explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

2025: Peer Review

2018-08-03T22:10:29Z

Thunderforge: /* Explanation */ Changing "lit" to "literature" since not everyone will know what the former refers to

{{comic
| number = 2025
| date = July 27, 2018
| title = Peer Review
| image = peer_review.png
| titletext = Your manuscript "Don't Pay $25 to Access Any of the Articles in this Journal: A Review of Preprint Repositories and Author Willingness to Email PDF Copies for Free" has also been rejected, but nice try.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a PEER REVIEWER. Needs volunteer commentary on title text. Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

How academic publishing works: When a researcher wants to publish their findings, they send it to an academic journal. The editor of the journal is another researcher (usually a college professor), ''who gets paid nothing or a minimal honorarium'' for editing the journal. The editor chooses a few (usually three) peer reviewers who are other researchers familiar enough with the study's subfield to judge the study's quality fairly and accurately, and sends it out to them for review. These peer reviewers ''do not get paid'' for the work of reviewing the manuscript and offering a detailed critique of every part of the study, from literature review to methodology to conclusions drawn from the results. If the peer reviewers and editor agree that the study was well-conducted and the paper well-written (or just needs minor revisions), it is accepted and published in the journal. The researcher ''is not paid'' for getting their paper published in the journal.

In short, nobody in the process is paid for their work except the journal publisher, who charges other researchers, libraries and individuals for access to the fruit of these people's free labor. This is commonly referred to as a "[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paywall Paywall]".

This system relies upon researchers to be employed by either companies or universities in positions which require them to publish in order to remain employed or achieve promotions or pay raises. In universities, only postdocs and tenure-track or tenured professors are paid in a way that figures in their research time as well as their teaching time, which means that anyone not in one of those positions (lecturers, educators, adjunct instructors) is not paid for any research they might be doing and publishing, nor are those who are conducting research but cannot get a tenure-track job due to universities replacing tenure lines with non-tenure-track positions.

Charging for access to these works has raised [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge controversy] in recent years, due to concerns that this may lead to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_silo Information silos].

Ponytail seems to be presenting papers concluding that this flow of currency is not equitable. Unfortunately (?), the journal she has submitted these findings to has opted not to review or publish them, either because they do not find her research suitable for their publication, or because they have a financial interest which conflicts with the findings, since sending her paper to review would give it directly to her target audience.

The title text refers to a recent Twitter [https://twitter.com/hwitteman/status/1015049411276300289 post] that went viral. Researcher Dr. Holly Witteman informs the public that you could just ask many researchers for a PDF copy of their academic paper and that they would be delighted to do so free of charge. (This hearkens back to the days of snailmail, when researchers would distribute printed copies, "reprints", of their work for, at most, the price of a self-addressed stamped envelope.) She has additionally written [http://holly.witteman.ca/index.php/2017/12/11/getting-access-to-paywalled-papers/ an article] on the situation and how to get papers for free.
Pre-Print Repositories are online databases for researchers to publish drafts of their research for quick distribution to willing reviewers, sidestepping the lengthy and often arduous reviewing process as conducted by many research journals. These databases are free to access by researchers and the general public, and often papers will remain on these sites long after their journal publication, making them a convenient way to get to papers locked behind a paywall. However, the pre-print versions of the papers will often lack peer review, and as such may contain a higher occurrence of errors. There are also sites which collect and re-publish papers for free, such as [http://sci-hub.is/ Sci-Hub], which attempts to provide all published papers free of charge globally. Links to Sci-Hub can go dead after being widely published; this one was live as of July 27, 2018. In the title text, the publisher refuses to publish a paper that describes ways to get around the paywall restrictions that make up their bottom line.

==Transcript==

:[Ponytail is sitting and looking at a laptop.]

:RE: Economics Journal Submission

:We have received your manuscript "The Bizarre Economics of Academic Publishing: Why Volunteer Peer Reviewers Should Rise Up and Demand Payment from For-Profit Journals."

:We have elected not to send it out for review.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics featuring Ponytail]]

1962: Generations

2018-03-03T20:59:05Z

Thunderforge: /* Explanation */ Changing -..- to – • • - to make it clearer that it's morese code

{{comic
| number = 1962
| date = March 2, 2018
| title = Generations
| image = generations.png
| titletext = For a while it looked like the Paperclip Machines would destroy us, since they wanted to turn the whole universe into paperclips, but they abruptly lost interest in paperclips the moment their parents' generation got into making them, too.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by THE PREVIOUS-PREVIOUS-PREVIOUS GENERATION - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

This comic is making fun of the various names we give "generations", and also predicting some future ones. The release of this comic coincides the [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/01/defining-generations-where-millennials-end-and-post-millennials-begin/ Pew Research Center's recent announcement that they have decided where the Millennial generation ends].

