THE COMPUTER ERA AND ITS IMPACT ON PROTECTING WORDS AND IDEAS

I copied and pasted this title directly from another document. Actually it’s the one about digital plagiarism from the ORI scholarly integrity website I want to discuss. Protecting words and ideas in the digital age is like suffocating them. The problem lies almost as much in the protection itself as in the failure to reference. As long as one attributes the words and the ideas and the links and the titles to their original source, I think stealing should be celebrated. It is what drives Google’s page rank algorithm and the whole field of search engine optimization. We live in an inherently connected world. Not borrowing ideas and inspiration is ludicrous. Researchers must embrace the burden of tracing the path back to (what they best conceive as) the original source of information. It can quickly become a rabbit hole, but one we have no choice but to dive down headfirst.

But where were we? Let’s break down a paragraph from Dr. Albert Teich’s session:

Computer word processors with such peripherals as scanners and laser printers make it substantially easier to appropriate another person's text, to manipulate that text, to publish and distribute that text, to use the text in unpublished documents, such as a proposal, or to manipulate or alter graphics or even photographic images.

First of all- scanners are no longer necessary with Genius Scan, let’s be honest. Printing has its value when dealing with government bureaucracies but most documents can now live out their entire life cycle as pixels stored in a server waiting for their chance to be loaded onto a display. As far as the appropriation of another person’s text, I’ve done it now in about three different ways (sorry Albert!). First, in the title with no immediate citation except a link to the original document in the first line of text. Second, in the quote above with direct reference to the author who originally wrote the words. And third, in my photo where the title and the quote are both displayed on my computer screen and on my phone, without any reference at all. Virginia Tech now encourages software such as iThenticate for identifying plagiarism and even requires it for graduate level theses and dissertations. But the software only scans official publications from the abstract to the appendices and only looks for matches of nine words or more. It also excludes all explicit quotes to other work. If Dr. Teich’s session review was (or is) published anywhere, my blog title would be the only thing to raise a red flag because it is eleven words long and repeated in the first original paragraph of text. All the stolen text in my picture and my quote live to lie another day.

Now to the role of computers in both creating and detecting these types of blatant plagiarism. Natural language processing is the algorithmic foundation of most programs like iThenticate. Software engineers and computer scientists, working with sociologists and neuroscientists studying the perception of language (computational linguistics), have figured out how to teach computers to read written text. Once the text under consideration and the text from every article ever published in the public domain (that the program database includes) is read, computers do what they do best: compare. The explicit text part is easy. It is the graphics that present more of a challenge.

Computer vision is now helping programs to interpret text captured in a photo, but it still has a long way to go. That is why verification softwares like CAPTCHA ask you to interpret distorted text almost every time you try to make a transaction or send a message online. They want to make sure you are not a bot. Bots can’t read distorted graphical text like the quote or the keyboard in my photo, at least not yet.

All of this can be done from virtually anywhere in the world, without leaving a trace of the previous version of the document.

Sorry Albert, the datedness of your session is showing once again. When you wrote it I am sure blockchain did not exist. Hate on cryptocurrencies and the Bitcoin bubble all you’d like, but at the end of the day blockchain is about securing a digital identity. It requires a private key in order to carry out any transaction and as long as you keep that key secure, no original content can get posted or manipulated without your consent. Virginia Tech alumnus and CEO of Blacksburg’s Block.one always uses the example of Elon Musk’s twitter account. If twitter ran on a blockchain, no one could post on Elon’s account unless they had his private key. All this to say, yes; graphic and textual content can be manipulated, but the same type of technological breakthroughs that made those alterations possible are now allowing us to track and store all manipulations of content on a secure and immutable ledger. Even though people will continue to manipulate words and ideas (and graphics) t least now we’ll know who does the manipulating and when they did it.

