Slashdot Mirror
Prime Ministerial Plagiarism Farce Continues In Romania
ananyo writes "Two investigations into the case of alleged plagiarism by Romania's prime minister, Victor Ponta, have reached opposite conclusions, ramping up the tension in a fierce struggle over political power in Bucharest. As Slashdot has noted before, Ponta stands accused of having copied large sections of his 2003 PhD thesis on the International Criminal Court. ... On 29 June, the Romanian National Council for the Attestation of University Titles (CNATDCU), which is in charge of investigating plagiarism charges in PhD theses according to Romanian law, had concluded that Ponta had copied and pasted 85 pages of his thesis from three books without properly marking the copied sections as quotes. But the committee was dissolved during the course of its meeting by acting education minister Liviu Pop. Meanwhile, concerns are rising in the European Union over what political observers say is a lack of respect in Romania for the fundamental principles of democracy."
A Doctorate gives you the right to doctor the data. But if you doctor first, your PhD might be moot.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It seems that many of these former Soviet Bloc countries have a hard time finding honest leaders. Almost seems like western corporations are funding their elections!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
(right... I started to feel I overstayed on /.)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Anyone remember the "greatest Romanian bio-chemist", "Professor" Elena Ceauescu?
Throughout the communist rule they squandered their intelligentsia, by making them immigrate in mass due to intellectual, economic, ethnic and religious repressions (for example Liviu Librescu, a brilliant Romanian scientist who was killed at VA Tech massacure). At the same time such illiterate trash as Ceauescu has been given educational degree for free, and her dissertation has been written for her! It has always been quietly known that all her degrees were a sham and that she was in reality illiterate?
The current Romanian authorities simply follow the long tradition established by Nicolae Ceauescu.
True, although the old argument that no one but your committee reads a PhD thesis generally applies. My MSc in comp sci was I think 180 or so pages. Of that probably 100 were menial background information, now days I catch people copying that section from wikipedia because it takes a long time to write and doesn't actually convey much useful information. Congratulations you can write on a topic anyone can look up on the internet or from a book. The actual work of the thesis, writing software and analysing how it behaved I couldn't have plagiarized because well, my boss watched me write it day after day for months, and we did a lot of analysis that turned out to be useless and had to be tossed and so on.
With political science (and the arts in general) I would think it's a lot harder. What 'work' are you doing that couldn't just be written down by someone else already anyway? Your whole work could always be in question, certainly cases like that crop up in sciences, but it's much harder to steal someone else's work when you have to be doing the work in a lab full of people. For them, you have a position, you argue it with evidence, which is hard to distinguish from found an argument you like, you copied it, and found work that supports it and copied that too.
I suppose this growing plagiarism problem highlights what's wrong with the dissertation format of masters and PhD's, which is that there's a lot of information in there which no one cares about, isn't really yours anymore than you're just re-writing it for the sake of demonstrating that you know the information exists, and that could probably be cut entirely from the process and not negate much. Let people replace 1 line with "this textbook or these articles cover all of the relevant background information'. Obviously you don't really want people graduating who can't (and don't) follow relatively simple rules, but at the same time, asking people to regurgitate 100 pages of material they just pulled out of a book isn't working to well, especially as grad students are relatively poorer, and don't really want to be wasting type typing something that isn't their own work anyway.
And yes, learning to say what someone else did in your own way is a skill, but one you should be working on and demonstrating in your undergraduate thesis.
Where I am now offers a 'Papers only' PhD, where you staple together 4 published papers and call that your thesis basically, which comes with its own problems related to when you've submitted your last paper but have no work to do, and no PhD and are stuck waiting around on low pay for feedback when you could be doing something useful that pays something, but I think that general idea is the future. If someone is going to plagiarize that work they're going to end up taking their supervisor who is usually a coauthor with them, and that person has a vested interest in keeping you honest.
Your whole work could always be in question, certainly cases like that crop up in sciences, but it's much harder to steal someone else's work when you have to be doing the work in a lab full of people.
It is plagarism for the liberal arts and falsified data for the sciences.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
No, it isn't. Sciences have plagiarism too. You can just *also* fake data. That's a problem that has been around since the advent of science and will persist forever. But there's a mechanism in place to deal with faked data, which is that you try and reproduce the results - and if you can't you now know something is fishy.
Faked data is also, I would argue, fundamentally a more serious problem. If I pasted the statement Running scientific experiments is, frankly, a pain in the ass without attribution (the first line of the article you linked) I'm merely misrepresenting the work I did, not the correctness of the work itself. If I faked data not only did I not contribute any new knowledge (plagiarism) I contributed negative knowledge.
The thing is, with faked data, eventually someone else will probably try and re-run the experiment if it's worth doing (which, for example, the experiments in my MSc aren't worth repeating because they were technology specific, and technology has plodded along to the point that none of that work is relevant) and find out if you were lying. Plagiarism that I'm talking about is only found if someone bothers to look into the irrelevant portion of your work.
Also, I apparently suck at proofreading /. posts.
[...] highlights what's wrong with the dissertation format of masters and PhD's, which is that there's a lot of information in there which no one cares about, isn't really yours anymore than you're just re-writing it for the sake of demonstrating that you know the information exists, and that could probably be cut entirely from the process and not negate much.
All of the background information in a thesis serves to do three more things, when properly written, beyond what you mentioned, i.e., showing that you appear to know the material:
- First, it should provide a nice, high-level summary of the research area you're focusing on, perhaps with a nod to related ones, so that a new researcher coming into the field can immediately get a foothold and decide what he or she needs to read to become more proficient. (Merely citing a slew of papers is great, but definitely not as meaningful as posting what work was done in them, providing some insights, etc.) In fact, being rather thorough in your literature review is a great way to garner plenty of citations: even if you don't intend for it to be a review paper, others will start viewing it as such.
- A second, intertwined point is that it should provide enough background information for someone who is sufficiently well-versed in that discipline, but not necessarily your topic, to gauge the credibility of your work. For example, in my S.M. Applied Math thesis, I had some nice sections on (special) functions of bounded variation, gamma convergence, k-currents, and variolds, along with some novel proofs of some fundamental notions associated with each of those, as my committee members were not completely knowledgeable about each. Moreover, the proofs I included had the effect of making my later analyses simpler than if I had gone with some of the standard proofs, e.g., by L. Ambrosio, G. Dal Maso, etc.
- Finally, it should explain how what you are doing is sufficient to merit an advanced degree.
He's just a puppet for the people with real power in his party (PSD ... former communist party). His role is to shake things up and take the fall if it doesn't work out.
should be this instead: http://de.vroniplag.wikia.com/wiki/Home