Differentiating Fact and Opinion F.1. The following sentences are taken directly from Patty Onderko’s “Gender Identity,”

Classify each of the statements as predominantly fact (F), opinion (O), or a combination of the two (C). Base your judgment on the substance of each statement rather than on your agreement or disagreement with it.

1. Among parents and child psychologists, “there’s a tendency to want to forecast a child’s future based on current behavior,” says Ken Corbett, a professor of psychotherapy and psy- choanalysis at New York University and the author of the new book Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities (Yale University Press). _____

2. He argues that liberal-minded parents, and the community of therapists who support them, are in a tough spot when it comes to dealing with gender-variant kids. __ ___
3. “We’re stuck between advocacy and reactive pathologizing,” he says. __ ___
4. “We want to be responsive and encouraging, but at the same time, it’s not right—ethically or responsibly—to predict a child’s future. __ ___
5. “We don’t have an archive of what happens to gender-variant kids. __ ___
6. “A boy who displays feminine traits as a child may grow up to be transgender, he may be a gay man, he may be a straight man who is a good father, he may become an artist with a sensitive temperament.” __ ___
7. Or none of the above: Look at Eddie Izzard. __ ___
8. It’s true, there is no “archive” of anecdotes, but there is one oft-cited study—which is outdated, according to Corbett—used to address questions of sexual orientation among gender-variant youth. __ ___
9. In 1987, Richard Green, M.D., published the results of his longitudinal study of boys called The “Sissy Boy Syndrome” and the Development of Homosexuality. __ ___
10. He followed 44 gender-variant boys from childhood to young adulthood; 75 percent of them grew up to identify themselves as homosexual or bisexual. __ ____
F. 2. The following sentences are excerpted from Scott Carlson’s “Journal Publishers Turn to Soft- ware to Root Out Plagiarism by Scholars,” published in the 10 June 2005 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Again, classify each of the statements as predominantly fact (F), opinion (O), or a combination of the two (C).
1. Publishers of academic journals and scholarly articles are starting to use specialized software to root out instances of plagiarism and self-plagiarism. _____
2. Such software, already used to check the work of students, can scan academic papers, compare them against others in a database, and find instances of common language and sentence struc- ture. _____
3. Christian Collberg, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Arizona, is developing a program to find self-plagiarists—academics who republish portions of their work in an effort to pad their vitae. _____
4. Mr. Collberg’s interest in self-plagiarism arose when he and a colleague from the University of Arizona, Stephen Kobourov, were reviewing papers for conferences and noticed that some of the works had been previously published. _____
5. In an article in the April issue of Communications of the ACM, a computer-science journal, Mr. Collberg and Mr. Kobourov say they used SPlaT [their plagiarism tool] to review papers on the Web sites of computer-science departments at 50 colleges. _____
6. The researchers found instances in which different articles by the same author contained similar sections, or were even identical, yet were submitted to separate conferences as original work. _____
7. Mr. Collberg said that while plagiarism is roundly condemned, cases of self-plagiarism are ignored and tolerated. _____
8. “Most of us are funded from public sources,” he says. _____
9. “If we keep republishing old results, then we are misspending taxpayer money. _____
10. “We take academic misconduct among students very seriously. We should be as careful about this in our own community as researchers. Otherwise we are setting a bad example.”___