention enabled the dish to conquer households: freeze-dried ramen, launched by entrepreneur Ando Momofuku in 1958, who based his marketing on the official recommendations of the Ministry of Health. The Japanese were not eating enough wheat or meat, they argued. Momofuku’s first freeze-dried noodles, Nisshin Chikin Ramen, with their chicken broth, effectively compensated for all these shortcomings at a reasonable price.”

 

Noodle blocks in that ramen really were deep-fried, not freeze-dried. See the Wikipedia pages on Instant noodles and Ramen.

 

The food cartoon came from OpenClipArt.