Bloggers' Plagiarism Scientifically Proven

XiceeX writes "Wired has up a story about HP, as part of a larger drive to figure out how ideas ideas 'infect' large groups of people, scientifically proving what most people already knew: bloggers steal their ideas from other bloggers."

Re:Bloggers

[Anonymous Coward]

>Of course, this begs the question..

No, that's not what begging the question is about.

Anyway, shouldn't this be about stealing other bloggers lack of ideas?

Re:wait

[lambent]

That's called a Google Bomb, and is an actual concerted effort to raise results on google. Not stealing.

Re:Bloggers

[Cecil]

It does not beg the question. It raises the question. Please don't use that term unless you actually honestly know what the hell you're doing. "Begging the question" has nothing to do with an actual question anyway. If your statement has a question mark in it you're almost certainly NOT begging the question.

Re:Bloggers

[welloy]

What does "beg the question" mean, anyway? [strongbrains.com].

Look! I'm linking to a blog in a discussion about blogs!

Isn't that ironic [reference.com]?

No, in fact it is not.

Re:Self-Pleasure Circuit

[Brown]

It is in human nature to believe in one's own importance; it is a self-defence mechanism as much as anything - most people really aren't important or respected in 'Society' (whatever that might be), and these give a harmless boost to self-confidence.

The reason it lasts is of course percisly due to their habit of referencing each other, explicitly or implicitly - there's no external force which slows the process down, only internal encouragement - a positive feedback loop. Most people 'outside' don't find it interesting or insightful, but within, the competition, community respect and recognition encourage people to continue.

Pretty similar to many of the fluffier 'academic' subjects in many ways, really :-)

-Chris

Re: Not the Idea, the Expression

[crashnbur]

According to copyright law in America -- and this makes sense -- you don't own the idea, because the idea is not your creation. You own the "fixed creative expression" of the idea. And by extention, it is that expression that is copyrighted to you. Not the idea itself.

Re:Few Original Ideas

[timeOday]

If memory serves, a 19th century sociologist by the name of "Darde" posited that out of 100 people, 1 is truly creative and the remaining 99 are echoic.

Hence the rest of us peons are reduced to recycling the wisdom of long-dead academics. (get it?)

Actually I mostly agree. Except I think everybody is at least slightly original, just to different degrees. Even Einstein's work wasn't a total discontinuity out of the blue.

I like to rank originality, at least in science, by the number of years I guess it would have taken for the thing to be invented anyways, if the original inventor had not. The TV, for instance, was a virtual tie among several people.

Back in the dark ages there weren't too many scientists and it was relatively easy to move a discovery up by 100 years IMHO. Nowadays so many people are working every problem that it's harder to jump ahead even by 1-2 years.

"Important Bloggers"

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

Isn't there something deeply wrong with any article where that phrase occurs?

Re:I have some ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the article they _don't_ assume "that if two people have the same idea one must have copied from the other."

They attempt to do programatically the same thing teachers do every day. If the prose is a little too close to a previously published item it suggests copying, not original thinking. Obviously this is extremely subjective.

straw men, yay!

[moral kiosk]

The title of this Slashdot story, as well as most of the comments, have missed the point.

I spoke with Lada Adamic Wednesday, and she gave a talk on this and several other of her research directions. They are not out to determine whether people plagiarize. They are interested in information flow within complex networks. That is to say, if I want to find good information, where should I look? The typical answer has been "those who agglomerate".

It is no surprise to the HP group or anyone that some information sources are simply aggregating agents. But if your area of research is information flow in complex networks, this type of study contains many insights. For example, a common question is "what information nodes are important?". This study seeks to look beyond the naive answer "high-degree nodes" and attribute some importance, in an informational sense, to lower-degree nodes that act as sources for the network.

The iRank scheme mentioned several times in the article, which I read, demonstrates this thrust. A scheme like PageRank will almost always rank most highly the aggregates, because they are highest-degree in terms of backlinks. But who is to say that such a ranking is optimal? If you care about quickly scanning much information, it probably is. But if you care about seeking more detailed or perhaps more well-informed sources of information on a topic, iRank may well be a closer-to-optimal scheme.

The comments regarding this story have been a straw man excercise if i've ever seen one on Slashdot. HP doesn't spend its research money to find out that some information sources gather information from many others and distribute it widely. It does spend its money to find out more about how complex networks operate and how the flow of information can be analyzed and exploited to improve query responses in those networks.

