Books

Bah, lazy hypocrites!

Its soon time for me to lecture on plagiarism again. I give this lecture every year to groups of students who are about to write their thesis. The idea is both to help them understand the boundaries between quote, citation, paraphrase & plagiarism and to get them to start thinking about the nature of property in relation to intellectual goods.

Giving this lecture today is aided by the current discussion on copyright and file sharing. In my IT & ethics course I regularly attempt to discuss the problem of file sharing and ask my students what they believe is the moral position of the person who illegally downloads music or films. Usually among my students 80-90% of those who download music do not consider there actions to be morally wrong and nor do they consider themselves to be stealing. The most often used legitimisation of their actions:
1. that they are not depriving anyone of use.
2. the entertainment industry is rich enough.
3. they would not buy that which they download and therefore there is no loss to the industry.

Considering these points it is interesting to attempt to raise awareness about plagiarism. In one way it is pretty easy: if you get caught you will be punished and it is humiliating. But this is not a good starting point since the stress is on not getting caught as opposed to building awareness.

Attempting to discuss student plagiarism is made more difficult recently when two professors have been accused (correctly) of plagiarising others work in their books. One is a professor at the University College of BorÃ¥s who has been sloppy when quoting others his/her own defence other are harsher and call it plagiarism (DN 29/4 â?? 2006)

The second is a professor at the University of Göteborg who has stolen other peopleâ??s works and included them in his work. The excuses for this theft was that the book was written under a very short deadline and the works from which he borrowed material are included in the bibliography.

We would never accept these excuses from our own students then why would these professors even think that the excuses would work for them?

Posted on by mklang

Rainy Sundays

Its almost a cliché. Its a rainy Sunday afternoon! The good news is that a large second hand bookstore nearby (Röde Orm in Haga) was having a major sale 10 kr per book. Most of the good stuff was gone but I came away with Lars-Ingvar Sörenson licenciate thesis from 1997 entitled Naturrätt, egendomsrätt och praxis (Natural rights, Property rights
and praxis). I am looking forward to reading it.

It begins with a quote from Sitting Bull’s speech 1875 where he speaks about his enemy and says, amongs other things:

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege. This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. (online version included here)

What can be better on a rainy sunday?
Posted on by mklang

Hi-Tech Trash

Are you old enough to remember asking why you would want or need a mobile phone? How many have you had so far? How many phones will the average person have in a lifetime? And what will the cumulative effect be?

The picture above of discarded mobile phones in a landfill, Orlando, Florida, USA, 2004. (photo by Chris Jordan via I Txt, Therefore I am) click here for a larger image.

This is scary stuff and requires more examination so I am sure that I will get back to this subject soon. In the meantime check out some of these reading tips.

Check out:

Giles Slade “Made to Break – Technology and Obsolescence in America” Harvard UP.

Elizabeth Grossman “High Tech Trash – Digital Devices, Hidden Toxins, and Human Health” Island Press (forthcoming)

Elizabeth Grossman “Where computers go to die — and kill“, Salon.com
Elizabeth Grossman “How to recycle your computer“, Salon.com

(Litterature tips via Question Technology)

Posted on by mklang

Life after Phd

A newly started blog called Deep Thought, (there is a name that demands living up to!) has written a list of things to do after the Phd. The list applies equally well to those of us not doing a phd in Anthropology.

1. Reaquaint yourself with your family, but be especially careful of partners/spouses/parents/friends/children who have aged five years since you last noticed them.
2. Get drunk (it doesnâ??t matter if you have a headache tomorrow)
3. Clean the fridge
4. Clean the house
5. Have sex (not necessarily in this order!)
6. Read something NOT published by Routledge, Sage, Berg, etc.
7. Change your email signature to include â??Drâ??
8. Switch the computer off before 5pm every day
9. Lie in every Sunday
10. Give birthday/christmas presents WITHOUT lecturing people about â??gift exchangeâ??
11. Move textbooks into spare bedroom
12. Accidentally leave your latest published article on the coffee table for when your mother-in-law visits

From Deep Thought.

Posted on by mklang

Phone Tracker

The technology to track via mobile phones has been around for a long time. Despite this, most telecoms have been slow to offer this ‘service’ to a general public. Most probably this delay has its background in the need for more sofisticated administrative and technical solutions rather than ethical questionmarks.