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! scope="col"| Generation
! scope="col"| Time period
! scope="col"| Explanation
|-
| The Founders
| 1730 - 1747
| Most of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founding_Fathers_of_the_United_States United States' Founding Fathers] were born in this period. (But not all: Benjamin Franklin, for instance, was born two generations prior.)
|-
| Generation ƒ
| 1748 - 1765
| ƒ was used to represent [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s "long s"] in the typography used in Colonial America. It can be seen in many historical documents from the period. It is also the symbol that represented the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_guilder guilder], the currency of the Netherlands from the 17th century until 2002.
|-
| The Adequate Generation
| 1766 - 1783
| Randall apparently found nothing notable about this generation, positive or negative.
|-
| Generation Æ
| 1784 - 1801
| Æ is the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Æ diphthong] Aesh - its name sounds like X, though it is pronounced as a long e or IPA /æ/. This character is commonly transcribed differently into British English and American English as ae and e respectively making a difference in spelling in words such as encyclopaedia/encylopedia. One of the key influences on this is Webster's dictionary, first published 1828.
|-
| The generation we cut a lot of slack because they produced Lincoln
| 1802 - 1819
| Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809, and is regarded as one of the best presidents of all time. The comic states that the other people born in this generation were "cut a lot of slack" because of him. As with the Oops, one of us is Hitler generation, it is absurd to define an entire generation by defining its most famous member.
|-
| The Gilded Generation
| 1820 - 1837
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Generation_(Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_theory) So named under the Strauss-Howe generation theory], though they use the time period 1822-1842 instead. This likely refers to the "{{w|Gilded Age}}" of American history, roughly the last three decades of the 19th century.
|-
| The Second-Greatest Generation
| 1838 - 1855
|
This is a reference to the Greatest Generation, below, and could be implying a similarity between the accomplishments and sacrifices of this generation - who fought in the first U.S. Civil War and who passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution - to those of the Greatest Generation. There is also some humor in the name: what Randall means is that this generation was, supposedly, second best in terms of its greatness. However, the wording could be interpreted to mean that they are chronologically the second generation to be called "greatest", even though they actually were born first.
|-
| Generation – • • –
| 1856 - 1873
| This may be referring to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Morse_code#Comparison_of_American_and_International_Morse Morse Code] for the number 9, although this is the eighth generation in this list. More likely, it is referring to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code the letter X] instead in International Morse Code. This may be an error on Randall's part, since the generations are an American phenomenon. Alternatively, this be a past example of similar cohort of Gen Xers, mirrored by the later "More Gen-Xers somehow". Regardless, this is also a reference to the rise of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy telegraphy], though it was "born" prior to 1856.
|-
| The kids who died in the Gilded Generation's factories and mines
| 1874 - 1891
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labour#The_Industrial_Revolution Child labor] had been widely used since before the start of the Industrial Revolution, but this is when people started doing something about it - and also, when the need for an educated workforce arose, applying substantial economic pressure on societies to put children in school instead. It would be more accurate to label this generation, "The kids who stopped dying in the Gilded Generation's factories and mines".
|-
| Oops, one of us is Hitler
| 1892 - 1909
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler Adolf Hitler], possibly the most hated (and, by most definitions, evil) man in living human memory as of this comic's posting, was born during in 1889. Aside from the fact that this places him in the previous generation, it seems beyond silly to blame everyone else who was born during this period for being born in the same generation as him. Among those who eventually heard of him (thus, excluding those in isolated areas or who died before he rose to power), the vast majority of them would not hear of him until well after 1909. In reality, this generation is known as the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Generation Lost Generation], though the dates are somewhat skewed.
|-
| The Greatest Generation
| 1910 - 1927
| Named by journalist [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Brokaw Tom Brokaw] in 1998 in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greatest_Generation a book of the same name], this is the first generation on the list to have a real, commonly accepted name, and was named as such due to being the generation that survived the hardships of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression Great Depression] immediately before being drafted to fight in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II World War II].
|-
| The Silent Generation
| 1928 - 1945
| Coined by Time Magazine in 1951, the Silent Generation grew up during a time of paranoia and very little activism due to phenomena such as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism McCarthyism] making it dangerous to speak out.
|-
| Baby Boomers
| 1946 - 1963
| A spike in births was seen following the return of soldiers to the US from European and Pacific theatres of war. These children enjoyed the benefits of US prosperity whilst the rest of the world rebuilt, lived in fear of nuclear annihilation and watched the Space Race.
