On plagiarism

It seems that nearly every week I'm catching a plagiarizer, but there was one scenario I really didn't expect. A couple of weeks ago I went on Google Scholar and googled myself to see if anyone had cited any of my papers. Well, one set of researchers went way beyond citing a paper--they copied great swaths of it wholesale, including the figures. They also copied large blocks of text from another person's paper.

The plagiarized paper is from an overseas conference and was published in an IEEE proceedings. So, after contacting my co-author and getting his approval, I sent copies of the conference paper and the two articles that were plagiarized to the IEEE copyright office. Today I got a response from the chair of the plagiarism investigation committee, detailing the steps they will go through to determine if plagiarism did, indeed, take place.

In this situation, my words were stolen. But a friend told me he knows of several cases where a researcher sent a paper to an international journal and it seemingly fell into a black hole. Then, amazingly, someone else publishes a suspiciously familiar paper, in that journal, on the very same subject.

It's clear that if we ignore plagiarism and cheating all the way from K-PhD that the result will be --and already is--plagiarism and cheating in the very venues we rely on for research ideas, supporting arguments, and publications for tenure. Is plagiarism worse in academic publications now than before? I don't know; I am fairly new at this. But it seems the dots are pretty strongly connected, and for sure we can't make excuses for supposed cultural differences in how we view copying someone else's work.

Catching and dealing with cheaters is an incredibly time-consuming and draining process. But it has to be done. I tell my students up front that I will be sending all their work through Turnitin.com, even their master's project reports. Some days it feels like sticking my finger in a leaking dam, but I can't just ignore it.

It's been a long, long time

and tons of stuff have happened. Too much to write about, and some I can't anyway.

Some random bullets:

• Had a wonderful visit this past weekend with Eldest Daughter. We had a great time.
• Still sick-y with runny/stuffy nose and cough. Yuck.
• Son's car is fixed (again) but we are looking for a replacement.
• Someone Who Shall Not Be Named chipped my passenger side door. Grrrrrrr!!!!!!

It's the end of the quarter and there's a lot of student angst going on. One of my MS students defended successfully this morning, thank GOD. We have four more defending in March so they can get their visas. Another eight or nine are rushing around feverishly trying to pin down a project topic. One of those e-mailed me this morning, asking me to send her a list of topics she can choose from, and to make an appointment super early in the morning or super late at night to accommodate her work schedule. Oh, and to let her know ASAP.

Sure, honey. Want coffee and breakfast (or dinner) while I'm at it?

Tonight was the final for my on-campus class, and afterwards two students who are less than thrilled with how they did (not that I've graded the things yet, but I guess they are being proactive in their own snowflaky way) e-mailed me. One wanted to change an answer. The other wanted a make-up exam. He helpfully let me know his exam schedule so I could accommodate him.

I smiled sweetly as I deleted his e-mail.

Son says I should send them all viruses, lol.

Better blog before ED yells at me

I've been swamped with work and non-work work, so I've not had a lot of time to write. ED is still doing well and enjoying normal food. Friday I'm going to visit her for the weekend, which should be fun!

The big news this week was what happened at Northern Illinois University. The calls for gun control have started up again (as well as the argument that if someone in that room had been carrying a gun, the shooter could have been stopped). I don't know why people think that's the answer. We don't even know why these shootings have become so common. So do we take away everyone's guns, lock them up, dust off our hands, and declare the problem solved? I don't think so. We've had guns around for centuries. Why now are we experiencing these issues?

I have a theory, but it's not PC (big surprise).

In other news, I have a bunch of students clamoring to defend before the end of the quarter because they just realized their H1B visa is in jeopardy. Of course, their reports aren't approved yet, and the department requires them to post announcements 10 days in advance of the defense, which they cannot schedule until their project reports are approved. So the student who e-mailed me saying she wanted to defend this Thursday....good luck with that.

I have taught my last evening lecture for a while, thank GOD. Still have three evening classes (two for project presentations, one for the final exam) but after that, my evenings are my own for the first time in three years. Ahhhhhhh that is going to be so nice.

Misclassification cost: no longer an academic exercise

In data mining, we often try to influence a learning algorithm by assigning a cost to making certain errors in prediction. We tend to be pessimistic with certain types of decisions--for instance, favoring false positive diagnoses over negative ones. The thinking is that the cost of missing an important diagnosis, such as cancer, is greater than the cost of unnecessary treatment. Today, that false positive cost became very real.

Eldest Daughter was diagnosed in 2002 with celiac disease brought on by two successive bouts of mononucleosis. For the last six years we have spent hours in ERs dealing with abdominal pain, thousands of dollars in special gluten-free foods, weeks and months re-engineering her favorite foods, and many tears dealing with family who did not or would not understand her new restrictions. All this delayed my Ph.D. completion for at least a year, but that was the least of my worries.

She's been in the City Too Far Away now for about a year and a half, and decided it was time to go visit a gastroenterologist. She found a doctor, and he ordered 23 blood tests and a bone density scan. Friday his secretary called and told her the blood test results came back, and were normal. ED asked if they were normal for a celiac, or normal in general. The secretary didn't know, and had the doctor call ED back.

He told her that her results were indeed in the normal range for normal people, and that he doubted her celiac diagnosis was correct. Today, in a followup appointment, he went over her results, her symptoms, the timeline of illness and diagnosis, and said he is certain she does not have celiac disease. Her original doctor made the diagnosis based on a single blood test--one of three that test for the disease, and the most unreliable of the three. Her initial endoscopic biopsy was negative.

She is to go on a regular diet immediately, eating gluten at every meal. At the end of March the doctor will attempt to definitively disprove the celiac diagnosis with an endoscopy and colonoscopy.

Today, for the first time, she ate a bagel. She had no symptoms.

We are amazed and grateful and angry all at once. The cost of this last six years has been tremendous, most especially for an 18-year-old suddenly faced with a restrictive diet and a long list of frightening ancillary problems such as infertility, cancer, and brain lesions.

My dad cried when he heard the news.

Better, *cough* *cough*, but massively behind

On grading, paying bills, cleaning, laundry, writing, lecture prep---everything.

Caught another cheater. A 250-word ethics essay, with over 60% of it lifted from three different sources. That had to be more work than it would have taken to actually write the thing.

Eldest Daughter is in limbo re: her celiac diagnosis, and we are flummoxed. The new gastro doc thinks she doesn't have celiac disease but isn't sure what caused her symptoms six years ago. The gluten-free diet isn't an easy one to deal with, and the thought that she's been struggling with this for so long, but needlessly--that's tough to take. She sees the doc again on Friday, maybe he will have more insight then.

Got some great student evals in the mail yesterday, from last quarter. The best comment: "DrMom rocks! You should pay her more!". I sent that to my boss, told him I'm cool with that.

One of my MS students is going to defend this month! Hurray! One down, 11 others to go.....

Okay, back to grading. Just had to let everyone know I was still alive, although I swear I should buy stock in Kleenex.

Still sick.

Had to break out the Big Gun--a pot of Russian Caravan tea.