March 2002 - Air-L - lists.aoir.org

FW: <toc>--Cheat-detection software (Economist.com)
by Michael Gurstein 24 Mar '02

24 Mar '02

Please note that my comments on "Plagiarism and Napster" were meant as a commentary on developments such as below, rather than on any particular contribution to this list and particularly not Lori Kendall's very innovative approaches to the matter as outlined in her recent post. MG --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 2002 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group --------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=1033832 Mar 14th 2002 Economist.com Cheat-detection software Plagiarise. Let no one else's work evade your eyes A window of opportunity for intellectual cheats is closing fast EVER since Al Gore invented it, the Internet has been a paradise for those with a creative attitude to facts. Students, for example, commission and sell essays with such ease there that online "paper mills" devoted to this trade are one of the few dotcom business models still thriving. With a few clicks of a mouse, a student can outsource any academic chore to "research" sites such as Gradesaver.com or the Evil House of Cheat. One market opportunity, however, frequently creates another. The past few months have seen a rapid rise in interest in software designed to catch the cheats. The subscriber base of Turnitin, a leading anti-plagiarism software house based in Oakland, California, has risen by 25% since the beginning of the year. Around 150,000 students in America alone are under its beady electronic eye. And in Britain, the Joint Information Systems Committee, the unit responsible for advising the country's universities on information technology, has tested the firm's software in five colleges. If all goes well, every university lecturer in the country will soon be able to vet his students' submissions with it. Turnitin's software chops each paper submitted for scrutiny into small pieces of text. The resulting "digital fingerprint" is compared, using statistical techniques originally designed to analyse brain waves (John Barrie, the firm's founder, was previously a biophysicist), to more than a billion documents that have been fingerprinted in a similar fashion. These include the contents of online paper mills, the classics of literature and the firm's own archive of all submitted term papers, as well as a snapshot of the current contents of the World Wide Web. Whenever a matching pattern is found, the software makes a note. After highlighting instances of replication, or obvious paraphrasing (according to Turnitin, some 30% of submitted papers are "less than original"), the computer running the software returns the annotated document to the teacher who originally submitted it--leaving him with the final decision on what is and is not permissible. Which teachers and institutions will choose to employ such software? Past research has shown that, perhaps surprisingly, academic dishonesty correlates with high academic achievement. Nor is public exposure of widespread cheating likely to burnish a university's reputation. Universities with the highest-achieving students and the most unsullied reputations may therefore have the most to lose from anti-plagiarism software. Indeed, a curious pattern has emerged among Turnitin's clients: good universities, such as Duke, Rutgers and Cornell, employ it. Those that like to think of themselves as top-notch, such as Princeton, Yale and Stanford, do not. According to Dr Barrie, "You apply our technology at Harvard and it would be like a nuclear bomb going off." Explosions are happening lower down the academic ladder, as well. In January Christine Pelton, a biology teacher in Kansas, was forced out of her job for using Turnitin's software. Just before Christmas she had run 118 essays though the mill, and found that 28 had been plagiarised. Naturally, she failed the cheats. But rather than thank her, the parents of some of those cheats reacted with indignation. They forced the local school board to order her to pass the offenders, and she resigned in protest. Clearly, shooting the messenger has not yet gone out of fashion. http://www.economist.com/science/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=1033832 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright © 2002 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group --------------------------------------------------------------------------- *******

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Guice:Looking Backward and Forward at the Internet
by Jay Robert Hauben 24 Mar '02

24 Mar '02

The URL for a version of the John Guice article, Looking Backward and Forward at the Internet is: http://www.slis.indiana.edu/TIS/abstracts/ab14-3/guice.html Jay

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Guice:
by Jay Robert Hauben 24 Mar '02

24 Mar '02

Hi, Those interested in Internet history and historiography might value the article by Jon Guice: Looking Backward and Forward at the Internet. The Information Society v14, n3 (July-September 1998), pp. 201-211. Take care. Jay

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Re: Internet Histories
by Jay Hauben 24 Mar '02