|-
| Generation X
| 1965 - 1981
| "X" here refers to an unknown or undefined element, not specifically a placement in the alphabet as Y and Z (see below) seem to imply, and was used throughout history to refer to alienated youth in general as early as the 1950s, only being applied specifically to this generation in 1991. Generation X's time period was one of sweeping societal change and rapid technological advancement.
|-
| Millennials
| 1982 - 1999
| The last children born in the 2nd Millennium. Initially called Generation Y, as they were thought to be so boring the only thing of note was that they came after Generation X, by people that hadn't anticipated the internet.
|-
| Generation 💅 (nail polish emoji)
| 2000 - 2017
| This begins the hypothetical future generation names, though this generation was already fully born as of this comic's posting. Social media was established and rising during the formative years of this generation, and the widespread adoption of emoji began during this time. The [https://emojipedia.org/nail-polish/ Nail Polish Emoji] (U+1F485) is used here. Currently known as Generation Z in reality, though the comic implies it may change due to emojis ultimately replacing the alphabet entirely.
|-
| Zuckerberg's Army
| 2018 - 2035
| Continuing on the above, this may be presuming the dominance of FaceBook during the childhoods of this generation, and corresponding social norming as ultimately directed by its leader Mark Zuckerberg. Ironically, as of this comic's posting, [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-quit-young-people-social-media-snapchat-instagram-emarketer-a8206486.html young users were already leaving FaceBook for other social media sites]. May also be a reference to "Dumbledore's Army" in ''Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix''. It is uncertain whether Zuckerberg's Army is in alliance or at war with the other social media militaries of the mid-21st century.
|-
| The Hovering Ones
| 2036 - 2053
| This may posit increased adoption of cybernetics, which (as with any technology) are more easily adopted by the young who do not have to unlearn previous ways. If advances allowed someone to hover all the time, such that one would not need to walk, this generation's name suggests that becoming so widely used among this generation that they became known for it.
|-
| Spare Parts
| 2054 - 2071
| Continuing on the above speculation about cybernetics, this presumes enough apathy or sociopathy among this generation's parents that giving birth (or other means of creating a new human) was often done to create bodies from which organs could be harvested (presumably primarily for the benefit of their elders).
|-
| More Gen-Xers somehow
| 2072 - 2089
| As with "Generation -..-", this may be positing that Generation X like traits pop up about 3/4 of the way through each century.
|-
| The Paperclip Machines
| 2090 - 2107
| This, and the alt text, are references to the concept of a [https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer paperclip maximizer], where an AI might be designed to be helpful, but end up being harmful. The clicker game [http://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ Universal Paperclips] makes this concept playable. Furthering the above speculation of cybernetics, this generation might be primarily artificial intelligences, though of limited ability to set their own priorities (a flaw which would be fixed in later generations).
|-
| The Mixed Bag (produced 4 Lincolns, 1 Napoleon, and 2 Hitlers)
| 2108 - 2125
| As with the above examples, a generation may become known for its most famous members, but it is not useful to define an entire generation by them.
|-
| The Procedural Generation
| 2136 - 2143
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation Procedural generation] is a way of creating data automatically, rather than capturing it via sensor (including when the "sensor" is a keyboard and the data is typed in). This confusion of the term "generation" could refer to more artificial intelligences that were created via routines instead of directly coded, which would likely stem from attempts to improve child creation once most children were explicitly manufactured instead of relying on evolution-granted biological means.
|-
| Generation Ω
| 2144 - 2161
| "Omega" is the last letter in the Greek alphabet, and used as a symbol of endings. Given the above generation names implying increasingly artificial children, this may suggest the last generation that is recognizably a generation. This does not necessarily mean the end of children or the end of humanity, just that anything after 2161 is widely recognized to no longer have even notional generational coherence - perhaps because of drift (children born to one group during a given time are wildly different enough from children born to another group at the same time that people give up trying to group them by time), child gestation and maturation times (for example, if it became common for a child to go from conception to adulthood in less than a year), or exceptions to what counts as a "child" (for example, if it becomes possible and common to create clones that are somewhere between free-willed beings and mind-controlled drones, and this sufficiently supplants creation of completely free-willed children, regardless of whether the children are artificial intelligences or old-fashioned biological children).
|-
| Star Trek: The Next Generation
|2360 - 2378
|''{{w|Star Trek: The Next Generation}}'' was a TV show set in the future. The first episode of ''TNG'', "{{w|Encounter at Farpoint}}", takes place in 2364, and it concluded with "{{w|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Good_Things..._(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)|All Good Things...}}", which took place in 2370. The final canonical adventures of the cast of ''The Next Generation'' did not occur until the events of ''{{w|Star Trek: Nemesis}}'' in 2379.
|}

