The disappearing links

I've noticed a change in what Google returns when you search on the names of persons who have been documented on the VroniPlag Wiki plagiarism documentation site as having extensive text parallels that could constitute plagiarism in their dissertations and habilitations. It used to be that when one searched for their names, the link to VroniPlag Wiki came at the top of the search.

Now there is a notice that some links have been removed because of personality rights questions, and links show up -- if at all -- past the first page of results. This is perhaps due to a recent court ruling.  The European High Court (EuGH, 13.05.2014 - C-131/12) ruled that people can have links about them personally "forgotten" by search engines. The pages naming them do not have to be removed, but they can insist that the search engines not point to such pages.

So it is not enough to just google a name to see if there are any problems associated with scientific publications about a person. One would now need to know where to look in order to find out if, for example, plagiarism in a doctorate has been documented or a paper withdrawn or issues with a publication documented.

This is unfortunate for scientific purposes, as it is vital that other scientists are made aware of dissertations, papers, and books that have been withdrawn for plagiarism or other academic misconduct. Otherwise they will try and replicate experiments that were forged, or build on top of wrong material. I have heard the excuse that a paper is plagiarized, but the contents are true. That is not always the case, sometimes in plagiarizing, something gets taken out of context and the meaning is changed.

Privacy is important, but scientific papers and dissertations are not part of one's private life. They are contributions to the body of science, and are thus public and open to criticism. That's what keeps us honest as scientists: if we goof up, our names are forever associated with our misdeeds.

Update: There has been some discussion about which cases are affected. The following cases (there may be more) show me the VroniPlag Wiki link either on the second page or not at all: Alm - Bm - Cl - Nig - Rh - Tt

Google censors link

Well, what does the morning's email bring? A letter from Google:

Notice of removal from Google Search

Due to a request under data protection law in Europe, we are no longer able to show one or more pages from your site in our search results in response to some search queries for names or other personal identifiers. Only results on European versions of Google are affected. No action is required from you.
These pages have not been blocked entirely from our search results, and will continue to appear for queries other than those specified by individuals in the European data protection law requests we have honored. Unfortunately, due to individual privacy concerns, we are not able to disclose which queries have been affected.
Please note that in many cases, the affected queries do not relate to the name of any person mentioned prominently on the page. For example, in some cases, the name may appear only in a comment section.
The following URLs have been affected by this action:
http://copy-shake-paste.blogspot.de/p/vroniplagwiki-scorecard.html

All right, that means that one of the following 36 persons who have either a dissertation, a habilitation or a textbook published under their own name have extensive text parallels with other works that are generally considered to be plagiarism, even if the university in question has not decided to withdraw the degrees:

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Veronika Saß, Matthias Pröfrock, Silvana Koch-Mehrin, Georgios Chatzimarkakis, Bijan Djir-Sarai, Uwe Brinkmann, Margarita Mathiopoulos, Siegfried Haller, Jürgen Goldschmidt, Cornelia Eva Scott, Arne Heller, Martin Winkels, Daniel Volk, Ulf Teichgräber, Patrick Ernst Sensburg, Nalan Kayhan, Andreas Wolfgang Bonz, Michael Heun, Loukas A. Mistelis, Asso Omer Saiwani, Arne Herting, Nasrullah Memon, Bernhard Fischel, Bernd Holznagel, Pascal Schumacher, Thorsten Ricke, Jesu-Paul Manikonda, Rodrigo Herrera, Mareike Bonnekoh, Christian Huber, Ruth Angela Wernsmann, Qiang Fang, Dariusz Malan, Tristan Nguyen, or Alexandros Philippos Anastasiadis

It's called the Streisand effect, people.

You published something that contains unexplained text parallels. These text parallels have been documented publicly, in a review. Explain them in public. That's what we do in academia, we discuss and exchange arguments publicly.

Or as the yearly conference of German language and literature scholars put it in 1967, when they were protesting the decision of the University of Bonn to not rescind the doctorate of Pater Udo Nix which contained extensive plagiarism:

