Parsing the Plagiary Scandals in History and Law

[Excerpt] “In 2002 the history of History was scandal. The narrative started when a Pulitzer Prize winning professor was caught foisting bogus Vietnam War exploits as background for classroom discussion. His fantasy lapse prefaced a more serious irregularity—the author of the Bancroft Prize book award was accused of falsifying key research documents. The award was rescinded. The year reached a crescendo with two plagiarism cases “that shook the history profession to its core.” Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin were “crossover” celebrities: esteemed academics—Pulitzer winners—with careers embellished by a public intellectual reputation. The media nurtured a Greek Tragedy —two superstars entangled in the labyrinth of the worst case academic curse—accusations that they copied without attribution. Their careers dangled on the idiosyncratic slope of paraphrasing with its reefs of echoes, mirroring, recycling, borrowing, etc. As the Ambrose-Kearns Goodwin imbroglio ignited critique from the History community, a sequel engulfed Harvard Law School. Alan Dershowitz, Charles Ogletree, and Laurence Tribe were implicated in plagiarism allegations; the latter two ensnared on the paraphrase slope. The New York Times headline anticipated a new media frenzy: When Plagiarism’s Shadow Falls on Admired Scholars. Questioned after the first two incidents, the President of Harvard said: “If you had a third one then I would have said, ‘Okay, you get to say this is a special thing, a focused problem at the Law School.’” There was no follow up comment after the Tribe accusation. The occurrence of similar plagiarism packages in two disciplines within an overlapping time frame justifies an inquiry. The following case studies of six accusation narratives identify a congeries of shared issues, subsuming a crossfire of contention over definition, culpability, and sanction. While the survey connects core History-Law commonalities, each case is defined by its own distinctive cluster of signifiers. The primary source for the explication of each signifier cluster is the media of newspaper, trade journal, television, and internet. The media presence is the Article’s motif—each case study summarizes a media construct of a slice of the plagiarism debate. By author’s decree the debate is restricted to “pure” plagiarism: the appropriation of another’s text without attribution. The survey is conducted according to chronological order, beginning with History. Ward Churchill’s sui generis smutch from plagiarism continues to agitate media coverage. His argument that a dismissal by the University of Colorado for academic misconduct would constitute a cover for a First Amendment protected essay on 9/11 adds more challenge to the plagiary abyss. This Article concludes with up-to-date coverage of the Churchill narrative.

Catastrophic Cervical Spine Injuries in Contact Sports.

Study Design Systematic review. Objectives To determine the incidence of catastrophic cervical spine injuries (CCSIs) among elite athletes participating in contact team sports and whether the incidence varies depending on the use of protective gear or by player position. Methods Electronic databases and reference lists of key articles published from January 1, 2000, to January 29, 2016, were searched. Results Fourteen studies were included that reported CCSI in rugby (n = 10), American football (n = 3), and Irish hurling (n = 1). Among Rugby Union players, incidence of CCSI was 4.1 per 100,000 player-hours. Among National Football League players, the CCSI rate was 0.6 per 100,000 player-exposures. At the collegiate level, the CCSI rate ranged from 1.1 to 4.7 per 100,000 player-years. Mixed populations of elite and recreational rugby players in four studies report a CCSI rate of 1.4 to 7.2 per 100,000 player-years. In this same population, the scrum accounted for 30 to 51% of total reported CCSIs in Rugby Union versus 0 to 4% in Rugby League. The tackle accounted for 29 to 39% of injuries in Rugby Union and 78 to 100% of injuries in Rugby League. Making a tackle was responsible for 29 to 80% of injuries in American football. Conclusion CCSIs are infrequent among elite athletes. There is insufficient evidence to determine the effect of protective gear (e.g., helmets, padding) on CCSI incidence. Scrum and tackle in rugby and tackling in American football account for the majority of CCSIs in each respective sport.This article is freely available via Open Access. Click on the Additional link above to access the full-text via the publisher's site.Published (Open Access

The Limits of Private Ordering within Modern Financial Markets

From standardized contracts for loans, repurchase agreements, and derivatives, to stock exchanges and alternative trading platforms, to benchmark interest and foreign exchange rates, private market structures play a number of important roles within modern financial markets. These market structures hold out a number of significant benefits. Specifically, by harnessing the powerful incentives of market participants, these market structures can help lower information, agency, coordination, and other transaction costs, enhance the process of price discovery, and promote greater market liquidity. Simultaneously, however, successful market structures are the source of significant and often overlooked market distortions. These distortions--or limits of private ordering--stem from positive network externalities, path dependency, and power imbalances between market participants at the core of these market structures and those at the periphery. Somewhat paradoxically, these limits can erect substantial barriers to entry, insulate incumbents from vigorous competition, and undermine the emergence of new and potentially more desirable substitutes, thus entrenching less efficient market structures. Using the London Interbank Offered Rate ( Libor ) and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association determination committee ( DC ) mechanism as case studies, this Article seeks to better understand the limits of private ordering. It also explores how relatively modest changes to the public regulatory regimes governing these market structures could, in some cases, yield significant improvements

Assessing the Usefulness of Visualization Tools to Investigate Hidden Patterns with Insider Attack Cases

The insider threat is a major concern for organizations. Open markets, technological advances, and the evolving definition of employee have exacerbated the insider threat. Insider threat research efforts are focusing on both prevention and detection techniques. However, recent security violation trends highlight the damage insider attacks cause organizations and illuminate why organizations and researchers must develop new approaches to this challenge. Although fruitful research is being conducted and new technologies are being applied to the insider threat problem, companies remain susceptible to the costly damage generated by insider threat actions. This research explored how visualization tools may be useful in highlighting patterns or relationships in insider attack case data and sought to determine if visualization software can assist in generating hypotheses for future insider threat research. The research analyzes cases of insider attack crimes committed during the period of 1998 to 2004 with an information visualization tool, IN-SPIRE. The results provide some evidence that visualization tools are useful in both finding patterns and generating hypotheses. By identifying new knowledge from insider threat cases, current insider threat models may be refined and other potential solutions may be discovered