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}

:"Generations" are arbitrary. They're just labels we use to obliquely talk about cultural trends.
:But since Pew Research has become the latest to weigh in, and everyone loves a good pointless argument over definitions...

:''xkcd presents''
:A Definitive Chronology of the Generations

:1730-1747 The Founders
:1748-1765 Generation ƒ
:1766-1783 The Adequate Generation
:1784-1801 Generation Æ
:1802-1819 The generation we cut a lot of slack because they produced Lincoln
:1820-1837 The Gilded Generation
:1838-1855 The Second-Greatest Generation
:1856-1873 Generation '''-··-'''
:1874-1891 The kids who died in the Gilded Generation's factories and mines
:1892-1909 Oops, one of us is Hitler
:1910-1927 The Greatest Generation
:1928-1945 The Silent Generation
:1946-1963 Baby Boomers
:1964-1981 Generation X
:1982-1999 Millennials
:2000-2017 Generation 💅 [nail polish emoji]
:2018-2035 Zuckerberg's army
:2036-2053 The Hovering Ones
:2054-2071 Spare Parts
:2072-2089 More Gen-Xers somehow
:2090-2107 The Paperclip Machines
:2108-2125 The Mixed Bag (produced 4 Lincolns, 1 Napoleon and 2 Hitlers)
:2126-2143 The Procedural Generation
:2144-2161 Generation Ω
:2360-2378 Star Trek: The Next Generation

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Emoji]]

1863: Screenshots

2017-07-17T04:06:28Z

Thunderforge: /* Explanation */ Adding a bit on why it's impossible to prevent copying the author's book

{{comic
| number = 1863
| date = July 14, 2017
| title = Screenshots
| image = screenshots.png
| titletext = For the final exam, you take a screenshot showing off all the work you've done in the class, and it has to survive being uploaded, thumbnailed, and re-screenshotted through a chain of social media sites.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Let's add a detailed bullet list explaining every point on the syllabus.}}

The comic shows a syllabus of an introductory course on {{w|Screenshot|screenshots}}. Screenshots have become a common way of spreading and sharing content on social media like Tumblr and Twitter, particularly excerpts of text such as seen in the cartoon. This in turn has developed into a common language with unwritten rules; the comic imagines a world where such rules have become codified into best practices, able to be taught in classes.

The image on the left shows an image of screenshots of text, along with what seems like annotations describing various ratios and dos and don'ts about making such screenshots. The right side shows the main points of the course, touching on topics that are relevant for making and publishing screenshots. Some of these guidelines are violated on a regular basis by people sharing screenshots on the internet, leading to impaired readability and the degradation of digital quality (see [[1683: Digital Data]]).

The punchline of the comic describes a high attendance in the course (presumably many people are interested in how to take high-quality screenshots); however, the digital textbook only sold one copy, implying that the only attendee that bought the book was adept enough to distribute screenshots of the textbook content to the others, because of the information gathered from the class itself. In essence, the writer of the textbook has taught its students how to pirate his material, effectively putting himself out of a job. There isn't anything that the author can do to prevent this due to the {{w|Analog hole|analog hole}}, which states that if non-interactive media can be visually seen by humans, it can be copied, as with a screenshot.

