China Issues Rules to Get Tough on Academic Integrity; Reuters, May 30, 2018

Reuters via New York Times; China Issues Rules to Get Tough on Academic Integrity

"China has issued new guidelines to enforce academic integrity in science that include plans to "record and assess" the conduct of scientists and institutions and punish anyone guilty of misconduct, state news agency Xinhua reported.

The guidelines, released on Wednesday by the ruling Communist Party and the State Council, or cabinet, prohibit plagiarism, fabrication of data and research conclusions, ghost-writing and peer review manipulation, according to Xinhua."

Cupcake wars: Blogger sues Food Network over snow globe recipe video; Washington Post, June 5, 2017

Derek Hawkins, Washington Post; Cupcake wars: Blogger sues Food Network over snow globe recipe video

"Elizabeth LaBau’s holiday cupcake recipe was so popular it crashed her food blog.

It was clever, after all. LaBau, who runs SugarHero.com, had figured out a way to make edible snow globe cupcakes by coating small balloons in sheets of gelatin and letting them harden into translucent domes.

About three weeks after she published her tutorial, LaBau alleges, Food Network produced a how-to video on snow globe cupcakes that was so similar that it constituted copyright infringement."

As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating; New York Times, May 29, 2017

Jess Bidgood and Jeremy B. Merrill, New York Times; 

As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating

"In interviews, professors and students said the causes were not hard to pin down.

To some students drawn to the classes, coding does not come easily. The coursework can be time-consuming. Troves of code online, on sites like GitHub, may have answers to the very assignment the student is wrestling with, posted by someone who previously took the course.

“You’ve got kids who were struggling with spending a third of their time on their problem sets with the option to copy from the internet,” said Jackson Wagner, who took the Harvard course in 2015 and was not accused of copying. “That’s the reason why people cheat.”

Complicating matters is the collaborative ethos among programmers, which encourages code-sharing in ways that might not be acceptable in a class. Professors also frequently allow students to discuss problems among themselves, but not to share actual code, a policy that some students say creates confusion about what constitutes cheating."

‘Remix’ or plagiarism? Artists battle over a Chicago mural of Michelle Obama.; Washington Post, April 24, 2017

Derek Hawkins, Washington Post; ‘Remix’ or plagiarism? Artists battle over a Chicago mural of Michelle Obama.

"Devins’s mural had only been up for a matter of hours when word got back to Mesfin. She objected to the use of her work without permission in a widely circulated Instagram post that triggered a wave of outrage online, saying she felt like Devins stole her piece.

“I was very disheartened when he did that,” Mesfin told The Washington Post. “There’s a common code among all artists that you can get inspired by someone’s work but you have to pay homage and you have to give credit for it.”...

Devins said he never intended to take credit for Mesfin’s creation, which itself was based off a portrait in the New York Times by photographer Collier Schorr. Mesfin credited Schorr’s work on her Instagram post...

Devins said he came across Mesfin’s drawing on the sharing site Pinterest and was unable to track down the artist. He explained his decision to use the image without permission in an analogy, saying he was creating a “remix” of a piece of art in the way that a DJ remixes songs."

Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle; Ars Technica, 2/11/17

David Kravets, Ars Technica; 

Oracle refuses to accept pro-Google “fair use” verdict in API battle

"Google successfully made its case to a jury last year that its use of Java APIs in Android was "fair use." A San Francisco federal jury rejected Oracle's claim that the mobile system infringed Oracle's copyrights.

But Oracle isn't backing down. Late Friday, the company appealed the high-profile verdict to a federal appeals court."

The Daily 202: Monica Crowley losing White House job shows that the rules of politics still apply for Donald Trump; Washington Post, 1/17/17

James Hohmann, Washington Post; 

The Daily 202: Monica Crowley losing White House job shows that the rules of politics still apply for Donald Trump

"A steady stream of stories since the weekend before last has revealed pretty egregious examples of apparent plagiarism over a period of several years, from a 2012 book to her PhD dissertation and op-eds.

I have little doubt that Barack Obama and George W. Bush would have immediately terminated someone who did what Crowley appears to have done if that person was up for a similar posting (with a role in speechwriting and drafting statements in the name of the president).

There are many precedents: Plagiarism doomed Joe Biden’s 1988 presidential campaign, and just three years ago Montana Sen. John Walsh (D) ended his campaign for a full term after it came out that he’d plagiarized a paper for the Army War College...

Trump continued to stand by her even as publisher HarperCollins announced that it would no longer sell Crowley’s book and more stories detailed fresh examples.


