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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday October 24 2017, @03:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-leave-the-gate-open dept.

Hundreds of Mysterious Stone 'Gates' Found in Saudi Arabia's Desert

Google Earth has unlocked the gates to ancient mysteries around the world.

For years, amateur and professional archaeologists have used the search engine's satellite imagery to discover mysterious earthworks in Kazakhstan, Roman ruins, a forgotten fortress in Afghanistan and more. In the past decade, Google Earth also has helped identify thousands of burial sites and other "works of the old men," as they're called, scattered across Saudi Arabia.

Now, archaeologists have uncovered nearly 400 previously undocumented stone structures they call "gates" in the Arabian desert that they believe may have been built by nomadic tribes thousands of years ago.

"We tend to think of Saudi Arabia as desert, but in practice there's a huge archaeological treasure trove out there and it needs to be identified and mapped," said David Kennedy, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia and author of a paper set to appear in the November issue of the journal Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy.

"You can't see them very well from the ground level, but once you get up a few hundred feet, or with a satellite even higher, they stand out beautifully."


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @05:28PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @05:28PM (#586957)

    >Does your second sentence invalidate your first?

    Let me restate in a way that may be understandable to you. Text was taken from a nytimes.com page, changed only by inserting a link to the source page within the quoted text, and that became the totality of the story submission. The link that was inserted was tacked onto a random word, giving no indication of its significance.

    >If no then can you say the nytimes wrote the entire article that appears to include text quoted from other included hyperlinks?

    Where, specifically, do you see those unattributed quotes? If the New York Times is plagiarizing in the same way this site is, that's a problem too. They do publish corrections. [nytimes.com] You can contact them about the problem, or I will do so. If you mean to say that I'm holding them to a lower standard than I'm holding this site, I'm not. Quite the opposite.

    >Most summaries i see are c&p snippets from a linked article with little rewriting. But that editing is still attributed to whoever submitted it. That seems fine to me.

    I've also seen it on other occasions. I don't agree that it's fine. Quotes, especially lengthy ones such as this, should be clearly attributed. Doing otherwise is confusing and appears, or is, dishonest.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @09:04PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 24 2017, @09:04PM (#587098)

    Well, it is true that the submission wasn't done the way that *I* would have.
    OTOH, anyone who's not using a device that disallows hovering over a hyperlink and seeing what that leads to isn't going to have a major problem.

    Search engines would also give a +1 to the pagerank of the page due to the embedded link.

    Molehill --> mountain.

    ...and an editor has already "corrected" the "deficiency".

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @05:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 25 2017, @05:37AM (#587280)

      > Molehill --> mountain.

      You call it insignificant. Another commenter said this style is "the SN SOP." Check the Hall of Fame [soylentnews.org] page. There are more accepted submissions from Phoenix666 than from any other named submitter, over 2800 of them. He consistently uses this unclear quotation style, and the editors frequently leave it unchanged. I don't think I've overstated the importance of this.

      > Search engines would also give a +1 to the pagerank of the page due to the embedded link.

      I wasn't claiming that this style denies "link juice" to news outlets. I'm not very knowledgeable about SEO, but I would guess that a more prominent placement of the link might result in greater "link juice."

      > ...and an editor has already "corrected" the "deficiency".

      I noticed that. I'm grateful for the response by that editor and for the submitter's acknowledgment that he made a mistake. I wanted to respond to tibman anyway, especially because someone deemed his remarks "insightful."