Digenis.org

If you’re a new reader to this site you may not be aware of an ongoing series I started back in 2004, when I was a student at Moscow International University. The series is called ‘Academic Integrity po-russky’ and explores the lax attitude towards plagiarism in Russian academic circles and the controversy that’s come up against initiatives to curb it.

My previous posts told of the wide-scale plagiarism I saw as a student, how one could buy research papers in the Moscow metro, the ingenuity of Russian shpargalki (crib-sheets), and Russian LiveJournal reactions to the accusations that Putin himself was a plagiarizer (gasp!).

I’ll just begin this post with a short humorous quip I heard as I was asking some Russians about this topic:

“Списывание с одного источника - плагиат, с двух - компиляция, с трёх и более - диссертация.”

“Copying from another source is called ‘plagiarism’. Copying from two sources is called ‘a compilation’. Copying from three or more sources is called ‘a dissertation’.

Whether or not you think plagiarism is a big deal, it’s clear that it’s becoming a hotter issue in educational institutions thanks to peer-to-peer networks, where users trade not only pirated music and video, but also documents and research papers. There are also a few websites, for example, 5ballov.ru (5 points, the Russian equivalent of an A+ mark), where Russian students can freely download tens of thousands of term papers on a number of subjects.

Kommersant Newspaper last Thursday ran an article entitled ‘Антиплагиат не пройдет’ (Anti-plagiarism Won’t be Tolerated) about the controversy over a website where Russian instructors can check their students’ papers for instances of plagiarism.

The web application, which resides at Antiplagiat.ru, has in fact been around since 2005. According to the website, the purpose of the initiative is ‘to improve the quality of the Russian education system, specifically in those areas where students are required to write research papers, term reports, and other original compositions’. As of September 21, 2007, the Antiplagiat database contains over 10,600,000 documents with which it compares the papers uploaded and checked by instructors. Since its launch, many institutes, universities, and even the Russian Ministry of Education have given their support to the project.

As it turns out, the site is also frequented by students themselves, no doubt using the service to see if the complex algorithms can indeed detect instances of ‘borrowing’ in their course work. In fact, one of the more active threads at the Antiplagiat Forums is titled ‘How to get around the system’, where many students have voiced their frustrations:

Наша кафедра взяла на вооружение антиплагиат…. млин, я никогда так не мучался с курсовой!!! (Петров Иван Аликович

Our department is now armed with the Antiplagiat system… Dang, I’ve never been so tormented by a term paper!!! (Ivan Alikovich Petrov)

and

Готов заплатить больше, чем Министерство образование (за создание сайта) - только бросьте этот, по-моему, “дурацкий” проект. (Пономарев Алексей Владимирович)

I’m willing to outpay the Ministry of Education (to build a site) - just abandon this stupid project (Aleksei Vladimirovich Ponomarev)

The commentary goes on and on with people’s suggestions on how to ‘fool’ the system and the moderators’ claims that it cannot be fooled. The author of the Kommersant article tracked down a Russian hacker named Georgi who claims to have created a program called ‘Killer’, which can effectively fool the Antiplagiat system.

Here’s a screenshot of the results of feeding a plagiarized paper through Antiplagiat:

The table shows three instances of plagiarism and their original sources.

Whether or not any such services could effectively curb plagiarism is still up for debate; students will either use their creativity to write original papers or they will use it to find ways around the system. Student groups in the United States have been successful in pressuring their universities to cease using such systems under the premise that it’s an infringement of their intellectual property rights for their papers to be added automatically to these databases.

In my opinion, the real test of determining whether such a system could actually work actually rests with the instructors and professors. Do they really have the time or will power to digitize and upload each paper of each of their students, then weeding out false positives? With the relatively low salaries of teachers, I highly doubt that many of them would consider it worth their time. I’d give the Antiplagiat site an ‘A for effort’, but I don’t think it passes the test in practicality.

If you’re like me, there’s a certain set of reference websites you visit and search frequently. If you’re like me, you’re also a savvy Firefox user, so a tip on how to perform searches at any website straight from your browser’s address bar may prove helpful and timesaving.

It goes something like this: You’re working on a blog post, a translation, or whatever have you when you come across a term and you need to consult an online reference site. Sure, you could easily open a new tab/window, type ‘www.wikipedia.com’ in the address bar, wait for the page to load, scroll down the page to the search box, type your search query, and be on your happy way four steps later when the search results have loaded…

Or you can set up a streamline keyword search. Here’s how:

1. Load any webpage (in Firefox) where you anticipate you’ll frequently perform search functions. For the sake of example, let’s take dictionary.com.

2. Find the search box and right-click on it. An options box will appear and you should select ‘Add a Keyword for this Search’ (sorry, mine’s in Russian, but you get the idea)

3. A new box will appear and you’ll fill in the following details.

Then click ‘Ok’

4. Now we can test our quick search feature. From any page just go to the address bar and type ‘d query, which ‘query’ being the term you wish to know more about.

Voila!

As you can see, I like to take it a step further and use key letters instead of just ‘keywords’. Afterall, if you’re gonna make shortcuts shorter for quick common tasks, why not go all the way?

I figure there are about 20 sites I visit frequently for reference searches, so I’ve decided to use a letter of the alphabet for each:
Need a synonym for exuberant? Just type ‘t exuberant’ (thesaurus.reference.com)
Need to know how to say ” in English? Just type ‘m меценат’ (multitran.ru)
Forget the definition of the word defenestrate? Type ‘d defenestrate’ (dictionary.com)
Want to quickly look up a passage from the Bible? Type ‘b 1 Cor 13′ (esv.org)
Need to know what year the whole Napoleon Great Fire of Moscow affair took place? type ‘w Fire of Moscow’ (wikipedia.com)

The possibilities are endless. Also, as you can see from one of my examples above, you can use multiple character encodings and languages.

