From his office at the University of California at Davis, the dean of the veterinary school, Bennie Osburn, sent out an alarm yesterday. "I'm writing to inform you that the University recently became aware…an unauthorized party had gained access to personal identity records," he wrote in a letter to students and applicants.
A hacker, sometime before June 15, got into the campus computer system and found the names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers of an estimated 1,120 people who had applied to the School of Veterinary Medicine for the 2007-8 academic year. The hacker also peeked at data from several hundred applicants from 2004.
University police officers, along with the Sacramento Valley Hi-Tech Crimes Task Force, are investigating but have not determined how the security breach occurred.
The school did have some advice for people whose data might have been swiped: Visit the Federal Trade Commission's Web site on identity theft, and call the Social Security Administration's fraud line. The university also has a Web site with more guidance.
Osburn said Davis, "at its own expense, will make available a one-year credit monitoring service for you and all of those affected by this incident." He closed by reassuring the possible identity-theft victims that the university is committed to protecting their privacy. –Josh Fischman
15 Responses to Security at Vet School Goes to the Dogs
Ludo Totem - April 5, 2012 at 6:54 am
Call me perverse, but though I might cheerfully and inattentively flip through all the rest, including the body of the book, it would never occur to me to skip the acknowledgments. It’s almost always the most revealing section. It’s here you learn who is a narcissist, a name-dropper, a log-roller, and even an incompetent typist.
englishwlu - April 5, 2012 at 7:03 am
Keep in mind some press style sheets have fairly rigid formulas for structure. For instance, some presses dictate that any book with a section _called_ “Introduction,” even “Chapter 1. Introduction,” must then have a chapter called “Conclusion” or “Chapter 6. Conclusion.” For those using chapter titles as a mode of signposting an argument, avoiding the term Introduction altogether might make sense. In that case, bring on the substantive Preface. Some of what is described above as Prefatory material can also be presented in a shorter section called Acknowledgements.
theart - April 5, 2012 at 8:45 am
I have one book on my shelf in which the author makes an explicit point of acknowledging nobody.
lotsoquestions - April 5, 2012 at 9:23 am
Yes, but back when they busted Ted Koczinski as the Unabomber, some reporter went back to Michigan and pulled his doctoral dissertation and made a big deal about the fact that he didn’t acknowledge anyone in his acknowledgement section. It was seen as evidence that he was a mentally unstable loner. The lesson I took away was to make sure you always acknowledge someone — lest you be considered the next Ted Koczinski.
jperkins71 - April 5, 2012 at 9:41 am
Be very careful about acknowledging everyone you know. For the journal I work on, which publishes extensive review essays, inclusion in the acknowledgments eliminates that person as a reviewer for your book.
Robert Lane Greene - April 5, 2012 at 9:59 am
Plus acknowledgments are where you see where the author places himself in his or her universe: who is thanked (and who is omitted) says a lot. You get a sense of alliances. Of course there’s also bald-faced name-dropping (a very sweet friend of mine went on for three pages, thanking Tony Blair and Bill Clinton among about 200 others), but that in itself tells you a lot about the author too. You want to know where these guys are coming from *before* page 1 if you want to read critically.
Also, to thank no one is asinine, unless you are writing a comedy book in which your comedic alter-ego is an egomaniacal a**hole. Unless you taught yourself everything (which you didn’t), you stand on the shoulders of giants.
gtcouser - April 5, 2012 at 10:24 am
As long as you don’t call it a “Forward.” I once saw an NYUP book with such a text.
luigi - April 5, 2012 at 11:09 am
And then there’s the problem of forgetting to acknowledge someone. I always give thank-yous to student assistants who have done research for me. On multi-year projects where I am working on several projects simultaneously, I can forget who worked on what. I sometimes thank the ones I remember and sometimes omit the thank yous altogether.
sand6432 - April 5, 2012 at 11:15 am
If you want libraries to buy your revised dissertation, do not reveal in your Acknowledgments that the book had its origin in your dissertation, as many libraries that subscribe to ProQuests’s dissertation database will not buy revised dissertations. So don’t thank anyone for being your dissertation advisor, and make sure that the title of your book is not the same as your dissertation’s title.—Sandy Thatcher
dottyeyes - April 5, 2012 at 11:53 am
Haha, gtcouser! In my early days in a major academic publishing house, five of us production editors temporarily squeezed into one room for a few weeks while our new office building was being readied. The managing editor stormed into the room with a set of blues, wanting to know who let “Forward” slip by to this near-final stage of the book. Fortunately, I wasn’t the guilty party, but I easily could have been (all of us were science majors turned editors). But thanks to those cramped quarters, I learned a very important lesson without any of the pain.
dottyeyes - April 5, 2012 at 12:11 pm
What about prologues and epilogues in scholarly on general nonfiction books? Alarm bells ring when I’m assigned to copyedit a scholarly book with a prologue and an epilogue. The terms seem so inappropriate, but some publishers instruct me to retain these terms. I edit a lot of business books; I’d expect a really good epilogue to read something like this: “Epilogue: The entrepreneur ran away with the venture capitalist when they met on a tropical island, and five years later, they had three little start-ups. But divorce soon ensued, and they were forced into a divestiture because of infidelity.” Now, that’s a good epilogue!
pilie - April 6, 2012 at 1:51 pm
You omitted the prolog. Can you spare a moment to differentiate its use from the others? Thank you.
Paul Ilie pilie@usc.edu
April Michelle Davis - April 8, 2012 at 2:41 pm
This is very timely! I had a conversation about the differences between these three this past week with a client. Thankfully, we both agreed, even though someone from the book’s previous edition didn’t.
dank48 - April 11, 2012 at 2:26 pm
I have one in which the author included the book itself in its own bibliography, which seems to me an indication of what a slovenly piece of work the book really is.
theart - April 11, 2012 at 3:26 pm
Was it a book about recursive logic?