Die auf der Bochumer Tagung versammelten Hochschulgermanisten halten es für ihre Pflicht, sich von dieser an der Universität Bonn getroffenen Entscheidung nachdrücklich zu distanzieren. [. . . ] Wenn eine Rezension in einer unserer Fachzeitschriften gegen eine wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichung den Vorwurf des Plagiats erhebt, hat es als selbstverständlich zu gelten, daß diejenigen, die ein solcher Vorwurf trifft, in angemessener Weise dazu Stellung nehmen. Versuchen die Betroffenen, die Angelegenheit durch bloßes Stillschweigen zu erledigen, und bleibt dieses Verhalten auch noch ungerügt, so muß man fragen, was unser Rezensionswesen eigentlich noch wert sei und bis zu welchem Grade die Regeln wissenschaftlichen Anstands denn außer acht gesetzt werden dürfen. [. . . ] Angesichts einer solchen Häufung von Entlehnungen, wie sie im Falle Nix festzustellen ist, kann weder die Erklärung befriedigen, daß vorsätzliche Täuschung nicht eindeutig nachweisbar und daher bloße Fahrlässigkeit zu unterstellen sei, noch die Behauptung, daß die plagiierten Stellen für die Beurteilung der wissenschaftlichen Leistung irrelevant blieben. Auch wenn sie zuträfen, höben beide Feststellungen den Tatbestand nicht auf, daß die oben genannte wesentliche Voraussetzung für die Verleihung des Doktorgrades irrigerweise als gegeben angenommen wurde. Es wäre schlechthin verderblich, wenn in solchen Fällen die gesetzlichen Vorschriften in einer Weise ausgelegt würden, welche eben diejenigen Grundlagen wissenschaftlicher Forschung und Publikation bedroht, deren Sicherung die gesetzlichen Vorschriften zu dienen haben.
[Moser, H. (1968). Notiz. In: Zeitschrift f. dt. Philologie, Vol. 87, No. 1, pp. 312–316]

The scholars of German Letters gathered at the conference in Bochum feel that it is their duty to distance themselves from the decision reached by the University of Bonn. [. . . ] When a review of an academic paper is published in one of our academic periodicals and contains the accusation of plagiarism, it is taken for granted that the person such accused must respond in an appropriate manner. If the person in question tries to solve the matter by remaining silent, and if this behavior is not condemned, then one must ask oneself of what worth our system of reviews actually is and to what degree the rules of good academic conduct may be set aside. [. . . ] In the face of the sheer amount of borrowed material that can be determined in the case of Nix, it is not satisfactory to declare that it is impossible to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that the deception was not done with malice aforethought and thus only an accusation of negligence remains. It is also not satisfactory to assert that the plagiarized passages are irrelevant for the determination of the academic content. Even if this were so – it would not change in the least the fact that the above mentioned preconditions for granting a doctoral degree were erroneously assumed to have existed. It would be ruinous if in such cases the legalities were to be interpreted in such a manner as to threaten the exact same basic tenets of academic research and publication that they purport to uphold.[Selection and translation from my book False Feathers, p. 50]

The Circle

Normally I review books on my private blog, but I found this book so disturbing and relevant to the topic of scientific misconduct that I decided to review it here.

Eggers, Dave (2013) The Circle. Toronto/San Francisco: Knopf/McSweeney's.

This disconcerting book was published late last year. The parallels to a current article in Der Spiegel (Thomas Schultz: "Google: Die Welt ist nicht genug", Nr. 10, 1 March 2014, pp. 58–67) are quite unsettling.

The book is about a company in the Bay Area called The Circle. Everyone wants to work there, because the Circle is going to change the world. The working conditions are great: wonderful offices, excellent health care, free food, lots of activities on campus for the people who work there. Google, by the way, is in the Bay Area and offers great working conditions, wonderful offices, excellent health care, free food, and lots of activities on campus for the people who work there. But "The Circle" is a novel, a work of fiction. "Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental", the author notes.

The novel illustrates quite vividly what can happen when computer scientists are allowed to freely invent technical systems to solve perceived problems. They delight in finding a solution, enjoy the challenge presented, measure and store all possible data without a thought for what is so nicely called in German the Technikfolgenabschätzung, a technology assessment as Wikipedia translates it.

Computer scientists are not trained ethicists, indeed, many have never had a course in ethics in their lives. They are not used to looking at how society will change if their systems come under general use. "That's not my job," they tend to say. That's the job of politicians and religious leaders and teachers and others to determine the moral implications, to decide how we best train people to deal with the new technology. Computer scientists tend to develop something and then move on to the next great thing. It's all just a game, really.

Is this scientific misconduct, to develop tools without thought as to how these tools will be used? The ethical guidelines of the German computer science society softly reminds its members to consider such effects. The German research funding counsel makes no statement on this in their guidelines on good scientific practice. VDI, the German engineering society, is well aware of this problem and makes it quite clear in their own ethical guidelines.

As Mercer, one character in "The Circle" states:

[...] all this stuff you're involved in, it's all gossip. It's people talking about each other behind their backs. That's the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. [p. 132]

The book quite vividly and understandably demonstrates what can go wrong under such conditions. The mottos, so reminiscent of some of the newspeak from Orwell's 1984, include gems such as "Privacy is Theft", "Secrets are Lies", and "Sharing is Caring". People are expectantly awaiting "Completion", a rapture-like situation when finally all human beings on earth are connected to the Circle.

