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Pressure Rises On German Science Minister In Plagiarism Scandal
An anonymous reader writes "Germany's minister for science and education, who is currently under investigation by her alma mater for plagiarizing parts of her Ph.D thesis, is facing new accusations: a total of 92 alleged incidents of plagiarism (German) have been documented by a blogger, who calls 'this number of violations inexcusable.'"
I've been plagiarized once. This bitch had copied one of my articles I wrote in a Proceedings of a conference, with pictures and everything, and used it in an overview article. The worst part of it is that my professor didn't care about it. I'm still mad, and it happened 15 years ago.
-- Cheers!
Seriously, what example does that set that your Minister for Science and Education is a cheat?
Go Germany!!!!!!
Be seeing you...
As an university teacher once told me: Copy from 1 is plagiarism, from 5 is an analysis, from 92 is summarizing the state of the question
NEIN! VERBOTEN!
Vorschrift Z38, Reichskampfstoffministerium, untersagt ausdrücklich die Mitführung von unversicherten Polenübefallmittelstoffmitführungsbehältnissen!
Begeben Sie sich in die Apparatur! Freude wird über Sie kommen!
Schavan received her doctorate in educational science in 1980 from the University of Düsseldorf; her dissertation was entitled: "Person and conscience—Studies on conditions, need and requirements of today's consciences.
This isn't science anyway, just brabra like most lawyers write about...
This is really bad in the perspective of the country more than as a personal disgrace to a minister, if she is proved to be guilty.
Well, copyright violators don't go around saying that they actually created any of the shit they copy around, in fact most of them go out of their way to tell people who's truly responsible for creating the work. Copy a song, that's copyright violation. Go around saying you fucking wrote the song, that's plagiarism. World of difference between the two.
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky would be proud.
Sig
Everything worth saying has been said. The merit of ideas should be independent of the source.
Plagiarism is just a branch of the immoral concept of copyright.
The Pirate Party is actually clear that they want to retain the creator's right to attribution. It's only the economic rights they want to abolish.
... after Mr Guttenberg had to quit as Defence Minister because of plagiarism, it seems to have become a sport to topple politicians this way. It's a fun thing to watch.
Just reading the title of her dissertation ("Person and conscience—Studies on conditions, need and requirements of today's consciences.") is enough to give me the giggles. Some of us got our PhD the hard way - by doing actual science or engineering that advanced the state of knowledge in their field. Just spewing some pseudo-intellectual waffle-gab should not count, except maybe towards a pseudo-PhD.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Wenn ist das Nunnstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
This is actually old news... And it has been quickly determined that the accusations are bogus. It's a desperate plot by political enemies against the minister.
For example, the first instance of alleged plagiarism is the following text:
Schavan's thesis:
Dabei haben sich – vergröbernd dargestellt – zwei unterschiedliche Verhältnisbestimmungen herauskristallisiert: [...]
Allegedly plagiarised text:
Er hat nachgewiesen, daß jedes Tier mit seiner artspezifischen Umwelt in einem Funktionskreis verbunden existiert.
Even if you don't understand German, it should be obvious that no text has been copied. The accusators of schavanplag call this "concealed" plagiarizing. There would be some truth to this if Schavan had actually known the source and paraphrased the text without citing. It is, however, equally likely that she had just came to the same conclusions based on the same sources.
Some minor quality problems have been found, too. For example, some citations contain typos. While that should not happen, it's far from plagiarism. (Furthermore, the thesis was published in 1980. Without computers, it's much harder to avoid such errors.)
The Pirate Party is actually clear that they want to retain the creator's right to attribution. It's only the economic rights they want to abolish.
The problem being that the creators sustain them selves by the same economic rights the pirates want to abolish.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
... as shown by the website here: http://de.vroniplag.wikia.com/wiki/Home/English
As an academic who earned a PhD in the US and worked as faculty in Sweden and now Germany, you're being quite naïve if you don't think this happens in every country including the US. The difference is that the Germans self-police (in standard volunteer wiki-style), while the US and Sweden do not, to my knowledge.
As far as it being a "sport", that's ridiculous. Being that we (Germany's inhabitants) take titles very seriously, with good reason, as the Chancellor has a doctorate in Quantum Chemistry, every thesis should be thoroughly scrutinized.
