Shearing is caring!

There was a scientific session at my university today. I've presented a report about waste management in St. Petersburg and Leningrad region. It was somewhat a "party" for the local scientists, so I was in doubt whether should I put the names of my Finnish colleagues as coauthors or not. It wasn't that level which would be valuable for them, besides this report was made of my part of our main article. Never the less the decision was made and I've put two more names on the front page. I've shared authorship of this report.

In the end of the session ex-dean of the faculty came to me and gave a special thanks. "Why? The report and following discussion were good, but there were better" - I thought at the moment. But he thanked me not for the report, but for the foreign coauthors! They brought an international status for our local party! So this publication (and others from the session) will be more valuable. The publication of report became more valuable just because the session became more valuable because of my report presence at the session! It is very interesting thought ;-) But the shearing was in the first place.

There was another shearing story at the session. Google is shearing imagery even if it doesn't want it))) One of the politicians(!) of the St. Petersburg reported about an expedition to the Altai. He mentioned that they have used an images from Google to create a 1:50 000 map... O_o ... Ok, even if he was not aware that for this scale Landsat was just good enough, wasn't this a violation of the Google's terms and conditions of usage? "Honestly, I do not know" replied politician to me...

Let's make it clear: I'm not against robbing Google, I'm against the ignorance.