From Ken Friedman & the PhD Design listserv:

The current issue of The Scientist has a story on an interactive film that helps research students and early career researchers to understand and navigate the perils of research misconduct.

Highlights: “The Lab is a choose-your-own-adventure story about an incident of apparent research misconduct. … At the outset, the viewer chooses one of four characters to follow: a grad student, a post doc, a PI, or a research integrity officer. Throughout the story, the viewer makes choices on behalf of this character, affecting the outcome. Make the right choices and misconduct is confronted and dealt with; make the wrong ones, and you’re bound for infamy when the misconduct is uncovered years later.”

The news-story is here: Misconduct and adventure

You can watch — and play — the film here: http://ori.hhs.gov/TheLab/

The film focuses on one lab in one field, but the issues and choices touch on the challenges of responsible research in many fields.

I spent a bit of time traversing the movie (from the point of view of the Post Doc) and I was impressed. The story line is complex, sophisticated and engrossing. It took a bit of effort for me to tear myself away… But I do think this is an important resource for all budding researchers, irrespective of the field they are in.

The cartoon is given above.

How sad is that!

They have been charged — in the world’s largest democracy, with a constitution supposedly guaranteeing a right to free speech — with “deliberately acting with malicious intent to outrage religious feelings”.

And this, in a secular country!

So far Johann Hari has refused to apologize for what he wrote, and rightfully so. In this piece in the Huffingtonpost titled: Despite the Riots and Threats, I Stand By What I Wrote. The entire article is worth reading in full but here is a key quote:

Every word I wrote was true. I believe the right to openly discuss religion, and follow the facts wherever they lead us, is one of the most precious on earth — especially in a democracy of a billion people rivven with streaks of fanaticism from a minority of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. So I cannot and will not apologize.

I did not write a sectarian attack on any particular religion of the kind that could lead to a rerun of India’s hellish anti-Muslim or anti-Sikh pogroms, but rather a principled critique of all religions who try to forcibly silence their critics. The right to free speech I am defending protects Muslims as much as everyone else. I passionately support their right to say anything they want — as long as I too have the right to respond.

I don’t think anybody could have said it more clearly and emphatically. For more information on this read the blog Butterflies and Wheels.

I was reading this novel even as the horrific events of the past few days played out in Mumbai (see this, this and this). In some ways the attacks on Mumbai became a lens through which to interpret the novel, making me somewhat less sympathetic to the novel than I would have been otherwise. Hamid has gone on the record indicating that the views of Changez do not reflect his own – and that Changez is a piece of fiction, a writer’s creation. Though I knew this intellectually, it was emotionally difficult for me to separate the author and the character. This was partly because Changez’s story and that of the author roughly parallel each other – though Hamid quite his high-flying job in the corporate world to become an author (not a Islamic fundamentalist) and partly because I could not but notice the connections between the western educated protagonist in the novel (Changez) and the young men (wearing jeans and designer shirts) who attacked Mumbai.

The weakest part of the novel, in my view, was this transition from being someone who realizes how the west truly treats immigrants (particularly those from South-Asia) to becoming a fundamentalist. The first part of the novel really rung true for me – being someone from India who came and settled in the US. However, how this sense of “distance” can lead to becoming a fundamentalist (or maybe even a threat to the state, as is suggested towards the end) was a bridge too far. Hamid, in an interview, suggested that we need to distinguish between Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic nationalism – suggesting that the latter is where he (or at least his character) stands. It appears to me that this is a specious distinction, one that seems to make sense at first blush but falls apart when one probes deeper into how these two ideas have traditionally been related. In some sense my response to the events in Mumbai are an example of nationalism and it is not surprising that this aspect of Hamid’s argument makes sense to me. However, how Islamic nationalism can be separated from Islamic fundamentalism is difficult for me to fathom. This is a tension at the heart of Pakistan (and other Islamic nations) and this is something that, I am not sure Hamid explains well. To find out that the head of the LET (the terrorist organization that appear to have masterminded these attacks) was recently gifted a bullet-proof car by the Pakistani government, is part of the reason why I am skeptical of such distinctions. Changez goes back to Pakistan for reasons that make sense to me (at some level) as an immigrant – but his shift to becoming a fundamentalist are never really explained.