I would wager my degrees that the percentage of pages plagiarized are very similar between the US, Sweden and Germany. We just find the plagiarism over here and hold politicians (and all others) accountable.
The Pirate Party is actually clear that they want to retain the creator's right to attribution. It's only the economic rights they want to abolish.
The problem being that the creators sustain them selves by the same economic rights the pirates want to abolish.
hah, like those rights benefit anyone but the corporate powers that be.
I've been plagiarized once. This bitch had copied one of my articles I wrote in a Proceedings of a conference, with pictures and everything, and used it in an overview article. The worst part of it is that my professor didn't care about it. I'm still mad, and it happened 15 years ago.
I've been plagiarized once. This bitch had copied one of my articles I wrote in a Proceedings of a conference, with pictures and everything, and used it in an overview article. The worst part of it is that my professor didn't care about it. I'm still mad, and it happened 15 years ago.
(Make that twice)
Yeah, and I might sustain myself with a right granted to me by law that forces everyone to give me a few dollars every so often for no reason at all. I mean, sure, authors think of new material, but the mere fact that that's the only way they know how to sustain themselves doesn't justify such freedom-violating laws. Find a business model or die.
http://de.vroniplag.wikia.com/wiki/%C3%9Cbersicht
The graphics at the bottom clearly translate for a non-German audience ... as do the lines through the "type" of doctoral degree directly above the graphic.
For a non-German perspective, I now see how someone could perhaps see this "as sport" as nothing like this has happened anywhere else to my knowledge (and definitely not in the US, where you'd probably be DCMA'd or immediately sued for slander).
Much of science is based on pseudo-intellectual waffle-gab. The experimental method, for example, empiricism, skepticism, many basic classificatory schemes, and actually even the groundwork for modern discoveries such as the atom. But what am I doing tell you all of this stuff, obviously you know the value of pseudo-intellectual waffle-gab, because your signature quotes Voltaire and not Newton.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/category/global_warming/wegman/
If you're connected, plagiarism is accepted, if hidden as far as possible from public knowledge.
Hmmm... I wonder... SPAM, or an example of plagiarism for comedy value? If the latter, kudos for getting it in under the radar!
Just my $0.03 (At current exchange rates, my £0.02 is worth more than your $0.02)
I showed this to a German friend of mine and he died - is that normal?
Find a business model or die.
It is nice to have writers because we like to read books. If there is no business model that allows people to work as full-time authors, then it's not just the would-be authors who suffer.
And those rights also sustain some grandchildren of the creators. The world needs some IP rights, but they are completely out of control right now. So if any negotiations are to be balanced, the anti-IP side has to start with wanting to abolish IP altogether, since the pro-IP side wants to extend it to eternity.
Nothing new here, this has been known thorughout history, they are but thiefing animals.
Exactly. I have a research position at a university. I get paid to write scientifical papers that are then available for everyone to download on my website. Why would the same thing be inconceivable for musicians?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Right, like I pay the painter who painted the crossroads every time I cross the street?
Find a business model or die.
It is nice to have writers because we like to read books. If there is no business model that allows people to work as full-time authors, then it's not just the would-be authors who suffer.
I'm generally a political lefty but the idea that content creators are supposed to work, essentially for free, so that pirates can enjoy their material is naive and economically unworkable. This anarchistic/socialistic idea of entire professions working for the common good of the community without recompense has been tested an re-tested since before the Spanish civil war and found not to work any more than rampant rapacious capitalism has. It's a bit like those far left wing types that want to confiscate all privately accumulated pensions, put them into a single pot and then redistribute them equally to everybody regardless of how much they contributed. It kills all incentive to contribute. Not that the far left has a monopoly on stupid ideas, fanatics on both sides of the political spectrum are usually a bunch of morons. Whenever I talk about the issue of abolishing the practice of deriving economic benefit from intellectual property the discussion always ends with me asking the question: "How are writers/filmmakers/developers/musicians supposed to sustain them selves in a world where they are not allowed to sell their works?". The best ideas I have yet heard from our pirate friends is that musicians would be doomed to a lifetime of concert touring, writers to charging for access to book readings, filmmakers to deriving revenues from movie theaters and nobody has yet adequately explained to me how software developers are supposed to make money in a world where they can't charge people for software licenses. You can moan on and on about making software free and charging for the services it gives access to but that brings up the dual problems of people feeling them selves entitled to circumventing the pay portals to those services and the fact that not all software is a gateway to a service you can charge access to.