And lastly let’s bring it back to ethics. As researchers, of course we have to be honest about where our words and ideas and everything else that inspires us comes from. Of course we have to be honest about our data sources and the statistics we create to represent them. Of course there will still be those who try to game the system; cheat and steal their way to fame and fortune. We already have the tools to start protecting ourselves from them. What we don’t is a good enough understanding of the tools themselves and the bias that we code into them. In this digital day and age I have to appreciate the work of FAT ML even more so than Dr. Teich’s sessions at ORI. We have to break down the black box and prevent our own biases from proliferating a new era of fierce computational inequality. With all this machine learning going on it seems like the computers are now studying more skewed information than the human academics their algorithms are trying to protect.

Mission Don't Kill the Earth

What is academia worth if there is no world left to save with new knowledge? One alma mater, one current academic institution, two great schools, and zero mention of preserving the earth for future generations in either mission statement. Both institutions boast incredibly well acclaimed architecture programs. Both institutions graduate some of our society’s most prominent builders and developers. Both institutions have situated themselves with current or future campuses next to Amazon’s new headquarters in two of the East Coast’s most prominent metropolitan areas (Cornell Tech in NYC and Virginia Tech’s proposed Innovation Campus in Northern VA near DC). Both align themselves with technology as a means toward progress. Yet neither of them commit to sustaining the earth as a tenet of their mission. What good will new knowledge do, all this endless outreach and commitment to the community, if there is no Earth left to sustain us?

Virginia Tech’s Mission: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) is a public land-grant university serving the Commonwealth of Virginia, the nation, and the world community. The discovery and dissemination of new knowledge are central to its mission. Through its focus on teaching and learning, research and discovery, and outreach and engagement, the university creates, conveys, and applies knowledge to expand personal growth and opportunity, advance social and community development, foster economic competitiveness, and improve the quality of life.

While I love the mention of outreach and engagement, and admit that Virginia Tech’s Ut Prosim motto meaning ‘That I May Serve’ is a big part of what drew me to come to school here in the first place, I still do not think it is enough. The mission trumps the motto, and though ‘advancing social and community development’ gets at a similar spirit, the true essence of Ut Prosim and the words themselves are absent. It seems the ‘economic competitiveness’ of an academic industrial complex distract from the more meaningful elements of the mission. And the idea of serving the earth and the environment and preserving this delicate ecology that facilitates the very existence of the university is never mentioned at all.

Cornell University’s Mission: Cornell’s mission is to discover, preserve and disseminate knowledge, to educate the next generation of global citizens, and to promote a culture of broad inquiry throughout and beyond the Cornell community. Cornell also aims, through public service, to enhance the lives and livelihoods of students, the people of New York and others around the world.

Again a focus on knowledge and public service, not just locally but also globally. I cannot help but hear undertones of neo-colonialism. I loved my time at Cornell, and I know the positive effect that the University and its research initiative has indeed had on communities across the globe. But without the prioritization of a local lens this work can quickly get convoluted by power dynamics. Just like Cornell departed from Ithaca to form Cornell Tech in New York City, a big part of Virginia Tech will leave Blacksburg when the focus shifts to the Innovation Campus next to Washington DC. Cities represent our society’s greatest concentrations of wealth and the engines of our economy. It makes sense that Universities feel the need to jump on board in order to survive in a capitalistic world. But we cannot forget our home and our sense of place in the process.

This is why this semester, as I lead my own team of students for the first time in the Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon Design Competition, my mission statement will be a bit different. I have learned immensely from my time at both of the institutions mentioned in this post, but my goals will refocus on addressing critical ecological issues locally here in Blacksburg. We want to rethink the way the built environment relates to the nature surrounding it. We want to reconsider buildings as constituent members of their contextual ecology. We want to rediscover waste streams as a critical resource in a circular economy. We want the Internet of Everything to work towards an equal environment for everyone and not just convenience for the lucky few. We want to define a path toward truly regenerative development that leaves the Earth better off than it started. We want to build net-postive housing that heals the world. And we want to teach our own University and others around the world How to Not Kill the Earth.