Academia

Plagiarism case continues

In May last year I wrote about a case of plagiarism from my university. The interesting thing about this plagiarism was that it was a teacher who had stolen part of a masters thesis written by two students whom she had supervised.

At the department of business studies two students wrote their masters thesis. Their supervisor then took parts of the text and included it word for word in an article she presented at an international conference. The students were not acknowledged in any way. The head of department defended the supervisorâ??s actions in the student press â?? which is sad, but in a sense an understandable defence. Still sad and it shows a definite lack of backbone. (this blog in May 2006)

The case was sent to the research ethics committee

The majority of the research ethics committee found that while it was wrong that the supervisor did not ask the students, it was too far to say that the supervisor had cheated. This position was motivated that by calling the supervisor actions plagiarism would effectively be damage scientific research. (from earlier post).

Thankfully today the local newspaper writes that the University Dean has sent the errand onwards and upwards to the research ethics group of the National Swedish Research Council. Maybe by going beyond the confines of the own organisation the message can be stated clearly that plagiarism by researchers is as unacceptable as we claim it is when students attempt it.

Today the local paper reports that the VetenskapsrÃ¥det (Swedish Science Council) have reached the unanimous decision that the supervisor’s actions were a clear cut case of plagiarism. The fate of the supervisor will be decided by the university dean after the summer.

Posted on by mklang

Millenium Mouse & Copyright

The attempts Disney goes to maintain copyright over their intellectual property are legendary. Copyright term extention acts have ensured that Mickey Mouse is saved from the public domain and continues to generate income for Disney.

But what would happen if Mickey was shown to be older than we thought? An artefact at Lund Historical Museum dated to 900 A.D. was excavated at a site called Uppåkra in southern Sweden.

Surprise, surprise its Mickey!! This means that Mickey is over 1000 years old – let Mickey enter the public domain – he deserves it…

Don’t be surprised if Disney uses this as an excuse to extend copyright terms to 1000 years!

Although made of bronze, the brooch ornament likely adorned the clothing of an Iron Age woman. Excavations at nearby sites, such as at Järrestad, have yielded other unusual pieces of jewelry, such as a necklace with a pail fob at the end and another necklace strung with 262 pieces of amber. (Discovery Channel)

(via Boing Boing)

Posted on by mklang

University email & student privacy

Some time ago Linköping University proudly announced that they were outsourcing their student email to Google. Basically the students will see the university email address but “under the hood” the system will be run by Google. The BBC reports (11 June) that Trinity College Dublin is doing the same thing.

Google email (gmail) has some privacy issues:

Google automatically scans e-mails to add context-sensitive advertisements to them. Privacy advocates raised concerns that the plan involved scanning their personal, assumed private, e-mails, and that this was a security problem. Allowing e-mail content to be read, even by a computer, raises the risk that the expectation of privacy in e-mail will be reduced. Furthermore, e-mail that non-subscribers’ choose to send to Gmail accounts is scanned by Gmail as well… (wikipedia)

So an uninformed gmail user may be losing some integrity. This is bad but at the same time it can be seen as a question of choice. (Don’t get me started on the problems of uninformed choice). But now the universities are pushing students to become gmail users. In Sweden universities are publicly funded government bodies and therefore they should be more concerned about forcing citizens to become customers of a private corporation.

Generally people are not to aware of the privacy risks which technology may create. Universities should help people to understand society and it is a shame that they are now acting as a sales representative for a company providing them with customers instead of acting as an example and educating citizens about the advantages and disadvantages of technology.

Posted on by mklang

Politics of Regulation – Violent games

The EU met yesterday to discuss the regulation of violent computer games to minors. This follows situations such as the German guman who last year shot several people before taking his life at a secondary school.

A European Union Commissioner, taking advantage of the shootings last year, has called for stricter regulations in the video game industry. A motion introduced last month calls for legislators to â??put in place all necessary measures to ban the sale of particularly violent and cruel video games.â?? (From Lawbean)

The impact of violent games, films and magazines on people (in particular impressionable minors) is questionable. Researchers have found results both to support and to deny any serious impact. The main problem is that no real study can be undertaken to ensure reliable data.

A research method would be to take two groups of children and allow one full access to violence while the other group was fed with “better” material. The drawback with this method is that it would (if true) require the creation of a group of disturbed people.

The next drawback is that the interpretation of the results would also be under question. Are the children being affected by the violence in the games or simply by the long use of computers and/or television?  Would long term exposure for long periods to peaceful activities (flower arrangement?) not lead to an equally a-social development?

This is not to say that I find the regulation of violent computer games to be a wrong goal. I just dislike bad science and the misuse of “scientific data” for political goals.

Posted on by mklang

Harvard Thesis Repository

With so many discussions on Free Culture, Open Access and the problems connected with making academic publishing available outside academia it is surprising how few good places there are to find thesis’ online.

This is why I was happy when Peter Murray-Rust pointed me towards the Harvard College Thesis Repository (a project of Harvard College Free Culture).

Here Harvard students make their senior theses accessible to the world, for the advancement of scholarship and the widening of open access to academic research.

Too many academics still permit publishers to restrict access to their work, needlessly limitingâ??cutting in half, or worseâ??readership, research impact, and research productivity. For more background, check out our op-ed article in The Harvard Crimson.