24 Mar '02

Radhika, I'm sorry I didn't see this earlier. > Can anyone share with me how many kinds of Internet Histories have > been written, told, narrated - sources, citations etc? > > thanks, > r > ___________ > Radhika Gajjala Are you familiar with Netizens: On the History of Usenet and the Internet by Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997? It was one of the earliest efforts to document the origins of the developments which led to the Internet. It takes a social prespective that is unusal for the US. But European researchers and also historiograghers like John Guice and Roy Rosenweig (see below) have found it valuable. It has been online since Jan 1994 at http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ In the December 1998 issue of the _American Historical Review_ Rosenzweig Observed that currently there is no mention of the Internet and little mention of computers in history books. His essay on "Writing Internet History" suggests that this will and should change. In his review essay Rosenzweig looks at 4 books about the history and development of the Internet and discusses them and the significance they have to developing a historiography of the Internet. The books he includes are "Where Wizards Stay Up Late", "Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986", "The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America", and "Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet". (He also mentions a few other books in his comments or notes.) The review essay looks at the social context of the Internet and of Usenet and recognizes that this is a vital aspect to consider. He says about "Netizens", it offers an interpretive perspective that should be central to any future Net history. It argues "...that the Internet has created a new kind of citizen, the 'netizens,' who they define as 'people who decide to devote time and effort into making the Net, this new part of the world, a better place -- a regenerative and vibrant community and resource.' The Haubens see the democratic nature of the network growing out of its grass-roots source in the people who created Usenet." I will look for the reference to John Guice's essay. Take care. Jay

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RE: [Air-l] RE: Plagiarism and Napster
by Kendall, Lori 23 Mar '02

23 Mar '02

Michael Gurstein wrote: > However, doesn't all this discussion about various mechanical ways of > capturing the plargiarizing miscreants say some interesting things about > the state of academe where: > * student assessment is so ritualized and depersonalized that > digitally encoded performances (e.g. student essays/reports) can be > substituted one for the other (apparently seamlessly) subject only to > mechanical (policing) review ... > * assessments are of student presentation/re-presentation of > infinitely reproducible (and in a digital age) completely depersonalized > "information" rather than the rather more context (and individual) > specific "knowledge". Actually, my discussion of how I detect plagiarism, and that of other people on the list specifically has to do with assessments which are *not* "ritualized and depersonalized". > Surely what is important is that students can construct a useful > argument, judiciously select and cogently deploy information from the > infinite information warehouse on the Net (or elsewhere) rather than find > this or that clever way of restating (in their own words) whatever is the > content of the subject they are discussing. Students' ability to construct an argument is exactly what is at issue. The examples of plagiarism I have encountered are not merely students plugging in others' words and then constructing an argument around them, but borrowing others' arguments whole cloth and thereby *not* demonstrating skills or knowledge. I am able to catch this precisely because I design assignments that encourage students to gather data, apply theory, and work with ideas in order to better understand them. So I don't really see how you can read this discussion as somehow reflecting a degraded state of academe, which is how your argument came across. And while the discussion may have centered on "mechanics," the underlying pedagogical issues go well beyond that. My original purposes in designing assignments the way I do were pedagogical; it is a side benefit that those assignments are also difficult to plagiarize. In addition, I don't think it takes much at all in terms of time or resources to detect plagiarism and to get students to understand the difference between gathering others' words and synthesizing something out of them on the one hand, and representing others' thoughts as their own, on the other. It could well be that I am not catching all of the plagiarism in my classes, but I am relatively confident that I am, and almost entirely through assignment design. _________________________________ Lori Kendall Assistant Professor of Sociology Purchase College-SUNY lori.kendall(a)purchase.edu

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More Spam
by Ellis Godard 23 Mar '02

23 Mar '02

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RE: plagiarism
by Kendall, Lori 23 Mar '02