All said and done I was glad to have read this novel – it offered insight into how well-thinking and well-educated men and women can fall prey to fundamentalist thinking. That said, it appeared to me that this novel does not truly engage with the inherent paradoxes and tensions between fundamentalism and nationalism.

The last few days have been very strange… dream and nightmare in one. At one level this is Thanksgiving weekend, one of my favorite holidays in the year. So we have been cooking, eating, drinking, with family and friends – the kinds of things we typically do at this time of the year. And yet, hanging like a dark cloud over everything, poisoning the very air we breathe is been the news coming out of Mumbai. The loss of innocent life, the brutality and ruthlessness of the attacks… the sheer scale of the horror just staggers the mind. This is brutality at an incomprehensible level. I cannot imagine what ideology or rhetoric can cause people to do things like this?

And there is the anger… an urge to do something, anything to prevent something like this from happening again. But even as the mind darts from one vengeance filled scenario to another, a part of me knows that there are no clear and easy solutions to this…

At the end what remains is a heaviness of the heart… yes life will go on but I can’t help thinking of all the innocent lives lost, and more importantly a certain loss of innocence, for Mumbai, for India and for each of us. What a terrible tragedy.

Even more complicated is the fact that, even in the US, this image could be regarded as being a myth – a feel-good vision of a past that may never really have existed. But as Picasso said, art is the lie that reveals the truth (or something to that effect, I am too lazy to google the actual quote). There is something in this painting, actually something in many of Normal Rockwell’s paintings, that touches me – deeply. I am not sure what it is – but I can’t deny its effect on me.

[See more of his art here]

… for Mumbai, for India, and for the world!

Note: I have deleted all the links and names, since that would be giving free publicity to the sites in question – something they are after.

I’m the webmaster of r a s m u s s e n [dot] e d u
I wanted to know if by any chance you would be interested in doing an unbiased review of our site [URL] on your blog http://punya.educ.msu.edu/
If you agree we will send you a payment for the review.
Please let me know if you are interested.
If you are interested please click here to receive your money: [LINK to a page on sepblogreview [dot] com with a long alpha-numeric identifier / parameter
If you want to receive more paid review proposals, just click the following link: [LINK deleted]
If you don’t want to ever receive mails from us, just click the following link: [LINK deleted]
If you have any questions just send a reply to this email.
Thank you

I was sufficiently intrigued that I clicked on the second link, the one that asked me if I was interested in getting some money and this is what the page told me:

We are interested in having a review of our product published on your blog.
The review doesn’t have to be positive, you are free to voice your opinion whether it’s good or bad. The review must at least 300 words long and contains at least 3 links pointing to the pages we will provide you and with the anchor text we will provide.
The website you will have to review is [Link]
The review must come from the blog http://punya.educ.msu.edu/

Here is more information about the product:
R a sm us sen College has educated people for more than a century and has taken revolutionary strides toward developing career-focused curriculum that will prepare you for your future career. [LINK]
We can send you money as payment for the review.
Click here [LINK] to recieve (sic) payment.

Now I was even more interested – so I clicked on the last link (despite the spelling mistake) and was redirected to a web-form, which asked me to write down the amount of money I would like to receive for the review. I was also warned that if the amount I requested was too high my offer would be rejected. There were other details such as the minimum length of the review (300 words), that it should have a certain number of links to the site being reviewed (at least 3), and that my review should be published within a specific time period (2 days of receipt of the money).

This is where I decided to stop clicking and started writing this post, wondering about the ethics of all this. Turns out that this is pretty standard procedure as this page indicates: How to buy blog reviews for SEO link building

Now I am as fond of free money as the other guy – but isn’t there something problematic about buying links? What would be a right price-point for me to feel ok about writing this review? I mean, all of us have a price, don’t we? Most interesting was the fact that the site in question didn’t care whether or not the review was positive or negative – what mattered was that the review would have three (at least) links! What a strange world we live in?