If you’ve written a thesis in Harvard College, you’re invited to take a step toward open access right here, by uploading your thesis for the world to read. (If you’re heading for an academic career, this can even be a purely selfish moveâ??a first taste of the greater readership and greater impact that comes with open access.)
If you’re interested in what the students at (ahem) the finest university in the world have to say at the culmination of their undergraduate careers, look around.

The FAQ explains much of the process. It is also good to see that they are applying Creative Commons Attribution License

Q. What permissions do I have to grant to free my thesis?

A. To make sure your thesis is always available for scholars to build on, we ask that you give everyone permission to do the things you’d want to be able to do with a scholarly work you liked: download the work, read it, keep copies, share it with other people, and adapt it into fresh works. The specific legal permission we ask for is the Creative Commons Attribution License, the same one required by the world’s leading biology journal PLoS Biology and the other journals of the Public Library of Science.

My only (small) complaint is that I wish the repository was clearer in showing the license terms for their content. I only found it in the faq. Normally I would not bother reading the faq. To increase the usability of the site the terms should be on the download page and preferably on the essay file.
Despite this I think this is an excellent initiative and I would hope that the fact that Harvard has taken a step such as this would work as an incentive for other universities to follow suite.

Posted on by mklang

Congratulations Dr Lilja

Today my friend Dr Lilja successfully defended her PhD thesis “Speakings” of Resistance. Women Politicians Negotiating Discursive Power in Cambodja.

Congratulations!!!

Posted on by mklang

Resisting Science

Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg have written a very nice article entitled “Why do some people resist science?” in which they put forward the interesting discrepency between the status of the scientist and the trustworthiness of the scientist in society. Despite the fact that scientists are proud of their objectivity and method they still have not managed to convince everyone that they are telling the truth.

In a 2005 Pew Trust poll, for instance, 42% of respondents said that they believed that humans and other animals have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.

This means that almost half of the people asked rejected the basic theory of evolution.

But this rejection of science would be mistaken in the end. The community of scientists has a legitimate claim to trustworthiness that other social institutions, such as religions and political movements, lack. The structure of scientific inquiry involves procedures, such as experiments and open debate, that are strikingly successful at revealing truths about the world.

But these results also show something else. They show that no matter how much increased communication is available in society, on a certain level, individuals will not find the truth themselves. They will reject it in favor of  belief. Additionally the over-belief in democracy will lead to the situation where untrained people will “know” better than the trained scientists.

Posted on by mklang

Robot Ethics

Some people seem not to be able to find anything to write about. Me on the other hand I am stuck with the problem of finding too many things fascinating. The topic of Robot Ethics is one which I would love to have time to engage in. I was reminded of this by the Humlab Blog

Peter Asaro will present a lecture on â??Robot Ethicsâ?? in the HUMlab.

This lecture will be an overview of his research at the HUMlab on Robot Ethics, particularly on the ethics of military robots. Peter is one of the new Postdoctoral Fellows at the HUMlab and the Department of Philosophy.

His film Love Machine will be shown in HUMlab at 15:30 on this Friday, June 1.
This is part of the â??Love, War & Robots Film Seriesâ??

Love Machine flyer

Love Machine (2001), directed by Peter Asaro, 110 min,

My fascination with robot ethics is the border between man and machine. When does a machine become complex enough to be granted rights on its own? Some may argue that no matter how sophisticated the software the machine will always be a machine. Fair point. But what happens when we begin to mix tissue in the machine. What happens when we begin to put more foreign objects into the human body. At what stage will the limits between man and machine become blurred enough for us to seriously discuss the limits of the man/machine dichotomy.

I have used some of these questions in my computer ethics courses but I never seem to have the time to explore this more deeply.

Posted on by mklang

About time too…

Via the Resistance Studies blog:

The Alabama Legislature on Monday approved a bill that would pardon Rosa Parks, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists convicted of violating Jim Crow laws in the state. During the â??second Civil Warâ?? in the 1950s and 1960s against desegregation, thousands of African-Americans and white people were arrested while standing up for freedom.

The protesters were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, criminal trespass, inciting riots, loitering and more, as they peacefully marched, staged sit-ins and protested to bring an end to the Southâ??s oppressive Jim Crow laws.

For exercising their rights as American citizens, they unjustly ended up with criminal records.

Recently, some Southern states, including Tennessee and Alabama, have moved to offer pardons to those convicted of acts of civil disobedience during the civil rights movement.

The House and Senate this week passed the Rosa Parks Act, named after the mother of the civil rights movement that would grant pardons to individuals who sought them.

The full text of the legislation is here:

http://alisdb.legislature.state.al.us/acas/searchableinstruments/2006rs/bills/hb592.htm

About time too…

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Bibliographies

Have you seen Bibme? It’s a cool application for creating, handling and saving bibliographies.

BibMe is your one-stop source for all your bibliography needs!  Donâ??t remember all the information for the source you cited? No problem! BibMe allows you to search from a database of millions of entries to find your source and autofill in the information. Or, if you the source in front of you, you can enter your entries in manually. BibMe also offers resources to help you cite your work properly in the â??Citation Guideâ?? section.

In addition to this the bibliography can be exported into the different bibliographic formats. I thought this was a very cool application.

Posted on by mklang