23 Mar '02

This is a bit long. In answer to the last question first -- if a student downloads *anything* and turns it in for an assignment, I expect them to tell me where they got it. In most cases, I would only allow them to use material from online if they were also analyzing that material and writing something additional about that material. Purchase College has recently rewritten their plagiarism policy in response to a perceived increase in the amount of plagiarism in classes. In my Classical Social Theory class last semester, 4 out of 40 students turned in papers that included some plagiarized material. (In one case, half the paper was downloaded uncredited from a website; the others included less material, and one student credited some websites and not others.) The semester before that, in my Computers and Culture class, I also had four plagiarized submissions (2 from the same person) out of only 25 students. In that group, most were entire downloaded papers, some with slight alterations. One was a Salon.com article! To discourage this, and to make it easier for me to spot instances of plagiarism (as well as for other pedagogical reasons), I structure my classes so that students do several writing assignments over the course of the semester. I almost never assign "library research" topics or traditional "term papers." As part of each assignment, which they receive in writing, I require that they use (quote from or reference) a set number of readings from the course, usually at least three. A typical assignment has them gathering original data of some sort (doing an interview, looking at a website) and then analyzing their data using the readings and theories presented in class. I usually have them turn in their original materials as well. (For instance, in my popular culture class, they just did analyses of magazine advertisements and attached the ads they analyzed to the paper.) In the case of Classical Social Theory, I paired each classical work (by Durkheim, Weber, and Marx) with a modern work which used that theoretical perspective. These strategies generally prevent my students from finding entire papers which meet the criteria of the assignment. Any paper which fails to complete the requirements of the assignment, fails to cite class materials, or has very different writing styles in differen portions of the paper, sets off my plagiarism "alarm" and I start doing online searches for material from the paper. (If you would like tips on this, feel free to ask, but I don't do anything fancy -- I just use search engines.) Purchase College does not have fraternities. At UC Davis, where I taught previously, we had a problem with fraternity "paper banks." Those can be harder to catch unless you regularly vary your class assignments in some way. Individually-tailored papers, which can be purchased online, would also be harder to catch, but I don't believe most of my students have the financial resources to devote to that -- I guess if they do, I don't know it! I will be interested to hear what experiences other people are having with this. ___________________________________ Lori Kendall Assistant Professor of Sociology Purchase College-SUNY lori.kendall(a)purchase.edu

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follow-up on trolling post
by Susan Herring 23 Mar '02

23 Mar '02

FYI, the paper on trolling that I mentioned last week is now available on the web as a downloadable postscript file from: http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/trolling.ps It is currently (as of March 2002) under consideration for publication in The Information Society. Please do not direct any further individual requests for the paper to me, unless you have a problem with the URL. I'm happy to get email from you with reactions to the paper, of course. >A related term is "flame bait", which Netlingo.com defines as: >An intentionally inflammatory posting in a newsgroup or discussion >group designed to elicit a strong reaction thereby creating a flame war. In our paper, I and my co-authors distinguish between "trolling" and "flame bait" -- although the two often produce similar outcomes -- in that trolling involves an element of disingenuity or deception. The troll presents him/herself as interested in legitimate discussion, when in fact their motives are fundamentally uncooperative. The flamer need make no such pretense. >>ps on trolls: Guillaume Latzko-Toth, who I think is still on this list, >>gave an interesting paper at the Lawrence Kansas AIR which (iirc) talked >>about the rise of software-agent trolls inside IRC, much more >>sophisticated than the USENET agent-trolls which I think still roam to and >>fro. A really neat topic for research: what happens when human and >>non-human trolls interact, I wonder? Do they? >Yup. Kibo and Serdar Argic bumped metaphorical heads more than once, if I >recall correctly.(Assuming you accept the definition of kibo as a troll, >which is arguable either way.) Plus, there's the people who would mention >"turkey" in posts deliberately to trigger Serdar, which would be a human >troll using a bot as its trolling agent. Is any of this documented? I'd like to learn more about both sets of observations. Thanks in advance to anyone who can provide specific references. In addition to the trolling research, I'm currently conducting research on relevance violations (apparent non-sequiturs) in synchronous chat interactions. My data include examples of humans interacting with bots, where the "authenticity" of the bot's interaction (i.e., how human- like it is) is assessed in terms of the relevance of its conversational responses. Surprisingly, the bots' responses are often no more relevant than those of the humans -- and this is not because the bots are highly sophisticated. Rather the norms of interaction in the (human) chat environments (IRC, MUDs, MOOs) involve what I call "loosened relevance" -- which is a polite way of saying that a lot of what the participants say doesn't relate to what was said before. This evidence suggests that humans and bots might well interact (in certain online contexts, in certain ways) such that the former don't realize they are interacting with the latter. It seems plausible to me that trolling is one of those behaviors for which bots could pass as human, since trolling involves relevance violations (think of Lachlan's more "off the wall" posts as recent examples). Regards, Susan ============================================ Susan C. Herring, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Information Science Adjunct Associate Professor of Linguistics Fellow, Center for Social Informatics Fellow, Center for Research on Learning and Technology Indiana University, Bloomington http://www.slis.indiana.edu/Faculty/herring/ ============================================