I showed this to a German friend of mine and he died - is that normal?
Yes
I have yet to see even one example of plagiarism among the 92 examples given. The blogger seems unable to understand that it is common academic praxis to sum up e.g. a theory from a work. Of course such a summery will bear some resemblance to the original work, otherwise it wouldn't be a summery. But as long as there are good footnotes documenting this, it isn't a problem.
One could in fact argue, that since the blogger doesn't seem to have found even one good clear case of plagiarism, the dissertation comes out strengthened.
Sigh. I hope you are pretty young to have such an idealistic world view.
Sigh. I hope you are pretty young to have written such a reply.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Well, in that case, you can make the same statement to book buyers: Find a funding model, or die. (Although it's not quite that bad, fortunately).
But there is no lack of other potential funding models. The main difficulty, both for authors and readers, is that we aren't used to these other funding models, and thus we're confused by them, scared by them, and unable to take full advantage of them.
Right now something exciting is happening, as Kickstarter is gradually, slowly, wrapping people's minds around the idea that you can approach creative projects as a investments/ventures for non monetary gain.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Politicians don't plagerize a PhD, but rather buy they bachelor's degree in the nearest "friendly" university. Former PM, José Socrates, finished his degree on a Sunday (when the uni is closed) and current Minister, Miguel Relvas, obtained a 3year bachelor's just by doing 4 subjects and getting the rest of the credit in exchange for "work experience".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Relvas#Academic_qualifications
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_S%C3%B3crates#S.C3.B3crates.E2.80.93Independente_affair
Right, like I pay the painter who painted the crossroads every time I cross the street?
That's just a plain stupid analogy.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Don't universities receive grants for producing scientific data? That also ignores the tons of money that comes in through tuition. Where would the money come from to support musicians/artists/software developers if everyone had to rely on such a system? The government? We have something like that already; it's called welfare and is generally reserved for the people who aren't very skilled or marketable in their field. The academic model would be terrible for private business. It's like that one SMBC Comic - academics like to complain about "Publish or Die," but in the real world that's called "Do Your Damn Job or Get Fired." The system in place works just fine: if people like your product, they spend money on it. If they don't, you better find a different source of income.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
WTF? How is that even comparable to an artist charging for access to his/her work? The guy who paints crosswalks is a civil servant, paid by your government to provide a public service. Do you really want to support every failed artist with tax money?
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
software developers are supposed to make money in a world where they can't charge people for software licenses.
Well, as a software engineer, I can answer this one: People pay you to solve problems. Generally they hire you to do so, but I've seen a lot of consultant/contractors do the mercenary thing.
At some of the places I worked, they would be perfectly fine if was open sourced afterwards, as long as they could still use it to solve their problem. Other places, the source was a national secret. But in both, there was a problem, they needed some software to solve it, and they paid me to git'er'done.
There are, indeed, those people that have products out on the web, that you can purchase and run, typically with some sort of DRM to keep the filthy pirates from keehauling them. And if IP laws are relaxed... they'll face the same troubles they do now: The poor pirate them and are unsueable because they're poor and have nothing to take, the rich blatantly steal their ideas and are unsueable because they're rich and can afford better lawyers.
Considering the "give it away for free" model has worked pretty well for Linux and that entire community, I'm going to just declare that this section of the problem has been solved. Our skillset is rare enough and useful enough that software developers as a whole don't have a problem with money.
in a world where they are not allowed to sell their works?
Whoa now. Whoever suggested that is crazy. No. I believe the idea is that they can't sue people for listening/viewing/reading their work. Subtle difference between "not allowed" and "it's an unrealistic expectation". I imagine there'd be a lot of begging, donation buttons, and commissions.
The white lines on the walks are useful because they stop cars crashing into each other quite so often. But their creative work gains them no salary, despite EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU PIRATES benefiting from it.