I read 1984 back in 1974 for the first time, and it was so unbelievable because the technology was so far-fetched. A screen in every room that could be used to call up information or that could watch over us? Crazy idea. Today, it is reality and Big Brother, aka as the Five Eyes, are indeed watching over us. Reading "The Circle" forty years later is much scarier. Most of the technology described in the book already exists and is in use by spy organizations like the NSA or openly shared by companies such as Google and Facebook. We are on the brink of completion.

The Google article in Spiegel describes a number of current projects and philosophies; there are surely hundreds more:

• There is the philosophy of 10x – everything must be made 10 times better, not 10%. 
• There is the concept of moonshots, projects like Google Glasses, self-driving cars, and something called Loon that I haven't heard of yet and am afraid to look up. 
• One project is showing a machine lots of YouTube videos in order to train it to understand daily life. It can now recognize objects, humans, and cats. )I am not sure that YouTube videos are a representative sample of human life... -- dww)
• There are robot projects.
• A gas balloon project is attempting to find a low-cost way of serving the Internet to remote locations.
• Project Calico attempts to find eternal youth, or at least to slow aging, by collecting immense amounts of medical data and analyzing them. This project seems to be quite similar to the health data collected in "The Circle". There, the protagonist Mae signs some forms without reading them, then is given something to drink that puts sensors in her body. The motto here is "To heal we must know. To know we must share." The personal data is published publicly.
• And then there is the step from just finding something in a document to the Knowledge Graph, demonstrated to the Spiegel author by Ben Gomes asking the system who the president of Germany is. The system answers correctly, Joachim Gauck. Then Gomes asks: Who is his wife. The system not only understands that "he" refers to Gauck, but also that "wife" can be a synonym for "life partner", and answers correctly. "We are just at the beginning," Gomes says.

That's the point. They are just starting, and have never really thought about what can happen if we use all of this technology. We can't say "oops" and start over again. We are already at a point where the mob, the German Stammtisch, the commenters in online articles quickly pass judgment, violently cry "off with their heads", and continue looking for the next victim.

Germany just recently has had two such cases:

• Sebastian Edathy, a parliamentarian, was found to have purchased legal pictures from a Canadian site that also sells child pornography. He has been active in the trial of the NSU, the right-wing group found to have murdered many foreigners, but also to have been infiltrated by the German spy organization, the Verfassungsschutz. He stepped down from his position as a parliamentarian "for health reasons" just days before the story broke. When it came to light that he had been warned that the police were working on the case, the former minister of the interior, Hans-Peter Friedrich, was forced to step down. The frightening parts are that somehow a newspaper was informed of the search of his home and took and published pictures. Edathy was "convicted" in the court of gossip within hours. The former editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, Robert Leicht, notes that we need to be careful of using the digital stocks: We need to remind ourselves of the principle of In dubio pro reo, one is innocent until proven guilty, and that Plutarch's Audacter calumniare semper aliquid haeret (slander boldly, something always sticks) needs to be heeded for us to consider ourselves a civilized society. The former publisher of Die Zeit, Josef Jaffe, has similar sentiments. Arguments such as: "People who smoke grass proceed to heroin" are false. It may be, that all heroin addicts started by smoking grass, but the converse argument is not true.
• Anne Helm, a politician from the Pirate Party participated in a Femen action (the picture is probably NSFW in the USA) during the commemorations of the bombing of Dresden. Yes, it was tasteless. But she was trying to be anonymous, wore a mask as she protested. However, the swarm soon identified her on the basis of a tattoo that she has. In an interview for Jungle World she admitted that this was her and that she wished that she could make the action "unhappen", she had not thought it through to the end. She reports on the threats that she has received, the calls for her to commit suicide, the murder and rape threats. There is a Facebook page that I will not link to that demands her being forbidden from entering the city and in which people have written that she must be publicly hanged in Dresden. The page has almost 9000 likes, she reports. I checked this morning, the page is now above 10.000 likes. A Tumblr has collected screenshots of some of the more horrid things people wrote.

So what does this have to do with the book "The Circle" and scientific misconduct? It shows that the technology is already here and we are not able to deal in a rational manner with it. Computer scientists have created a monster, one that looked furry and fun, that is now threatening to turn global society into a totalitarian state. Should scientists have to think about what could happen if they develop their systems? Well, we won't know until we develop them, will we? And if we don't develop them, someone else will?

"The Circle" will be required reading for all of my students this coming semester. You should read it, too.