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Re: first amendment and posting policy
by eszterlists＠netscape.net 23 Mar '02

23 Mar '02

Gina, thanks for clarifying my clarification.:) You're right, in addition to the free-speech guarantee of the First Amendment against governmental interference it is a guarantee also against government interference with the right of association. But that still pertains to government interference. Eszter -- __________________________________________________________________ Your favorite stores, helpful shopping tools and great gift ideas. Experience the convenience of buying online with Shop@Netscape! http://shopnow.netscape.com/ Get your own FREE, personal Netscape Mail account today at http://webmail.netscape.com/

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Internet history references
by William Stewart 23 Mar '02

23 Mar '02

Folks - as well, the following page lists several online references on Internet history: http://www.livinginternet.com/i/im_hist.htm >Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 18:20:06 -0500 >To: air-l(a)aoir.org >From: William Stewart <billstew(a)livinginternet.com> >Subject: Re: [Air-l] Internet histories? > > >The site http://livinginternet.com/ provides an extensive history of the Internet. Developed over the last seven years, the site has been reviewed and benefited from the input of dozens of people who helped create the Internet, some of which have provided comments on the site listed here: > http://livinginternet.com/tcomments.htm >and copied below: > >"Most interesting and ambitious." >Paul Baran, developer of packet switching. > >"It looks great: simple, easy, correct! Great resource!" >Robert Cailliau, helped develop the world wide web. > >"One of the most comprehensive sites devoted to the Internet and its history." >Vinton Cerf, co-designer of the Internet protocol TCP/IP. > >"Interesting and useful site! Excellent!" >Mark Horton, helped develop the Usenet. > >"As the Internet continues its explosive growing into humankind's living global nervous system, your site will be all the more valuable to us as it clearly records the memories of our Internet origins." >Steve Kinzler, helped develop the Internet Oracle. > >"Congratulations on a successful site. It is very well organized and easy to use." >Leonard Kleinrock, helped build the ARPANET. > >"I really appreciate the trouble you've taken. Thank you so much for doing it correctly !-) " >Ted Nelson, discovered the concept of hypertext. > >"Fair coverage of complicated history." >Dennis Ritchie, developed the C programming language. > >"Nice job and reasonably balanced. Very professional." >Lawrence Roberts, ARPANET Program Manager. > >"I spent about an hour roaming through your site (until my browser crashed) -- I enjoyed it, thank you." >Ken Thompson, led development of the Unix operating system. > >"A great reference for people who want to get a concise and valid historical perspective on the evolution of the net as a whole." >Murray Turoff, created the first multi-machine chat system. > > >At 07:44 AM 3/21/02 -0500, you wrote: >>Can anyone share with me how many kinds of Internet Histories have been >>written, told, narrated - sources, citations etc? >> >>thanks, >>r >>___________ >>Radhika Gajjala >>Bowling Green State University >> >>http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik >>http://www.cyberdiva.org >>http://lingua.utdallas.edu:7000/4425/ >> >>"I am not erudite enough to be interdisciplinary, but I can break rules" - >>Spivak, 1999. >> >>"Just bear in mind, darling: Write Mortal. Think Witch" - Endora from >>"Bewitched" >> >>_____ >> >> >>__________ >> >> >> >>_______________________________________________ >>Air-l mailing list >>Air-l(a)aoir.org >>http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l

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