Finally, because a handful of reporters doggedly pursued the story, the pressure became too much. Yesterday afternoon, Crowley sent a statement to the Washington Times to say that “after much reflection” she’s decided to stay in New York. She made no mention of plagiarism."

Mexico president Enrique Peña Nieto plagiarized thesis for law degree: report; Associated Press in Mexico City via Guardian, 8/22/16

Associated Press in Mexico City via Guardian; Mexico president Enrique Peña Nieto plagiarized thesis for law degree: report:

"President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico heavily plagiarized the thesis for his law degree, according to an investigation by a local news outlet...

It said 29% of the thesis was material lifted from other works, including 20 paragraphs copied word-for-word from a book written by former president Miguel de la Madrid without citation or mention in the bibliography...

In 2006, a scholar at the Brookings Institution found that now-Russian president Vladimir Putin in earning his graduate degree had copied pages of material from a book written by two American professors.

In 2012, Hungary’s President Pal Schmitt – whose role was largely ceremonial – resigned after a scandal over his doctoral dissertation.

Earlier this year, a German university decided to let the country’s defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, keep her doctorate after plagiarized passages were found in her dissertation."

"Vetting"; robrogers.com, 8/10/16

Rob Rogers, robrogers.com, Brewed on Grant:

"Vetting"

By Russian Standards, Melania Trump Would Be a Plagiarism Amateur; New York Times, 7/22/16

Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times; By Russian Standards, Melania Trump Would Be a Plagiarism Amateur:

"A study published in the newspaper Novaya Gazeta found that out of 450 members of Parliament, about 200 claimed advanced degrees and at least 49 had been accused of plagiarism, including the speaker. (He denied it.)

Dissernet started work in 2013 after a political appointee with a limited academic record was tapped to lead a prestigious mathematics school. Academics began pouring over his history dissertation line by line, which inspired Mr. Rostovtsev to write software to automate the process.

The Dissernet group knew that an electronic synopsis of every doctoral thesis was posted online in Russia. Its software selects a thesis and compares it with all others in the system. If there is more than a 50 percent overlap, the computer flags the material and a volunteer compares both full works manually.

The software makes comparisons 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and a band of about 50 volunteers does the rest. The results are published on Dissernet.org."

Melania Trump Plagiarized Her Convention Speech From Michelle Obama; Huffington Post, 7/19/16

Christina Wilkie, Huffington Post; Melania Trump Plagiarized Her Convention Speech From Michelle Obama:

"Trump communications adviser Jason Miller, in a response early Tuesday, acknowledged that Melania Trump plagiarized “fragments” of her speech and referred to a “team of writers,” essentially refuting her claim that she wrote the speech.

“In writing her beautiful speech, Melania’s team of writers took notes on her life’s inspirations, and in some instances included fragments that reflected her own thinking,” Miller said in a statement. “Melania’s immigrant experience and love for America shone through in her speech, which made it such a success.”"

PPS review of Hamlet's credentials details 'inaccuracies' in his resume, lacks recommendations; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 7/2/16

Molly Born, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; PPS review of Hamlet's credentials details 'inaccuracies' in his resume, lacks recommendations:

"Anthony Hamlet was sworn in Friday as superintendent of the Pittsburgh Public Schools, and in conversations with reporters, he began outlining his vision of the district’s future. But he also had to weather one last review of his past: an independent look at his credentials that detailed several “inaccuracies” in his resume.

Laurel Brandstetter, a former state prosecutor, conducted the review in June after the resume raised questions concerning Mr. Hamlet’s claims about school performance and for wording taken without attribution from other sources. Her report confirmed those discrepancies, but did not include recommendations about whether the school board should take any action.

School district solicitor Ira Weiss’ office on Friday released the 30-page report, plus appendices, via a Right To Know request by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette...

More than half of the report included details of the investigation, a list of relevant policies and a line-by-line “factual summary.” In her 9 1/2-page analysis of the data, Ms. Brandstetter found a resume “fraught with errors” relating to Mr. Hamlet’s employment dates and inaccuracies in school grades, graduation rates and suspension rates at one Florida school he led. She said the problems were “primarily the result of typos, inaccurate verbiage, and lack of clarity or precision.”"