(via A Mac Tip Every Day, but you can use it with PC Firefox as well)

Never mention Hotmail in your CV. The HR department of a company was looking for someone with ample internet experience. From a pool of 50 candidates, they promptly discarded 30 resumes because of hotmail e-mail addresses. Afterall, you can’t be much of an internet specialist and still use Hotmail. It’s all about the Gmail, friends.

The Page Paradigm - “On any given Web page, users will either click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal, or click the Back button on their Web browser.”

Woah. Jeff Croft has ‘geocoded’ nearly all the content on his website. Now you can browse his photos and posts according to the location where they were made. Interesting use of metadata and taxonomy. I’d consider doing this myself for experimental purposes, but I’m becoming more and more cautious of just how much personal information I put on this site.

Google has created an interesting mashup using Google Books and Google Maps: Google searches through the text of books in the Google Books database and displays the locations mentioned on Google Maps. Take for instance the Google Books entry on Tolstoy’s War and Peace (scroll to the bottom of the page to see the map) or The Travels of Marco Polo.

The past year has been a decent one for me with respect to my skills as a photographer. I’m confident that I have made strides forward and improved my techniques. Much of that would not have been possible without Katya’s creative collaboration and encouragement; at the risk of sounding cliche, she’s opened my world to see things from all sorts of new perspectives.

I’m thrilled to say that in 2006 I was contacted by several publishers seeking to buy rights to publish some of my photos. This was both a first and a surprise for me, as I’ve never sought that. Keep your eyes peeled for the following:

- A photo I took of Vladimir Lenin’s souped-up Rolls Royce Silver Ghost with snow treads was featured in an article in Russian AvtoMir (CarWorld) Magazine (January 6, 2007 issue).

- The Russian Orthodox Easter Procession (Krestny Khod) photograph that I took from my balcony last April will be published by BullFinch Press in a book on holiday traditions around the world. It will go to press in October, more details to come.

One of my goals for 2007 is to sell a few more photos. Since these photo editors came knocking at my door, I figure that if I set such a goal before me, do some research, and get my photos circulated, I should at least be able to sell more stock photos than in 2006.

Anyone out there have experience or helpful articles on getting started in stock photography as a hobby?

Wordie is a new Web 2.0 service that defines itself as being ‘like Flickr, but without the photos’. It’s basically a place for word collectors to catalog their lexical specimens (i.e., make a list of words they like, dislike, think sound funny, etc.). This practice is probably of very little interest to most of the population, but I as a list-maker and word-collector I’ve already signed up.

I’ve started to build my list of favourite and interesting words. As a matter of fact, the service lets you create multiple lists under one account, so I’ve created two: my main collection of English words and a second list of Russian words.

According to their site, it was less than a month ago that this service was just an idea in its creator’s head. At the time of writing this entry there are 2,158 users and 76,683 words in the database. As it’s still such a young service, I don’t expect it to be perfect while it’s still in Papmers, but I do have a few suggestions to make the site better:

1) Hire a graphic designer. This is probably what most would suggest right off the bat. I’m usually a fan of low-fi design, but Wordie leaves my eyes tired and bored. They don’t have to go all hardcore 2.0 with gradients, reflections, soft shadows, starbursts, and the sort, but a little splash of colour and some nicer menu interfaces would do a lot of good. It would also add a little flare if users had their own avatar, a feature common in most forums and 2.0 services. This could actually be implemented really easily through Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar).

2)Build a stronger sense of community The easiest way for Wordie to do this would be by creating contacts, groups, pools, and other features which would allow users to meet, interact, and socialise with other users.

3)Allow for accented unicode characters, please. This is probably pretty controversial as it could potentially create multiple entries for the same word if different users choose to spell it different ways.

But if you think about it, there are some words that just need a diacritic. For example many English words of French origin, such as: résumé vs. resume; divorcé vs. divorce; exposé vs. expose; chargé vs. charge; and worst of all pâté, pâte, and pate. And in reality, these will be such a minute percentage that it probably won’t create a problem. These diacritics aren’t there for no reason; for Pete’s sake, it’s a site about words, let’s do it right.

4) Allow users to specify which dictionary services are listed to look up words. Right now Wordie displays next to words 8 sources: Ninjawords, The Free Dictionary, Etymonline, Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online, Urban Dictionary, Wikipedia, and Google. Quite frankly, several of them are pretty much your standard dictionary and only offer redundancy. Continue listing these as default, but allow users to choose to specify themselves which references are listed if they so desire.

5) Include functionability for non-latin foreign languages. I applaud the creators for using UTF-8 encoding, but right now the Wordie guidelines state that ‘the word must exist in at least one language. If that language is not based on the standard Latin alphabet, transliteration must be done intelligently’. Why must we transliterate? I tested it out and I can add Russian words to my lists just fine using Cyrillic characters. Wordie could be of great use to language learners who want to keep lists of new words they learn.

6) Make a word stream badge on your own site. It would be great if someone would create a tutorial for making a ‘badge’ that would display your most recent Wordie words on your blog or personal website, similar to a Flickr badge. This can done already since you can subscribe to RSS feeds of word lists, but I’m sure the average user hasn’t got a clue how to do it.

I’m sure that these and many other issues will be addressed in the near future.

John, the site’s creator, has set up a blog to track the life of Wordie.