Re:Bloggers

[Anonymous Coward]

Using "beg the question" to mean "raise the question" is becoming more and more a common and accepted practice. It may be distasteful to those that know the true origins of the phrase (Aristotle and the latin translation, "petitio principii"), but languages evolve, and sometimes words and phrases come to mean something quite different to (or even the opposite of) what the original meaning was. Evolution is a good thing. It adds richness and complexity.

This has been stated as an acceptible meaning in the Oxford English Dictionary. Its only a matter of time before it gets wider support. Clinging to what was right in the past will only bring stagnation, IMHO. Embrace the new and its craziness.

Re:It's what Open Source is all about

[turnstyle]

"Simple answer: it's not a problem if no one is complaining. If they were worried about getting paid, they would not do it for free."

Hey, I'm all for people making their own choices.

But I can also tell you that I've been in touch with a number of coders behind fairly popular OSS projects who told me that their next project wasn't going to be OSS.

And also note that folks like me regularly get asked (and not always kindly): "hey, why don't you GPL your code?" and I think it's just as fair for me to ask: "hey, why don't you think about charging for your work?"

Re:I have some ideas

[Zeinfeld]

Somehow, I doubt this. Do you really think that the "craftsmen" who copied (even very well or perfect) Michael Angelo's David were of a "highest form" of regard, even above the original artist?

I said craftsman's art. Artists were considered slightly differently, but not all that much. Caravaggio's work was admired because of his technique and the skill with which he produced sculpture in the Greek-Roman tradition.

In his day the innovative elements of his work were not considered in the same light we consider them today. And for the next couple of centuries artists were judged by their ability to replicate the techniques and subjects of Carravaggio, Raphael, da Vinci et. al.

The example you give 'David' was admired because it represented a 'hero' of the old testament in the style of a Greek Hercules. It was the mastery of the Greek heroic that won praise at the time. The innovative homerotic theme was not admired in the same light. In any case Carravagio is being praised for his ability to copy the human form, not for innovating a new form.

The idea of pure originality without any demonstration of skill or technique only appears in the Modernist movement 1890 or so. Duchamp certainly could not have got away with his ready-mades any earlier. Even the idea that art could represent sensation rather than merely depict nature was controvertial when Turner started to show his abstract sea scenes. In his day the innovation was dismissed as 'soap suds and white wash'. It hurt his career and the career of Ruskin.

So no, I don't think you do manage to show that innovation was appreciated as a good in itself prior to the industrial revolution. If you look at some of the loopier pieces of modern art (the unmade bed) I think it is time to consider innovation for its own sake as probably overrated. The shock of being invited to consider something new as art wears thin after a while. The day that Damian Hirst exhibits one of his own turds pickled in his own urine is not far off, beat that one.

Re:Memes even worse than unscientific...

[bayvult]

Meme advocates remind me of the annoying kid in the class who has one only answer to every question. That answer is to shout "Meme!" to everything, whether the answer is best explained psychologically, sociologically or by a combination of approaches.

For a really torching critique of how stupid and limiting this idea really is, see Mary Midgley's famous essay from 1979, here [royalinsti...osophy.org].

Answering the point that "A cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itself... Once the genes have provided their survival machines with brains that are capable of rapid imitation, the memes will automatically take over."

Midgley writes -

So, apparently, if we want to study (say) dances, we should stop asking what dances do for people and should ask only what they do for themselves. We shall no longer ask to what particular human tastes and needs they appeal, how people use them, how they are related to the other satisfactions of life, what feelings they express or what needs cause people to change them, Instead, presumably, we shall ask why dances, if they wanted a host, decided to parasitize people rather then elephants or octopuses. This is not an easy question to handle for dances, but it will be still harder for scientific theories. Dawkins explicitly includes them as memes, so that the proper way to enquire about them seems to be, not to investigate their truth or any other advantage which they might have for the people using them, but to study the use they make of people.

So "mimetics" basically assumes we're Borg'd robots and all other studies of how ideas are valued, evaluated or accepted should be thrown out of the window.

No wonder people find the idea creepy.

She elaborated on this in her chapter in Alas Poor Darwin [link [amazon.com]] where she described it as "...an entirely understandable move in view of the success of similar methods in the physical sciences... The trouble is that thought and culture are not the sorts of thing that can distinct units at all.... Information is not a third kind of stuff."

She's pretty much on the money. Meme-advocates are dazzled by patterns, but the approach is so philosophically narrow the answers don't have any context, and so no value. Why do you run Linux, BSD or Mac OS X? Don't even bother answering, your operating system chose you... :-/