As for your artist, if they want to charge people access to their work, don't release it to the public, keep it private and charge an entrance fee to partake of it.
Don't go STEALING my work in making a copy of a copy of your work done by you and a thousand others who only got paid ONCE for it.
Got rich.
"Fake it until you make it" will beat honest work every time.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You doubt that content creators can be compensated by any other system? Really?
Universities use a form of patronage. It has its problems-- for instance, the notorious Publish or Perish pressure pushes researchers towards quantity rather than quality-- but it does produce research. And it is not welfare, nor is it for those of poor skill, quite the opposite. We need some place for deep thinkers to work, and business is poor at providing a suitable environment for that.
The academic model would be terrible for private business
Would it? How do you know that? And do not talk as if currently used business models are the best we can do. They have big problems, such as a tendency to evolve towards exploitative monopolies which must be constantly guarded against by anti-trust watchdogs, extreme shortsightedness that sacrifices the future for immediate profit, and a narrow viewpoint that sees everything through the lens of products and property rights no matter how wildly inappropriate such a view may be. The private bookstore is an excellent example of this. More and more, we're seeing that trying to treat data as if it is a scarce resource does not work.
The bricks and mortar bookstore is doomed. They have huge overhead in their preferred methods of storage and distribution that is becoming harder to support and justify. A new paperback is now approaching $10 per copy at a time that digital copies can be had for $1, and in time, free. I used to shop at bookstores a lot. Now I may go once a year if that. The last time I set foot inside a bookstore was 2 months ago, and it was only to use up a gift card I'd received. Even used bookstores aren't much of a deal compared to digital.
There are many other ways to compensate authors. Patronage is a big one, with many, many variations that we have as yet barely explored. It is not charity. Patrons expect something they can personally enjoy in return. Then there are endorsements and advertising. For musicians, there are concerts. Another avenue of compensation that is not used as much as it could be is merchandising. For instance, Asimov's Foundation series is popular, but I have not heard there are such things as t-shirts, coffee mugs, action toys, and the like for the Foundation. Why not? It's only partly because there isn't enough of a market. It's also because the process of getting the rights to do such a thing is too cumbersome.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
And it is not welfare, nor is it for those of poor skill, quite the opposite.
Sorry, I must not have phrased what I was saying clearly. I'm not trying to compare researchers at universities to welfare recipients; I was trying to point out that state-funded artists and content producers would essentially be just that.
And do not talk as if currently used business models are the best we can do
No, they clearly aren't. But the ability for content producers to sell and distribute content digitally is removing much of the need for big business there. With that type of model, an artist or producer's ability to sustain that career is completely dependent on whether or not consumers appreciate his/her work enough to pay for it. If you aren't producing anything of worth, why should you be supported in doing so?
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
In addition to plagarized theses, there are a lot of completely fictitious degrees being flaunted.
A few years ago a senior MIT administrator had to resign.
Last year there was the CEO of a tech company.
About 30 years ago, the President of the IEEE claimed to have a doctorate from a minor German university, but no one could find any record of it. However, his friends rallied around, and he was given an honorary doctorate.
Then there are the unaccredited doctorates. E.g., when Ryerson Polytechnic Institute was transitioning to Ryerson University a few decades ago, many of their faculty did not have doctorates. RU strongly encouraged doctorates, so a bunch of faculty got them from a degree mill in central Europe.
Finally, there's the faculty member at The King's College in Manhattan who lists himself as PhD, Princeton (ABD). ABD means that he does not actually have a PhD, but many readers might not know that.
Maybe you'd fancy paying the carpenter every time you sit in the chair he made, access the building he built, or why not, every time you open or close the door? He's at least not a civil servant. The argument or copyright is still crock shit.
The experimental method, for example, empiricism, skepticism, many basic classificatory schemes, and actually even the groundwork for modern discoveries such as the atom.
I read this thrice, and I am pretty sure there is a verb or two missing in the statement.
My thought exactly.
My other thought was: How can you possibly determine that plagiarisation has been taking place while comparing two creations of fluff like these.. reminds me of the guy who wrote a bot that could write dissertations. Very few of the proofreaders actually realized that it was all just fake as the bot was very adept att using "big" words and vague concepts..
