Figuring out whether someone committed plagiarism is usually straightforward. You compare the two texts to see how much of one appears verbatim in the other. Even if some words have been changed, there is often a pattern of similarities that can’t be coincidental. It’s not that hard.
Determining whether someone swiped an idea, or a set of ideas, is another beast entirely. In a review in the June 7 issue of The New York Review of Books, the possibility is raised that Terence W. Deacon, chairman of the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley, borrowed heavily and failed to credit core ideas in his book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter, from at least two scholars. Here’s what the NYRB reviewer, Colin McGinn, a professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, writes:
One would never think from reading Incomplete Nature that the author’s …
In one sense this is just a spat between an author and a reviewer. But it’s worth looking at closely because it’s also about how science gets communicated and translated, summarized and (possibly) dumbed-down.
Here’s a brief dissection of the back-and-forth (the quotes are from Chabris’s review):
“Visual information from the left eye does not go only to the brain’s right hemisphere; information from the left visual field does.”
Chabris points out an error. Lehrer acknowledges it. Point Chabris.
You’ve probably heard of Kickstarter, which allows would-be documentarians, video-game designers, and atheist cobblers to solicit money for their projects. A new company, called Petri Dish, gives that tool to scientists who want to finance their research projects. It’s already received significant attention considering that it has been around only since March and has raised tens of thousands of dollars.
As on Kickstarter, many Petri Dish participants offer rewards for donations. For instance, if you give $25 to Gerald Carter’s project to understand how animals “can enforce and stabilize cooperation in a complex society,” you will receive three photos of one of the vampire bats he’s studying. If you give $10 to Ashlee Lillis’s project to record audio of deep-sea habitats, you will get a five-minute compilation of the most interesting stuff she’s recorded.
In Tennessee a new law took effect last month that allows teachers to discuss creationism as an alternative to evolution. This happened, as nearly everyone has noted, in the same state where John Scopes was tried in 1925 for exposing impressionable high-school students to the evils of evolutionary theory. The Volunteer State has now given us both the Monkey Trial and the Monkey Bill.
But it’s not just one state. Polls show that fewer than half of Americans accept evolution. Most of us still don’t buy it. As the comedian Louis C.K. asked in a bit about people who insist that they can’t possibly be related to monkeys: “Why are you fighting this?”
Dan McAdams offers one possible, rarely discussed reason: Maybe evolution is a lousy story. Actually, McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, doesn’t think evolution is a story at all. There is no protagonist, no…
But take heart, unjuiced undergrads—there may be a solution on the way, albeit one that sounds dubious, even dangerous, at first. It’s called transcranial direct current stimulation (or tDCS), and it involves running a weak electrical current through your brain. While tDCS has been around for decades, in the last couple of years it’s been getting a lot of attention, thanks to research suggesting that it speeds up learning for certain kinds of tasks.
Here’s an example: In a study published in January, researchers tested subjects to see how well they could detect concealed threats in a…
If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous—particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals: Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. The project is part of Open Science Framework, a group interested in scientific values, and its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies from the scientific literature.” This is a more polite way of saying “We want …
Last August I wrote an article about a controversy involving MIT’s prestigious Clean Energy Prize. The winning team for 2011, CoolChip, had publicly implied that they had developed the technology featured in their entry, when in fact it was developed by a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories (who, by the way, had no idea CoolChip was submitting his invention in the contest). After the article was published, the chancellor of MIT, Eric L. Grimson, began an investigation, the results of which have now been released.
The short version: CoolChip did not break the rules of the contest.
The long version is a little less positive. The investigation found that CoolChip was “misleading in some of its public presentations of its business plan and associated technology.” It also found that the Clean Energy Prize’s rules needed to be clarified and that the university should make sure…
You might think that, for scholars who study bias and bullying, the conviction of Dharun Ravi would be a victory of sorts. After all, the jury took seriously the suffering of Tyler Clementi, Ravi’s roommate at Rutgers University who killed himself soon after he discovered that Ravi had been using a Webcam to spy on his intimate encounters with another man. In interviews after the verdict was announced, jurors seemed disturbed by Ravi’s behavior, calling it “wrong.” As one prosecutor put it: “They felt the pain of Tyler.”
But the reaction from these scholars is much more ambivalent. danah boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and a visiting researcher at Harvard Law School, said in an interview that she remains “troubled by the decision to prosecute Ravi.” It’s not that she doubts that Ravi is guilty of the crimes in question, but she worries about drawing a line between his …
A paper by two bioethicists arguing for “after-birth abortion” has stirred up a debate, to say the least (here’s an earlier post about it). I asked Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and one of the world’s best-known philosophers, for his take. Here’s what Singer, whose own views on infanticide are controversial, wrote:
In contemporary applied ethics, the issue of the moral status of newborns and the possibility that in some circumstances infanticide can be justifiable, dates back to Michael Tooley’s article “Abortion and Infanticide” published in Philosophy and Public Affairs—perhaps the most respected journal in the field—in 1972. (The authors quite properly note this article, as well as later contributions to the discussion.) Their article doesn’t say anything remarkably new, although it does add some thoughts about the justifiability of infanticide…
If you sat down to write an inflammatory paper, just for giggles, you might come up with something like “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” But Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva were serious when they argued in that recent paper, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics, that it would be morally permissible to kill a newborn if that newborn might be an “unbearable burden.”
They were not talking only about severely disabled infants (which is a controversial idea, but one that’s been floated before). They were talking about perfectly healthy newborns that for some reason—financial, psychological, whatever—would pose a problem for their parents or society.
Of course there’s been a backlash. The authors have received death threats. They’re being compared to Nazis on Twitter. Pro-life activists are using the paper to make a slippery-slope,…
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