Today’s NYTimes has a op-ed by Stanley Fish (titled Psychology and Torture) about this very issue.
He makes some good points tracing the APA’s sad history with this to the fact that Psychology is not, what he calls, a “healing profession.” Go goes on:

To be sure, there are psychologists who provide counseling, therapy and other services to patients; but there are many psychologists who think of themselves as behavioral scientists. It is their task to figure out how the mind processes and responds to stimuli, or how the emotions color and even create reality, or how reasoning and other cognitive activities are affected by changes in the environment. Their product is not mental health, but knowledge; their skills are not diagnostic, but analytic -– what makes someone do something -– and it is an open question as to whether there are limits, aside from the limits of legality, to the uses to which these skills might be put.

He ends with making a connection between the science of the mind and rhetoric, arguing that both these fields are connected by their important role in persuasion and how our knowledge of both these fields is open to misuse. “Applied psychology,” Fish argues, “can never be clean.”

I think that there is much to be said for Fish’s argument. What this means, of course, is that ethical guidelines can never emerge from the strictures of a discipline (be it the discipline of rhetoric or psychology, or in my personal case, educational psychology) but has to be imposed from without. How guilty am I as a teacher of utilizing the rhetorical playbook to teach my students, how often do I use psychological techniques gleaned from cognitive and social psychology, to get my students to learn to think in certain ways? These are not questions with easy answers, and Fish is right to point them out for us to think about.

The sequence continued as follows: Emailing a plagiarist | Plagiarism, note to Root-Bernstein’s and Creativity Portal | David Jiles plagiarism issue, update | Plagiarism, update II | Update III | Update IV | Update V

This has been an interesting experience – both in terms of tracking these issues down and seeing people’s responses to my blogging about it. Some quick updates:

First, almost all of David Jiles Ph.D.’s writings (at least those I had found on the web) have been pulled off. Some people did it just on reading my postings, while others did it after getting the Root-Bernstein’s book and checking for themselves. Those who did the latter were blown away by the extent of the plagiarism. I am not kidding when I say that this is the most blatant plagiarism I have ever (and I mean, ever) come across.

Second, most websites chose to merely delete the offending passages (as I said, usually taking me at my word, which is kind of funny given that that is how they had gotten fooled in the first place, taking someone who sent them a note at his word!). The only exception is the Young Bright Minds & Inventors Academy, who have been skeptical of my statements, and only upon realizing that what I had written was just the tip of the iceberg, did they take action. They did that in a transparent manner, posting a note on their front page (here).

Third, the book authored by David Jiles, Ph.D., on Lulu Press has been pulled off. It appears that Lulu press is refusing to reveal the contact information (apart from the gmail address which was publicly available) of Dr. Jiles. However, this is not something I have pursued, I just got this information second hand.

Fourth, I now have with me copies of lots more articles that Dr. Jiles was trying to get published. This adds to all the other articles I had downloaded on to my computer.

Finally, I have some possible background information about Dr. Jiles, that I am not revealing at this time. Anyway my interest was never in tracking him down. My goal was to have these pieces removed from public view, and due credit be given to the real authors, and I think in that I have been successful. As to whether Dr. Jiles should be charged legally I leave to others, the authors, the website owners who were directly harmed by his cheating behavior.

All in all this has been an interesting experience – and one that I have learned quite a bit from. I really wish I didn’t have to do it – but once the scope of the copying became clear there was no way one could let it go.

I include the complete email below (with her permission). What has been impressive, in my mind, is Rita’s approach to this entire mess. Not seeking to place blame (or cast aspersions) where they are not due, Rita has shown a transparency and a willingness to learn from this experience that speaks volumes to her open-mindedness. Isn’t this, at least to a large extent, what creativity and a creative mind-set is all about? This is, of course, in sharp contrast to some of the other emails I have been receiving from people who had hosted articles by Dr. Jiles.