Superintendent; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 6/22/16

Rob Rogers, Brewed on Grant, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Superintendent

Start over, city schools: The Pittsburgh Public Schools cannot function with Anthony Hamlet as superintendent; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 6/10/16

Editorial Board, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Start over, city schools: The Pittsburgh Public Schools cannot function with Anthony Hamlet as superintendent:

"Anthony Hamlet has some of the qualities that Pittsburgh requires in its next superintendent of schools, including a drive to turn around low-performing schools and the realization that alternatives to suspension are needed to address discipline issues. Mr. Hamlet, however, also has qualities that the Pittsburgh Public Schools does not need at this delicate stage. They include a slippery relationship with facts, a willingness to plagiarize and an overly defensive attitude. He must not become the next superintendent of the Pittsburgh Public Schools.

The process was flawed from the start...

The problems with Mr. Hamlet’s credentials are substantive — and the implications for keeping him here are profound. It is impossible to move forward under a leader who misrepresents himself and prefers recalcitrance to transparency. He has more than gotten off to a bad start. He has proved himself unworthy of holding one of the most important positions in the Pittsburgh region. He should withdraw as the next superintendent, a job he is set to begin on July 1.

Lynda Wrenn is the first board member to express doubts about Mr. Hamlet, declaring Thursday that if the plagiarism charges hold true, she will call for a new search. So far, other board members have hedged or stood by its chosen candidate, an understandable position with so much invested in him.

But these are elected officials, responsible to the citizens of Pittsburgh. When the board meets today in a special session about the controversy, it must take a deep breath and realize that the situation has become untenable. If Mr. Hamlet does not resign, his contract must be dissolved. Start another search immediately, this time with a professional search firm.

The board’s failure at this essential task calls its leadership into question, and will renew calls for legislation to dissolve the elected school board and move to an appointed system.

There is only one lesson Mr. Hamlet can teach the students of the Pittsburgh Public Schools now: Own your mistakes, accept the consequences and move on."

The Craziest Black Market in Russia: It’s not for oil or guns. It’s for plagiarized dissertations. And every self-respecting doctor, lawyer, and politician in the country wants one; Slate, 5/22/16

Leon Neyfakh, Slate; The Craziest Black Market in Russia: It’s not for oil or guns. It’s for plagiarized dissertations. And every self-respecting doctor, lawyer, and politician in the country wants one.:

"Many of the alleged fraudsters are politicians. Some are judges. Others are prosecutors, police officials, and heads of universities; one was a bureaucrat in charge of overseeing Russia’s circus industry. In the past few years alone, there have been credible allegations of dissertation plagiarism made against Russia’s minister of culture, the governor of St. Petersburg, and the head of the country’s top federal investigating authority. Just in the past month, copy-and-pasting has been discovered in the dissertations of the deputy finance minister of the Russian republic of Mordovia and a government adviser on justice who is the putative author of a thesis comparing legal principles in Russia and the West.

In all these cases, the alleged fraud was exposed by members of a volunteer organization that calls itself “Dissernet”—the “website” Naryshkin referred to so dismissively. Started in early 2013 by a handful of scientists and journalists, the group has undertaken the task of identifying and publicly shaming government functionaries, academic administrators, and members of Russia’s so-called elite who allegedly hold advanced degrees they did not earn through legitimate means. Using software that looks for sections of text that resemble previously published work, Dissernet has, to date, identified roughly 5,600 suspected plagiarists and published damning reports on about 1,300 of them. In an exposé posted earlier this year, Dissernet showed that 1 in 9 members of the Russian State Duma—the parliamentary body that Naryshkin presides over—had received their diplomas using dissertations that contained large portions of other people’s work and that had, most likely, been purchased from ghostwriters...

While academic fraud exists all over the world, the pervasiveness of the deception in Russia is unparalleled, as is the extent to which it is tolerated. As MIT historian Loren Graham points out, even Vladimir Putin has been accused, in a 2006 investigation by the Brookings Institution, of plagiarizing parts of his Ph.D. thesis in economics."

Cassandra Clare Created a Fantasy Realm and Aims to Maintain Her Rule; New York Times, 4/23/16

Penelope Green, New York Times; Cassandra Clare Created a Fantasy Realm and Aims to Maintain Her Rule:

"The place Ms. Clare occupies in publishing — and the work she does to keep herself there — is emblematic of the burdens and boons fan culture bestows on so many fantasy authors. Deeply possessive of the characters Ms. Clare has created, the fans can turn on her for plot directions they don’t approve of, or for the ways in which the television show diverges from the books. (Ms. Clare has no role in the TV series.)

Fantitlement, as this phenomenon is known, has raised her fortunes while at times it has bedeviled her, as it has so many of her peers. Laura Miller, a books and culture columnist at Slate who has written about fan culture, likened Ms. Clare’s experiences to that of George R. R. Martin, the “Game of Thrones” author whose fans grew so angry at his publishing pace that some created a blog, “Finish the Book, George.”"

Crosswords and copyright; Washington Post, 3/15/16

David Post, Washington Post; Crosswords and copyright:

"What’s interesting, to me, in all this, aside from the light it sheds on puzzle construction, is that it illustrates how “plagiarism,” though it is often conflated with copyright infringement, actually covers very different territory and involves very different interests. A crossword’s “theme” is probably one element of the puzzle-creator’s work that is not protected by copyright; copyright law doesn’t protect “ideas,” only the expression of ideas, and a puzzle’s theme is, in my opinion, just such an unprotectable “idea,” free for the taking (as far as copyright law is concerned). But it’s precisely this kind of taking — theme theft — that gets the angriest response from those in the puzzle-writing business.

This has a direct parallel in academic writing. There, too, the plagiarism norms focus on a kind of borrowing that the law of copyright deems permissible: taking another’s ideas or expression without attribution. Nobody in the academic world will complain if you use their ideas or quote their work — in fact, that’s very much the whole point of the enterprise. But to do so without citation — that will get you into the hottest of hot water. [Just ask Doris Kearns Goodwin, or Stephen Ambrose or Joseph Ellis]. Yet copyright law gives an author no enforceable right to have his/her work properly attributed to him/her — a fact that surprised the hell out of many of my law prof colleagues when they first learned of it (insofar as proper attribution was really the only thing they cared about)."

A Science Journal Invokes ‘the Creator,’ and Science Pushes Back; Wired.com, 3/3/16

Madison Kotack, Wired.com; A Science Journal Invokes ‘the Creator,’ and Science Pushes Back:

"After a couple days of getting batted around in social media and comments sections, the journal retracted the whole paper. No editors from PLoS ONE responded to requests for comment.

Since PLoS ONE is open-source, it’s tempting to wonder if this kind of mistake calls into question the quality of all open-access scientific journals? PLoS ONE‘s website describes its editorial and peer-review practices, but also says that it can publish faster than old-school journals because it leaves out “subjective assessments of significance or scope to focus on technical, ethical and scientific rigor.”

Yet somehow Creationism got past peer review.

On the other hand, the old big-dog journals have their problems, too—plagiarism, errors, and so on. “I don’t think this will mean anything for open access journals, and it shouldn’t, because it happens at top journals, too,” says Jonathan Eisen, chair of PLoS Biology‘s advisory board and a big-time advocate for open-access (though unaffiliated with PLoS ONE)."

Widespread Nature of Chapel Hill's Academic Fraud Is Laid Bare; Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/23/14

Jack Stripling, Chronicle of Higher Education; Widespread Nature of Chapel Hill's Academic Fraud Is Laid Bare:

"An academic-fraud scandal at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill took root under a departmental secretary and die-hard Tar Heel fan, who was egged on by athletics advisers to create no-show classes that would keep under­prepared and unmotivated players eligible. Over nearly two decades, professors, coaches, and administrators either participated in the scheme or overlooked it, undercutting the core values of one of the nation’s premier public universities.

Such are the sobering findings of an eight-month investigation led by Kenneth L. Wainstein, a longtime official of the U.S. Justice Department who was hired by the university to get to the bottom of a scandal that came to light four years ago."

Read this: Jane Goodall caught in plagiarism scandal; Washington Post, 3/20/13

Amy Argetsinger, Washington Post; Read this: Jane Goodall caught in plagiarism scandal: "Jane Goodall, the groundbreaking primatologist and wildlife-documentary superstar, is the latest high-profile author caught in a plagiarism scandal — and this one is really embarrassing, reports Steve Levingston. Among the passages her new book apparently rips off (as discovered by a critic for the Washington Post) are ones stolen from Wikipedia, some marketing material for an organic-tea company, and an astrology Web site."

Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Dylan Quotes for His Book; New York Times, 7/30/12

Julie Bosman, New York Times; Jonah Lehrer Resigns From The New Yorker After Making Up Dylan Quotes for His Book:

"An article in Tablet magazine revealed that in his best-selling book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” Mr. Lehrer had fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan, one of the most closely studied musicians alive. Only last month, Mr. Lehrer had publicly apologized for taking some of his previous work from The Wall Street Journal, Wired and other publications and recycling it in blog posts for The New Yorker, acts of recycling that his editor called “a mistake.”"