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Weiye Loh

Rationally Speaking: The Michael Hecht-Rationally Speaking affair - 0 views

rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/...hecht-rationally-speaking.html

Podcast Plagiarism New Media

shared by Weiye Loh on 23 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • As many of our readers and podcast listeners have now learned, author, colleague and friend Jennifer Michael Hecht has started an internet campaign on June 22nd using social media to accuse us of plagiarism.
  • Jennifer apparently believes that we in some form stole her ideas, as presented in her 2008 book, The Happiness Myth
  • We protested our innocence, emphasizing that the only areas of overlap between her book and our podcast concern a few very common topics about happiness (its treatment by Aristotle and Epicurus, so-called happiness “set points,” and the question of whether wealth is connected to happiness). These, we pointed out, are so fundamental to a discussion of happiness that they are practically mandatory in any treatment of it. It would be odd indeed to have a show on happiness and not mention the research on set points, or on income and happiness — sort of like talking about evolution without mentioning Darwin and natural selection. We also pointed out that said topics make up only a small fraction of those we discussed in the podcast, and of her book for that matter. These ideas are certainly not Jennifer’s original contributions (of which there are many genuine examples in her book); rather, they have been widely discussed in the media, academic journals, and in many popular press books, such as Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Todd Gilbert, Authentic Happiness by Martin E. P. Seligman, and The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • a podcast (as opposed to, say, a book, or a technical paper) is a summary for a lay audience, and is not in any way a scholarly pursuit towards defining new ideas on the topic. This means that it isn't even clear how the very concept of plagiarism could possibly apply in this context. Nevertheless, we asked Jennifer — multiple times — to provide us with a detailed list of her charges, such as at what points in the podcast we used exactly what from her book. We thought that was fair, considering that she was the one making the potentially damaging charges. She refused, stating that we should do that kind of home work on our own. So we did. Below is a table that Julia and I put together, with a minute-by-minute summary and commentary of the entire podcast.
  • c) Those ideas that do overlap with Jennifer’s are common knowledge in the field. 
  • We deeply regret this incident, particularly the manner in which Jennifer has chosen to exploit social networks to smear our reputation before even attempting to contact us and hear our side of the story. We stand by the content and form of our podcast, which we think is intrinsically interesting (while certainly not groundbreaking!). We also still profess admiration for Jennifer’s work, not just about happiness, but in her other books as well, and hope that this ugly incident can soon be put behind us so that we can all get back to what we enjoy doing: writing and talking about interesting topics for an intelligent and informed audience.
Weiye Loh

Government to Create New Internet With No Right to Privacy? | The Utopianist - Think Bi... - 0 views

utopianist.com/...ernet-with-no-right-to-privacy

Privacy Network Security

shared by Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Popular Science explains the rationale: China and other regimes around the world inherently have an upper hand when it comes to cyber defense because their lack of civil liberty protections lets the government freely monitor online activity. Things like “deep packet inspection” (which gained notoriety during Iranian election protests back in 2009) that let governments monitor citizens traffic also let them monitor for unusual activity … The U.S. Internet, by virtue of its adherence civil liberties, is more like the wild west. Everyone does everything online anonymously, and while that’s great for liberties, it’s also dangerous when cyber criminals/foreign hackers are roaming the cyber countryside
  • The .secure zone would essentially mimic the way the internet is regulated in more oppressive regimes, creating a space where banks, government contractors and the government can do business without fear of being hacked. Keith Alexander, who has the totally not made-up title of Cyber Command Chief, and several lawmakers are pushing for the new infrastructure, saying it’s absolutely necessary for national security. While the vulnerability of our infrastructure is a major concern, we’d wager a lot of Americans might have a problem with a section of the internet where your right to privacy is nonexistent.
  • Weiye Loh on 10 Jul 11
     
    How do you stop hackers from attacking your network? Build an entirely new infrastructure. That's the idea behind the new .secure network, which will work just like any other network except for one thing: once you enter, you waive your right to privacy. 
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