Detailed explanation of the headings on the right:

{| class=wikitable
! Heading
! Explanation

|-
| Highlighting: What & How much?
| This refers to highlighting text of particular interest in screenshots, as depicted on the left.

|-
| Aspect ratios
| Again, depicted on the left. If a screenshot is too wide, it might be difficult to read, and/or it will not fit into thumbnails and social networking feeds. This leads to the screenshot being scaled down too much to be readable (see bottom left). An {{w|aspect ratio}} that is too tall would have similar effects, so in general it is better to stick to near-square aspect ratios (see bottom right of the left section). Some users change the aspect ratio when scaling with a very ugly result (see e.g. [[1187: Aspect Ratio]]).

|-
| Cropping: Pre- and Post-
| This refers to {{w|cropping}} the image, that is, cutting away the irrelevant or unnecessary parts, leaving just the content one needs to communicate.

|-
| Whitespace
| This section presumably deals with {{w|White space (visual arts)|whitespace}} (though "whitespace" is not necessarily white). Whitespace generally refers to the space around the content of interest, which is often but not always white. In the main image on the left side of this comic, most of the red marks are arrows indicating the white space of that image. In this case the "whitespace" at the top and bottom are indeed not white, but rather filled with text not relevant to the screenshot. Removing all whitespace makes an image more efficient and helps provide focus on the important part of a screenshot, but too little whitespace can be less comfortable to read or look at, and therefore appear as a more amateurish result. This section of the course would likely discuss this balance.

|-
| Screenshots vs Links
| For the most part it is recommended that one links to the original content, rather than publishing a screenshot of said content. In some situations it is advisable to opt for using screenshots, such as trying to catch attention on social media, or if the content in question has been removed from the original source, and one still wants to communicate the fact that it was published there.

|-
| Catching the right GIF frame
| A {{w|GIF}} is a bitmap image format that was developed in 1987 by CompuServe and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability. The format supports animations and is often used for short looping animations on the internet. They often employ a low {{w|frame rate}}, so that one might notice a funny or interesting frame during playback. The naïve approach is to press the 'Print Screen' button with careful timing, but in this manner it can be very challenging to capture the desired frame of any GIF that plays at a speed of greater than 5 frames per second. Presumably, the course introduces its students to special tools to get the job done, such as [https://ezgif.com/speed the EZgif website] or the [http://www.xtreme-lab.net/7gif/en/index.html downloadable 7GIF app].
|-
| Snapchat and trust
| {{w|Snapchat}} is a popular social networking application for mobile devices primarily used for sharing images and short videos. One of the main selling points is the transience of content posted. The idea is that as soon as one opens an image or video, a timer starts, and once it has expired the content is no longer accessible on the device. This has led to people sending sensitive content to their friends, thinking that they wouldn't be able to cause much harm, as the content is non-permanent. An obvious flaw in this model is the capability of modern mobile devices to take screenshots (usually available from shortcut keys), and thus permanently save the images to the phone's memory. Saving embarrassing images of one's friends, that they themselves meant as a transient joke, is a serious breach of trust, hence the heading.

|-
| Embarrassing background tabs
| A common error when publishing screenshots is not checking thoroughly enough, and leaving content visible, that might be embarrassing. One such example is {{w|browser tab}}, which might feature content that the creator of the screenshot does not want others to see, such as a page about a sensitive disease one may have (e.g. {{w|AIDS}}) or {{w|pornography}}. Since tabs are small and disconnected from the main content, it is easy to miss such occurrences, which lead to situations such as [http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/10/lawmaker-mistakenly-hands-out-document-with-porn-references.html this one], where a politician handed out a document with background tabs to pornography websites.

|-
| Spellcheck's red underlines
| {{w|Spell checkers}} are designed to notify the writer of a document of spelling and grammatical mistakes in the text. This is usually done through the editor marking text it thinks is incorrect with an underline (usually red, but other colors may indicate different kinds of mistakes). Sometimes these mistakes are not relevant to the writer, such as when editing {{w|source code}} or using a spellchecker that is set to another language. Even if the corrections are relevant, however, one would not want the ugly red underlines on a screenshot. This section presumably deals with this problem.

|-
| Security: Beware of URL tokens
| {{w|Query string|URL tokens}} are pieces of code embedded in the {{w|URL}} of a website. If implemented well, these help identify a particular document or search query, and do not carry any sensitive security information. Insecure web-apps, however, may encode authentication information (such as {{w|Session_ID|session IDs}}, or even worse: usernames and passwords) in the URL, leading to a massive security risk on the part of someone whose screen might be visible to others. Screenshots allow anyone to easily read off these parameters, and possibly successfully impersonate the creator of the screenshot on a website. This is especially hard to notice to less technically inclined users, who might not know that, say, a session ID (a seemingly random jumble of characters), might be used to impersonate them.