Open Access, Interoperability, and DTCC’s Unexpected Path to Monopoly

For markets characterized by significant economies of scale, scholars and policy- makers o�en advance open-access and interoperability requirements as superior to both regulated monopoly and the breakup of dominant firms. In theory, by compelling firms to coordinate in the development of common infrastructure, these requirements can replicate the advantages of scale without leaving markets vulnerable to monopoly power. Examples of successful coordination include the provision of electricity, intermodal transportation, and credit-card networks. This Article offers a qualification to this received wisdom. By tracing the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation’s path to monopoly in the U.S. securities clearing and depository markets, it demonstrates that open-access and interoperability requirements can serve as instruments by which dominant firms obtain and entrench their monopoly power. Specifically, by imposing high fixed costs to connect to common infrastructure, allowing dominant firms to dictate the direction and pace of innovation and investment, and reducing the scope for product differentiation, these requirements can prevent smaller firms from competing with their larger rivals. In these ways, open access and interoperability can exacerbate the very problems they were designed to address. Our analysis helps to explain why important components of our financial infrastructure have become too big to fail. It also helps explain why, despite their highly concentrated structure, U.S. securities clearing and depository markets still exhibit relatively high levels of innovation and in- vestment. More broadly, our analysis offers a cautionary tale for policymakers seeking to employ open-access and interoperability requirements to curb growing market power in Big Tech, social media, finance, and elsewhere. Open access and interoperability are unlikely to constrain market power unless larger firms are unable to dictate decisions about innovation and investment, and unless the costs of building, maintaining, and connecting to common infrastructure are allocated in a way that does not discriminate against smaller firms. Where this is not possible, open access and interoperability are unlikely to forestall monopoly control, though they might still improve market efficiency by exposing incumbents to the threat of new entry

The Ethical and Political Contours of Institutional Promotion in Esports : From Precariat Models to Sustainable Practices

This study evaluated five early cases in which esport developer Riot Games made rulings regarding activities and infractions by members of various institutions related to its product, League of Legends. The findings of this study support future theoretical exploration of other esports in seeking a fuller understanding of issues related to consent, power differentials, and roles and behaviors expected of the institutional activities of players and teams in competition. Increased investigation of these—and other—issues from an ethical standpoint could lead to a framework that not only would facilitate future study but also bring opportunities for improvements in practices in concert with necessary policy changes.</p

Hit ‘em where it hurts: Measuring and testing the impact of economic nonviolent strategies on democratization

The literature on nonviolent political action has found that nonviolence far outpaces violence when it comes to winning political conflicts. Yet which actions nonviolent movements may perform to achieve success has rarely been studied. I argue that strategies which aim to limit the state’s economic capacity are likely to be effective, and test whether such economic strategies are predictive of democratization. I build upon both recent and classic nonviolence- and democratization literature to craft a theoretical narrative of why I expect economic nonviolent strategies to be effective. I then craft a measurement model for economic strategies using a novel combination of the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes 3.0 dataset and Bayesian item response theory methods. Using the resulting latent variable of economic strategies as an independent variable, I test whether it is predictive of transitions to democracy using Bayesian logistic regression. I find that nonviolent political campaigns that use economic strategies are more likely to cause a transition to democracy than those which do not. My findings are relevant to the nonviolence- and democratization literature as well as for practitioners of nonviolent action and fill an important research gap in an innovative way.MasteroppgaveSAMPOL350MASV-SAP

A micro to macro investigation on Electric Vehicle Policy in the UK: Work Package 3 Activity 6 report.

Written by E-Mobility NSR partners Richard Kotter (Northumbria University) and Dr Stephen Shaw (London Metropolitan University, Cities Institute), the report considers how the step change to mainstream market acceptance of Electric Vehicles (EVs) is being supported by macro-level policy to secure economic as well as environmental benefits. Particular reference is made to the UK, where interventions include grants to purchase new plug-in cars and vans, tax exemptions, and match-funding from the government for 'Plugged-In Places': pilot schemes designed to stimulate innovation and development of EV infrastructure at the meso-level of areas within the country. There are also examples of local authorities outside the Plugged-In Places areas that have found other thematic and enabling ways to invest into E-mobility. This is supplemented by private sector commercial investment additional to and outside of the eight Plugged-In Places areas in the UK. It considers how the vision for each area is, in turn, being scaled down to the micro-level of streets and parking spaces. It also reports on the latest government policy to spread EV charging infrastructure around the country. The report concludes that Local Authorities will play a leading role in developing a charging network that is comprehensive, inter-operable and easy to use. Working in collaboration with other key stakeholders, they must be equipped for two critical challenges: - Scaling up to the 'bigger picture': to raise the confidence of EV users who wish to make longer trips (including low carbon journeys where EVs are part of the modes of transport), including transnational journeys through international transport hubs to/from other NSR countries via ferry ports, airports and the Channel Tunnel - Scaling down to 'street level': to ensure that EV users, especially those who are less familiar with the locality, have the confidence to find publicly-accessible points, plug-in, and leave their vehicles charging 'Methodologies for Mutual Learning: a Digital Map Interface for Effective EV Infrastructure' - a supplementary paper to the main report - outlines methodologies to help stakeholders address these challenges and exchange good practice