I wonder for how long our train-wreck of an economy (ie: the west) will be sufficiently strong to be able to support this kind of totally pointless "research".
...find another metric than a thesis to award doctorates, but give "extra credit" for OC.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I get paid to write scientifical papers...
Scientifical?
I wonder if anyone reads them.
The problem being that the creators sustain them selves by the same economic rights the pirates want to abolish.
That's another discussion, but here goes: Creators can earn money without copyright.
For example, a lot of music artists have discovered that they earn roughly the same amount of money by putting up their music on the Internet for free, and selling signed copies, merchandise, extra material, and so on. A lot of people are prepared to pay because they want to support the band, they have the cash and can't be bothered to find the material on a filesharing network, or they want to be sure they get the best quality as fast as possible. Plus, the added exposure draws more people to their concerts.
In fact, the only music artists I've seen complain about piracy, are the ones that are already established and have a steady, safe income ("rent") from albums they've already released. But that's a small, small minority of all artists.
People are also prepared to pay to see films at the theatre, and to see them shortly after the release date. A lot of people download the film to see if it's worth watching, then pay to see it at the theatre a second time.
Usually, there are only low-quality copies filmed with hand-held cams available the first few weeks -- but even when high-quality copies are leaked before the premiere, as with the first Spider-Man film, the film still does well if it's any good.
When it comes to writing, there are (and have always been) precious few authors that have been able to support themselves on writing alone. The vast majority need to have a day job, or supplement their income with writing-related jobs, such as journalism, teaching, holding lectures and workshops, and so on. And yet, people keep writing, even when they'd earn more money washing dishes. As an amateur writer, I know.
Also, I accidentally lied in the GP -- the Pirate Party doesn't want to abolish all the creator's economic rights. They only want to legalise private copying. The artist will still have an exclusive right to commercial use.
The best ideas I have yet heard from our pirate friends is that musicians would be doomed to a lifetime of concert touring, writers to charging for access to book readings, filmmakers to deriving revenues from movie theaters and nobody has yet adequately explained to me how software developers are supposed to make money in a world where they can't charge people for software licenses.
But that's exactly how most musicians, writers and programmers earn their living today.
Most musicians derive the majority of their income from concerts and merchandise. It's only the stars that get significant income from album sales.
The vast majority of writers derive the majority of their income from writing-related jobs, such s teaching, workshops and journalism -- if they don't just have a day job.
The vast majority of programmers work with writing custom software for a specific customer, and get paid directly by that customer -- not by writing general-purpose software that's sold off-the-shelf.
You sink you are being zo funny! You vant to play rough, ja? OK, ve play rough:
There were zwei peanuts, walking down the straße, und one was 'assaulted'... peanut
I'm going to be honest, I don't care about plagiarism. I don't care about copyrights in general. The fact that someone transplants information from one place and puts it in another is not a problem, because no one can rightfully own information. Nor can anybody rightfully own an arrangement of words.
Oh sure, I still care about sources, because you need to prove the statistics or obscure information you are citing is true. But it does not bother me if somebody is just ripping that information out of somewhere else. Information is information, whether or not you are "saying it in your own words" is irrelevant. The disgust people display towards the concept of plagiarism is a result of various public school systems beating that into their heads, and the fact many public school systems do this indicates very skewed priorities. School is not about learning information plainly, no, it is also a game of reputation. If you are going to be using this information, make sure you remind people that I said it first, and not just for verification of the information in question, but so that I can get credit for it.
I've spent far too many hours in my college career trying to avoid typing something in the plain manner dictated by common sense, merely because some other author typed it before me and is easily search-able on the internet / library databases. And I can't ever admit that I reworded what I just about to say, because that would be "concealed plagiarism" (even if I thought up the phrase on my own, I would never be able to prove it). It's either find a new way to state "Cat's have fur." or put it in quotes and add it to the bibliographical mountain that is amassing.
What strikes me as ridiculous is that many people argue there is educational value to rewording statements; as if I have been subconsciously learning more from that the entire time. No, screw that. I have been learning from reading, listening to lectures, and doing work many times. The ability to reword "Cat's have fur." into "Cat's are covered in fur." has nothing to do with it. It is just one of many unnecessary hurdles in the education system that push people away.