Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

I was reading the April 2005 issue of the Communications of the ACM and saw this really interesting paper on Self-Plagiarism written by Christian Collberg and Stephen Kobourov. In this paper they talk about what is legimitate reuse of your own work and what is Self-Plagiarism. In case you are wondering what is Self-Plagiarism just like I was when I first saw the title, here’s a brief definition of the term according to Miguel Roig

In writing, self-plagiarism occurs when authors reuse their own previously written work or data in a new or written product without letting the reader know that this material has appeared elsewhere.

Now I find this to be pretty interesting concept ’cause its pretty easy to define when you stole from someone else, but how do you identify that you stole from yourself? Programmers are esp susceptible to this (In my opinion) as we are so used to reusing code in our programs that we don’t even think twice about reusing parts of old papers/articles we wrote when creating a new one. I know I have done it a couple of times… What about you? According to ACM & IEEE an article is only considered for publication when more than 25% of it is unpublished work. But even then over 75% of the article is composed of results that were previously published elsewhere… Think about it, in a lot of the papers out there in which over 75% is old work that was regurgitated in a new layout with some minor changes…

To demonstrate the widespread nature of the problem the Arizona computer science department has created a tool called Self-Plagiarism Tool (SPlaT) that searches through the publications from over 50 institutions and analyzes them for similarity. Check it out its a pretty cool tool. I wish it would let me check my old articles and stuff to see how much I reuse….

Well this is all for now.

– Suramya

Original Paper: Communications of the ACM, April 2005 (ACM Membership needed to read the complete paper)

A few of you might have heard about Fiona apple for those who havn’t she is a pretty talented singer whose last album was released in 1999, this recording went platinum. She is also famous for calling the recording industry ‘bullshit’ at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards.

In 2003 she recorded another album titled ‘Extraordinary Machine’ but her record label, Epic Records decided it wasn’t good enough and decided not to release it. Recently a copy of the album was leaked on the p2p networks and has become very popular. Some of the fans who liked the songs when to the music stores to purchase it but there they found out that the album hasn’t been officially released. These guys are now demanding that the album be released so that they can buy it but the studio’s are still refusing to launch it.

How stupid can these guys be? There is a big crowd out there that’s demanding the release of the album but these guys are refusing. If its too expensive to do a full fledged launch they can do a limited edition launch and make money. If they don’t release it at all they aren’t making any money anyways. The sad part is that since Fiona has a contract with Epic she can’t release the album under another label unless they release it.So she can’t make any money on her album because some management type decided that it shouldn’t be launched. Go figure…

Original Story: Wired Magazine

– Suramya

Read an awesome book called ‘Technogenesis’ by Syne Mitchell today. In this book humans are connected to the net 24/7 and everything takes place on the web. So if you are not connected you don’t exist. The main character of the book is a dataminer whose equipment breaks down and while she is taking it to the repair shop she notices that her senses are a lot more acute and her thinking is more alert. Slowly she becoms aware of the strange corrdinated behaviour of the people who are connected. Then she finds out that the couple of million connected human brains have start acting as a nervous system giving birth to a thinking machine or a meta-intelligence. Can’t tell you more about with book without spoiling the fun so go check it out.

While reading this book I was thinking how much the book made sense and how this could happpen a couple of years from now. Think about it, humans have also evolved from a bunch of randomly connected neurons which slowly evolved to create a thinking mind. Why can’t the same thing happen to a computer network where each computer connected acts as a neuron and once a certain critical mass is reached self-awareness can be achieved. The problem is finding this critical threshhold. It gets easier when you use the human brain as a processor ’cause we are already wired for awareness and our sub-councious can act as a building block for the new intelligence.

A lot of people are scared about this and will try to prevent this from happening(I guess a lot of people watched the terminator movies…). I mean a being whose mind covers the entire world and controls the entire human infrastructure sounds pretty scary. And whats to stop this ‘mind’ from deciding that it doesn’t need humans anymore and proceed to get rid of the inferior race.

The only thing that can prevent this from happening is teaching. We need to teach the AI human values and morals. I am not saying it will be easy, I mean how can a person teach someone who can scan an entire book in the time it takes us to say ‘book’? If something like this were to happen we would have only a couple of hours maybe less to react ’cause after that it will be out of our hands.

I personally think that the probability of something like this happening is pretty high and that we should be prepared for it. ’cause if we don’t we will never know what hit us when it happens.

What do you think?

– Suramya

Had a discussion with Surabhi today about people comparing two things. She is totally against anyone comparing anything with anything. She gets mad when people compare her looks with her friends or when people compare things in India to things else where etc.

Is it really so bad to compare? We do it all the time, is IE better that Firefox? Is Linux better than Windows? Is food at this place better than the other place? So why do some people don’t like others comparing two people? I don’t mean that you should compare someone with another person and tell him/her that the other person is so much better and that he/she is useless. We can do a positive comparision also, where both the plus points and the minus points of each person is compared. This can be done without putting down anyone.

Comparing yourself against an ideal tells you how much more effort you need to put in in order to achieve the same result. How is that bad? I think that comparing two things allows us to recognize the good points in both of them and if done the right way it generates a healthy feeling of competition between the two but if done incorrectly it can really damage someone’s self-esteem. So if you want to compare someone with another person put yourself in their shoes and think how that comment would effect you if it was directed towards you. One the other hand if you are comparing two inanimate objects you can put down the one you don’t like as much as you want. 🙂

Well this is all for now. Goodnight.

– Suramya

Was talking to Vinit today and his told me about this student in NJIT who was taking pics of the NJIT campus for a photography class he was taking. He was supposed to take 2 rolls worth of pics and submit them, and he decided to take pics of the NJIT campus but was told to stop by the NJIT Campus security as it was a security risk and was not allowed without prior permission.

How stupid can you get? This is a student taking pics so that he can pass a class not some terrorist. And before you start yelling at me to tell me its impossible to know. Think. If you were a terrorist would you have walk around the campus openly with a camera taking pics? Wouldn’t it be easier and safer to visit the official NJIT website, click on the link for a virtual campus tour and use that to plan for an attack? You can even get printed maps of the campus from the student center. For that matter you can goto the photogallery section of my site and under the heading NJIT Campus Views and get photos of almost every building on campus. Does this mean that I am helping terrorists?

I have seen the same thing on bridges etc in NY and NY. Big signs that say “Photography strictly prohibited” All they do is prevent tourists from taking pics to preserve memories. People who are planning an attack are not going to walk around with a big camera to plan an attack, they could just as well use a 5 year old photo to plan where they want to plant a bomb. Its not like the support pillars of the bridge go waltzing around every few days. The ban on photography makes some sense in millitary area’s, Airports etc, where the structure and placement of guards etc changes constantly. On a bridge/college it makes no sense at all.

Well this is all for now. More later.

– Suramya