Rita read my email and posting, but did not take my word for it. For all that she knew, I could be the fraud, seeking vendetta against David Jiles, Ph.D. for some reason. She ordered the Sparks of Genius book and checked it against Dr. Jiles’ writing and came to the same conclusion I did. But that’s not all. She will be pulling all of Dr. Jiles’ articles from her site AND will be adding a note and a link to my website about this unfortunate incident. She will mention it in her weekly newsletter and add a link there as well.

What a contrast to others who have attempted to merely sweep this issue under the carpet, or better still cast my actions as being nothing but “naming and shaming.” As she said in another email to me, ” If there is a wrong doing – it needs to be addressed and furthermore, justice claimed.”

In conclusion, I must say that if there is anything good that has come of this, as far as I am personally concerned, it is getting to know that people like Rita exist. She is truly deserving of my thanks.

For the record here is the email that she sent to me:

Punya,

I have double checked “Sparks of Genius” with the text from Dr. Jiles, and YES, you are right! Your findings are indeed incredible and mind-boggling!

I have attached some more articles from Dr. Jiles for your further research. In the Articles.DOC attachment are some additional articles then the once [sic] you compared along the book from the Root-Bernsteins.

[I have added these documents, which I have not had the time to read, to my list of downloaded files: Punya]

All articles from Dr. Jiles will be taken down from my website along with a note and link to your website. In addition, I will mention it in my weekly newsletter and put your link there as well.

I will also email Dr. Jiles to express my utter bewilderment and disappointment by your findings along with my encouragement to clarify things and to take a stand to his criminal actions. According to the Bible we’re all sinners in the one or other way and fallen short; it’s the confession of the wrong doing and bringing things in order again.

Thank you again for taking the time to research this all and for your devotion to not just sweep this under the carpet! May the LORD bless you for all your effort!

Please let me know of the further development. Thank you already.

Have a good day,
Rita

Just a couple of points. First, I have not received the email they sent me (I do not question the fact that they did send it) – just that I did not receive it. I checked my log again and did not find it.

Second, the comment suggests that I have been in a “rush to judgment” and have assumed that everybody is in this “plagiaristic conspiracy ring.” That is just not true. I have not blamed anybody but David Jiles Ph.D. and even there I have asked him to offer his take on what has happened.

Third, they say that their response was “pretty good for an average dot com Web community not in the business of peer-reviewing articles for professional publications (nor expected).” I am not sure about that. I think in the age of Google the least we can do is check up on this person – get a copy of their vita or whatever. Look at their profile on Linked in? Was that done? I don’t know.

But that is neither here nor there.

What is important in all this is what is NOT being talked about. In all this I see no concern on the part of the “average dot com Web community” to the rights of the the Root-Bernsteins.’ Their work has been completely ripped off and these people have been (inadvertently or whatever) party to this. Yet, I hear no one speak to how their life’s work has been stolen.

So I must say that the sentence, that I “have done a fine job in quickly naming and shaming innocent parties to the ‘deception’ of this author” is the one that bothered me somewhat. It is kind of ironic that protecting the rights of content creators is seen as being an unkind act.

I am sorry I did not receive the note from Chris at Creativity Portal. I would have quickly noted that they were acting on this. Let this be a statement to that effect. That is indeed the fair thing to do.

It is not clear to me what “settled” means. I doubt that David Jiles Ph.D. is emailing me (or anybody else) anytime soon (despite my shout out to him to clear up any misconceptions we may have).

I find this response somewhat problematic, akin to sweeping the issue under the carpet and an unwillingness to engage with the core problem – that of how we “verify” someone’s credentials and quality of work in a world where more and more connections we make are mediated by technology. How do web-based organizations that depend on outsiders to develop content make these decisions? Clearly not by just ignoring the issue, and surely not by dealing with it as if it were SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem).