Category: Internet Culture and Technology

As It Happens, Privacy, and the Mechanical Turk

As It Happens on CBC Radio just played a good double segment on “Google Eyes”. The first part looked at the Amazon Mechanical Turk task looking for Steve Fossett’s plane on satellite images. The second part looked at privacy issues around street level imaging from outfits like Google.

Mechanical Turk (Artificial Artificial Intelligence) is a project where people can contribute to tasks that need many human eyes like looking at thousands of satellite images for a missing plane. It reminds me of the SETI@home project which lets users install a screen saver that uses your unused processing cycles for SETI signal processing. SETI@home is not part of a generalized project, BOINC that, like the Mechanical Turk, has a process for people to post tasks for others to work on.

The Privacy Commissioner of Canada announced yesterday that she has written both Google and Immersive Media (who developed the Street View technology used by Google) “to seek further information and assurances that Canadians’ privacy rights will be safeguarded if their technology is deployed in Canada.” The issue is that,

While satellite photos, online maps and street level photography have found useful commercial and consumer applications, it remains important that individual privacy rights are considered and respected during the development and implementation of these new technologies.

This is a growing concern among privacy advocates as a number of companies have considered integrating street level photography in their online mapping technologies.

In street level photography the images are, in some cases, being captured using high-resolution video cameras affixed to vehicles as they proceed along city streets.

Google, according to the commission on the radio, has not replied to the August 9th letter.

Plagiarism and The Ecstasy of Influence

Jonathan Lethem had a wonderful essay, The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism, in the February 2007 Harpers. The twist to the essay, which discusses the copying of words, gift economies, and public commons, was that it was mostly plagiarized – a collage text – something I didn’t realize until I got to the end. The essay challenges our ideas of academic integrity and plagiarism.

In my experience plagiarism has been getting worse with the Internet. There are now web sites like Customessay.org where you can buy customized essays for as low as $12.95 a page. Do the math – a five page paper will probably cost less than the textbook and it won’t get detected by services like Turn It In.

These essay writing companies actually offer to check that the essay you are buying isn’t plagiarized. Here is what Customessay.org says about their Cheat Guru software:

Custom Essay is using the specialized Plagiarism Detection software to prevent instances of plagiarism. Furthermore, we have developed the special client module and made this software accessible to our customers. Many companies claim to utilize the tools of such kind, few of them do and none of them offer their Plagiarism Detection software to their customers. We are sure about the quality of our work and provide our customers with effective tools for its objective assessment. Download and install our Cheat Guru and test the quality of the products you receive from us or elsewhere.

Newspapers have been running stories on plagiarism like JS Online: Internet cheating clicks with students connecting it to ideas from a book by David Callahan, The Cheating Culture (see the archived copy of the Education page that was on his site.)

There is a certain amount of research on plagiarism on the web. A place to start is the The Plagiarism Resource Site or the University of Maryland College’s Center for Intellectual Property page on Plagiarism.

I personally find it easy to catch students who crib from the web by using Google. When I read a shift in writing professionalism I take a sequence of five or so words and Google the phrase in quotations marks. Google will show me the web page the sequence came from. The trick is finding a sequence short enough to not be affected by paraphrasing while long and unique enough to find a web site the student used. This Salon article, “The Web’s plagiarism police” by Andy Dehnart, talks about services and tools that do similar things.

Perhaps the greatest use of these plagiarism catching tools is that they might show us how anything we write is woven out of the words of others. It’s possible these could be adapted to show us the web of connections radiating out from anything written.

Note: This entry was edited in Feb. 2018 to fix broken links. Thanks to Alisa from Plagiarism Check for alerting me to the broken links.

WikiScanner

The media has been reporting on a neat tool that Virgil Griffith developed called the WikiScanner which scans the Wikipedia for entries edited by a particular domain. This has allowed people to find that people at the Department of Defence, for example, are hard at work editing the entries for abortion and the pill. The BBC has a story at Wikipedia ‘shows CIA page edits’. Wired has a story, See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign. Wired also has place you can submit interesting Wikipedia Spin Jobs.

All this raises the question of what/who is a legitimate Wikipedia author? Is there something wrong with a company editing its own entry? Isn’t the point of the open enditing to let all the various interests out there negotiate the entries?

I should add that the WikiScanner is an example of the unexpected uses of datamining. It uses information no one expected could be mined and combined to produce interesting results that can be interpreted.

CAUT: Email Outsourcing Threatens Privacy & Academic Freedom

The Canadian Association of University Teachers recent Bulletin has a timely story about Email Outsourcing Threatens Privacy & Academic Freedom. The story is about Lakehead University switching over to Gmail. The switch means that students and faculty now have gigbytes of email space as opposed to the megabytes they had from the campus run service (a situation similar to what we have at McMaster.) The switch also raises privacy concerns because Google’s terms of use includes the following:

As a condition to using the Service, you agree to the terms of the Gmail Privacy Policy as it may be updated from time to time. Google understands that privacy is important to you. You do, however, agree that Google may monitor, edit or disclose your personal information, including the content of your emails, if required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order), or as otherwise provided in these Terms of Use and the Gmail Privacy Policy. Personal information collected by Google may be stored and processed in the United States or any other country in which Google Inc. or its agents maintain facilities. By using Gmail, you consent to any such transfer of information outside of your country.

As Google ads functionality so that they can offer more than just email I suspect this problem will be more acute. Soon we might see universities outsourcing calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, and web site functions.

Sweden upstaged by Maldives in virtual diplomacy

Sweden is the second country to open an embassy in Second Life according to this story from the Associated Press, Sweden upstaged by Maldives in virtual diplomacy. The Maldives beat them to it by a couple of weeks. What is interesting is that the embassay will feature an exhibit about Wallenberg.

It provides visitors with information about Swedish culture and history, as well as tips about places to visit and visa rules. It will also host exhibits, including a virtual version of the Budapest office of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who helped thousands of Jews escape Nazi-occupied Hungary during World War II.

Thanks to Jean-Claude Guedon, who told me about this yesterday.

Buying friends online

Do you want more friends for your MySpace presence? The Globe and Mail has an article by Keith McArthur, Trouble making friends online? Buy them (May 22, 2007) about services known as “friend trains” that help people make lots of friends. These services are selling enhanced access so that people can get lots of friends faster. Companies that use Facebook for viral marketing can then get lots of friends who then get their feed.

Obviously you may not be able to buy love, but you can by friends.

Offshore learning

Tutoring is now available over the Internet from India. A BBC News story Multinationals lead India’s IT revolution (Steve Schifferes, Jan. 24, 2007) reports about how companies like TutorVista are selling tutoring for North American kids at rates like $99 a month, unlimited help.

How long will it be before we have university marking being contracted off-shore?

The same BBC News series includes a story, Here is the US news from Bangalore, about reporters in India covering news in the US.

McMaster Youth Media Study

A colleague of mine, Phillip Savage, supervised an interesting student research project into the attitudes of McMaster youth towards broadcast and youth media. A group of upper-class students in his Communication Studies courses surveyed students in a first-year class and prepared a report titled, The McMaster Youth Media Study (PDF). What is impressive is that one of the students, Christina Oreskovich, presented this at the “CBC New Media Panel” to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage (today, May 10th, 2007.)

Here is their “composite sketch of the typical student” which nicely captures the results:

She is 18 years old in her first year of a liberal arts program, her parents were immigrants and she speaks English and another home language (mostly with her grandparents now). She has a cell phone with a built-in camera and is toying with the idea of perhaps in the summer upgrading to a phone with a built in MP3 player. She got a laptop computer when she started at Mac in the fall and has broadband access at home, and in certain locations on campus. She downloads music for free from the Internet form a range of sites and although she has an iPod she rarely pays for iTunes. She regularly downloads complete TV programs off the web to watch on the laptop but rarely whole movies. Almost every day she catches one or two items from YouTube (usually sent as attachments to electronic messages from friends). She occasionally uses MySpace for social networking. On a daily basis she keeps up to date with over 100 friends from school, home and work on Facebook. Only occasionally does she look at blogs; and she doesn’t keep one herself – though some of her friends do.

She still watches TV – usually at least once a day. Her favourite channel is City-TV but she also catches CTV, CBC-TV and CH. She regularly listens to radio (very rarely CBC Radio), although she figures she gets most of her music from other sources. She’s heard of people getting satellite radio but since she doesn’t have a car she very rarely experiences – it’s more something her Dad is into. She will read magazines quite regularly, at least once or twice a week.

She doesn’t feel she has the time or interest to follow most news closely, yet. When she does she is as likely to use traditional mass media (TV, newspaper or radio) as internet sources. She prefers TV, radio nd newspapers for national and international news, and the internet for arts and entertainment stories.

She feels strongly that the Internet allows her to both keep in touch with a wide range of friends, but worries a bit that maybe she is spending less face to face time with close friends and family. She is also a bit concerned about whether time on the internet is making her a little less productive in her school work, although she thinks that it really helps her understand quickly about what’s going on in the world and exposes her to a wide range of points of view (more so than traditional mass media). She gets worried at time about her own privacy on the Internet, especially when she spends so much time on Facebook. She’s not really sure if she can find more Canadian information on the Internet versus traditional media. (pages 3 and 4)

I knew Facebook was popular, but didn’t expect it to be this popular. I’m guessing that it is becoming an “always on” utility for many students that aggregates, summarizes and nicely shows what’s happening to their friends. I suspect interfaces like Facebook Mobile will become more and more popular as iPhone type cell phones become affordable.

BookCrossing – The World’s Biggest Free Book Club – Catch and Release Used Books

BookCrossing is a project a colleague librarian Barbara suggested to me as an example of new media and books intersecting. The idea is that people release books into the “wild” with a BCID label and number. Then others who find the book can log on and write in the journal of the book. Users can then watch how books travel around, being caught, read and released. Neat idea – would our library do this on campus? What if we took books being deacquisitioned and released them in departmental lounges or the student centre?