[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Beyond the Beyond shares Yves Behar’s thoughts on design in an age of artificial intelligence.
• blogTO makes the case for the east end of Toronto.
• The Big Picture shares photos of a family of Congolese refugees resettled in New England.
• Centauri Dreams hosts an essay looking at the prospects for off-world agriculture.
• Dangerous Minds shares photos of the beauty created by graffiti removal.
• The Dragon’s Tales looks for signs of possible cryovolcanism on Europa.
• Joe. My. God. shares audio of the new Blondie track “Fun.”
• Language Hat remembers the life and career of linguist Leon Dostert.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money argues protest is needed in blue states, too.
• The LRB Blog warns people not to forget about Pence.
• Marginal Revolution considersa trends in the British economy.
• Neuroskeptic shares disturbing findings about the prevalence of plagiarism in science.
• Window on Eurasia notes that Russia does not expect Trump to take all the sanctions down at once.

[WRITING] “Blogs, Papers, Plagiarism and Bitcoin”

Neuroskeptic provides an astonishing example of how some scholars were able to get away very lightly with apparently plagiarizing a blog post about Bitcoin, because it was a blog post.

Retraction Watch reports on a strange case of alleged plagiarism.

In February 2016, F1000Research published a paper called How blockchain-timestamped protocols could improve the trustworthiness of medical science. The authors, Greg Irving and John Holden, demonstrated the use of the bitcoin blockchain as a way of publicly verifying the existence of a certain document at a certain point in time. This approach, they say, could be used to make preregistered research protocols more secure. A problem with preregistration is that it requires a trusted central authority to securely store the protocols. To overcome this, Irving and Holden suggested using the distributed bitcoin network to timestamp documents.

The method involves hashing the document containing the protocol, and then using the hash value as a password (private key) to create a new bitcoin account. By transferring a nominal sum of bitcoins into the new account, a permanent data trail is created, all across the worldwide bitcoin network, which anyone can later use to verify that the hash value was used on the network at that particular time. Because the hash value is unique to a particular document (even a change of one character would totally change the hash), this serves as a tamper-proof way of verifying preregistration.

It’s a clever idea – repurposing the bitcoin network to help make science more rigorous. But it turns out that it wasn’t Irving and Holden’s idea. Back in August 2014, a blogger called Benjamin Gregory Carlisle wrote a post called Proof of prespecified endpoints in medical research with the bitcoin blockchain. In this piece, Carlisle proposed the hash document/create bitcoin account/transfer nominal sum system as a way of verifying preregistration in science. He provided a step by step guide to how to do it. Yet Irving and Holden didn’t cite or acknowledge Carlisle’s post at all. In fact, they implied that the idea was theirs e.g. they wrote that “we propose” the blockchain scheme.

Reading both documents makes it clear that intellectually speaking, the F1000Research paper is very closely based on Carlisle’s blog post. The main difference is that Carlisle simply proposed the idea, while Irving and Holden actually tried it out in practice – but what they tried was 100% Carlisle’s idea. Also, in terms of the text, the paper contained some passages which are strikingly similar to Carlisle’s post.

Much more is at Neuroskeptic.

[URBAN NOTE] “Toronto school board head resigns, plagiarism allegations grow”

The past day’s worth of news about Chris Spence, head of the Toronto District School Board until he resigned on account of extensive plagiarism, is astonishing. Just. Astonishing.

The man who was brought in to turn around Canada’s largest school board has resigned “with a profoundly heavy heart” after admitting to plagiarizing material for a newspaper article.

Chris Spence, who was appointed director of education for the Toronto District School Board in 2009, handed in his resignation on Thursday — 24 hours after issuing an apology for plagiarizing a large part of an article published in the Toronto Star. The article has since been removed from the newspaper’s website.

“It is with great sadness and regret that I am writing to tender my resignation as director of education for the Toronto District School Board,” Spence said in his resignation letter.

“I have come to this decision after a great deal of reflection, and no small amount of consultation with family, friends and colleagues. I do so with a profoundly heavy heart.”

Chris Spence, director of education for the Toronto District School Board, has resigned after being caught up in a plagiarism scandal. (TDSB)Spence, 50, said he doesn’t “wish to be a further distraction to the trustees, or my many friends and colleagues at the Toronto District School Board. I therefore submit my letter of resignation and, once again, offer my sincerest apologies.”

Chris Bolton, chair of the TDSB said he had accepted Spence’s resignation “effective immediately.”