|-
| Redacting personal info
| Somewhat related to the previous point: Screenshots might include personal information, such as indications of institutions one might work for, e-mail addresses, and the like, that one might not want to share with the world. This section presumably deals with ways of obscuring such information on screenshots.

|-
| Useful browser modes
| Using the {{w|Privacy mode|private browsing mode}} offered by most browsers helps with the previous point of keeping your personal information out of the screenshots because websites see you as logged out. Another helpful mode is the full screen browsing mode (usually F11) that will maximize the content to cover the whole screen, keeping the browser UI chrome out of the screenshots. This also helps with privacy, as it will keep the bookmarks on your browser toolbar from being visible, as well as your username if you're logged in Chrome, without having to crop the screenshots manually. Counterpointing with the final bullet on spotting fakes, the Inspect Element browser mode allows you to live-edit the HTML source of the webpage, allowing you to create more convincing fakes if that is your goal.

|-
| Tradeoffs: PNG vs JPG
| {{w|Portable Network Graphics|PNG}} and {{w|JPG}} are file formats with different {{w|image compression|image compression algorithms}}. JPG is widely used for encoding photographs, as it compresses real-world images to a fraction of their normal size without losing much quality. On artificial images with lots of sharp changes in contrast (such as text), however, JPG produces visible {{w|compression artifacts}} due to its {{w|lossy compression}}. For these, PNG is usually used, as it compresses large blocks of a single color, and repeating patterns efficiently, and due to it having a lossless option is able to encode text without artifacts, improving readability. PNG is usually superior for screenshots, as these are artificial images, but if the screenshot is of an actual photo (or a frame of a GIF or movie), JPG might yield lower file sizes at comparable quality. This tradeoff is presumably discussed under the heading.
JPG images also have an attached {{w|EXIF}} data file, not present in PNG images, which may contain information about the device that the screenshot was taken on (especially "with", e.g. a camera) and thus be a potential privacy risk in some cases. However, EXIF metadata is not used with JPEG 2000.

|-
| Watermark ethics
| Many users and websites add {{w|watermarks}} to their original content (or even worse: their screenshots) to indicate where it came from. As depicted in [[1683: Digital Data]] this can lead to degradation of quality as watermarks are stacked on top of each other. It is generally considered okay to put a single unobtrusive watermark on one's own original work; anything other than that would be considered unethical.

|-
| Spotting fakes
| It is relatively easy to fake a screenshot in an image editing program such as {{w|GIMP}} or just editing the page source, making it seem like another organization or person is the original source of the content, possibly damaging their reputation. Some of these techniques are easily detectable by looking at the images {{w|metadata}} or correlating the contents of the screenshot with other sources.

|}

The title text once again refers to the continual re-screenshooting of data as seen in [[1683: Digital Data]], where the final examination consists of the students taking a screenshot good enough that it is still recognizable (and hopefully readable) after being re-compressed, re-screenshot and re-uploaded to various social networking sites, deteriorating its quality. This is quite a difficult task, considering the student only has control over the first screenshot, and subsequent screenshots could degrade the quality to any level. Hopefully the professor is aware of this and plans to perform the test under controlled conditions, as well as grade on a curve.

Previously were explored by Randall in [[1373: Screenshot]], [[1683: Digital Data]] and [[1815: Flag]]. This comic is one of a small set of comics with the same or almost the same title as another comic (with only the plural form of the word screenshot being the difference).

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
:<big>Intro to Screenshots</big>

:[The left side of the panel shows three images. The largest image is a screenshot of text with the middle section highlighted and margins and top and bottom rows marked with red lines and arrows. The two smaller images below are cropped versions of the screenshot in the first image: the left image has an incorrect "squashed" aspect ratio and a red X on it, while the right image has a correct aspect ratio and a green check mark.]

:[The right side of the panel:]

::Syllabus
:*Highlighting: What & how much
:*Aspect ratios
:*Cropping: Pre- and post-
:*Whitespace
:*Screenshots vs links
:*Catching the right GIF frame
:*Snapchat and trust
:*Embarrassing backround tabs
:*Spellcheck's red outlines
:*Security: Beware URL tokens
:*Redacting personal info
:*Useful browser modes
:*Tradeoffs: PNG vs JPG
:*Watermark ethics
:*Spotting fakes

:[Caption below the panel:]
:My class on screenshots was a big hit, although for some reason I only ever sold one copy of the digital textbook.

{{comic discussion}}

[[Category:Comics sharing name|Screenshot02]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]