The telecoms company Sprint has now begun to offer its Family Locator service

Sprint Family Locator gives you and your family peace of mind in the palm of your hand.

Locate Your Children in real-time, from either a registered “Parent” mobile handset or from the web.

Safety Checks let you know that your children have arrived at home or school on time.

For Only $9.99 a Month have quick, easy, and secure access to the location of up to 4 Sprint-Nextel handsets.

The emphasis is on paranoid parenting (Furedi 2001) i.e. to scare parents and create insecurity so that a need for a solution. This makes accepting the solution offered (in this case the family locator) is the only sensible thing to do. Never mind the fact that spying (even on your own children) is wrong. That those spied upon will devise creative solutions to avoid being spied upon. And that all systems such as these once implemented will be abused through some form of function creep.

Earlier similar posts: Spying on Cars and Privacy, GPS and Children.

Posted on by mklang

Scientific Publication in Europe

In the report Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe (full report here), Commissioned by Directorate-General for Research (January 2006) the following recommendations are made:

A1. Guarantee public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication.
A2. Aim at a ‘level-playing field’ in terms of business models in publishing
A3. ‘Extended Quality’ rankings of scientific journals
A4. Guarantee perennial access to scholarly journal digital archives
A5. Foster interoperable tools to improve knowledge, visibility, accessibility and dissemination
B1. Promote pro-competitive pricing strategies
B2. Scrutinize future significant mergers
B3. Promote the development of electronic publications
C1. Setting-up an advisory committee
C2. Further investigation

The market for scientific publications has been under development for a long time. Now the situation we have arrived at is warped. The writers apply for grants (often government grants) to research and write. Sometimes the writers even apply for grants to publish their material. When the material is published the libraries (often funded by public money) then pay to buy back the books or subscribe to the journals.

Very often the system implies that public funding pays for access to the same knowledge several times over. This is a subvention of the scientific publishing industry.

In addition to this the university text book industry has grown into a virutal monopoly where the major players control almost entire markets depending upon subject area. Mergers between the companies have created massive media companies that control the publication of university text books. This is reflected in the price of the litterature.

Posted on by mklang

Public Domain Comic

Law books are traditionally text heavy with little or no pictures. Very rarely including humor or light entertainment. Therefore it is great to see what law professors can do when they want to change this!

The Center for the Public Domain have created a cool comic explaining copyright and the public domain. It takes the form of classic horror comics and describes the adventures (or misadventures) of the hero Akiko, the documentary film maker. I thought it was geat! So go look at “Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law” by Aoki, Boyle & Jenkins

Read it online or download it here.

Posted on by mklang

then there were five days left…

Cool – I can literally feel the tension. Tomorrow I am giving a guest lecture on the Impact of Internet Technology on Human Rights which is fun but as any good supervisor will tell you – this is not the time for fun…

The thesis is still swelling – maybe I should see a doctor? Sorry that was an aweful joke. Today has added 1363 words to make the messy total at 94 881. This late addition was the addition of a larger conclusion in the form of implications of this work.

I also received an interesting book package today including Rampton & Stauber’s book “Trust us, we’re experts” – more info here, and the incredibly cool book by Torbjörn Tännsjö “Du skall understundom dräpa!” (translated: thou shallt sometimes kill!). Tännsjö is a very interesting professor of philosophy at Stockholm University.

Posted on by mklang

Da Vinci Code in Court

Two of the three authors of “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” are suing the publisher of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” for for breach of UK copyright in the UK editions of the book. Today through a series of takeovers Random House is the publisher of both books.

“The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” was published in 1982 and claimed that Jesus did not die on the cross, but married Mary Magdalene and had a child by her.

The legal problem is that an idea for a book is not itself protected, but the actual content of a book is. So its not copyright infringement if two books appear with the same idea as long as they dont directly copy or adapt the earlier text.

So both books are about the same thing – not copyright violation. But what about the architecture of the book? It may be plagiarism but is it copyright violation to describe a similar scene in two different books?

Posted on by mklang

Book Cover Art

Designing book covers is a difficult and underestimated art. To anyone who has finally finished a book the ordeal of book cover design is awful. Naturally if there is an art then there must be a group of afficionados & critics. Enter Book Covers, a site dedicated to viewing and discussing book covers.

I managed to write this post without even attempting a joke about judging books by their covers!

Posted on by mklang