The plague of plagiarism

Recently, I came across a sad incident. A very good friend of mine had to shut her cooking blog that she loved so much because of the plague of plagiarism. I have known her since she married my friend. Over the years, she had developed a taste for cooking and started her own blog on cooking, complete with recipes she tried along with beautiful pictures of her creations. The blog went on to win quite a few awards and gave her good recognition within her 'cooking blog' peer group. More than awards, I felt she got personal satisfaction out of putting her recipes to print and sharing it with her friends and admirers.

A year or so back, she found out that a popular food website had taken one of her recipes and posted it on its own without a single line of credit. Her polite request to give her proper acknowledgment was met with indifference. Incensed, she posted the conversation on her site, eventually forcing the website to pull that recipe down. This was her first encounter with plagiarism.

I believe the next major encounter (maybe there were others in between that I do not know of) has what has led her to the decision of making her blog private. This time it was another person who had copied many of her recipes and posted on her own blog once again without any acknowledgment of the source. When questioned, the argument the copier posed was interesting - since almost everyone plagiarizes in one form or the other - be it a download or a torrent, what's wrong in her doing so? A good question indeed, but I don't think one that is fair by any means.

I have encountered blatant plagiarism while in college, probably the fertile playground for plagiarism. Couple of my friends in college copied my assignment in one of my favorite subjects and gave it to the professor. Like in most colleges now, my prof had a software to identify potential 'copies' and true enough, he found strong similarities between the three of our assignments. It was a C program where the logic was the same, but the difference was in variable names! The prof pulled us aside and gave all of us an 'F'. He was quite disappointed at me because I was getting consistent A+s in his subject. Probably for that sole reason he gave me a reprieve and told me that I can make up my grades if I did well in the next assignment, which thankfully I did. In this case, I never intended to copy or to be copied. I had given my assignment for 'reference' to my friends, who unfortunately, referred it a bit too much. So, whose fault was it - mine or theirs?

In this day of torrents, downloads, YouTube videos, and pirated CDs, it is very easy for our moral compass to point in the wrong direction. It has become so easy to flick someone else's work that it barely registers in our brain that what we are doing is wrong. Internet has made it so easy to get information that we forget that what we read or download is someone's hard work.

Even before the Internet, we used to do all this. We copied tapes. We photocopied books. Plagiarism was still there, but it was just a lot harder earlier.

As an author of a book, I know how much time and effort it takes to write a book. Unless your book sells like Harry Potter, the amount effort that's put in is highly disproportionate to the return that's obtained in the form of royalty. I spent almost 1 - 2 years intermittent effort (roughly 4-8 hours a week) to get a royalty of around $50!

But getting back to the point, was the person justified in arguing that since we plagiarize in one form or the other, we should not complain when someone plagiarizes our work? I don't think so.

Whether we care to admit or not, we are all hypocrites. We preach something and do something just the opposite. We proclaim that bribery is bad, but if it gets our work done, we are fine with it. We claim that nepotism is bad, but if our relatives get a good job, we are fine with it. We claim that favoritism is evil, but if we get preferred treatment that we don't deserve by merit, we are fine with it. This is not going to change.

However, what we do try is to change our slowly, over generations. While it may be too late for us to correct our mistakes, we try our best to ensure that our children are taught the right morals and hope that they will be better than us. While we may curse, we tell our children not to. That's what makes us human. By nature, we try to make our next generation better.

Thus, if not for the sake of ourselves, we need to start cultivating better habits so that our next generation has something to look forward to and not wallow in the same muddy waters that we are in. That would be my argument to the person who stole my friend's recipes, and more importantly, my friend's sense of trust in others. By setting a bad example, we may still survive, but we are just making the world a little worse down the road.

We cannot change a lot of things about ourselves, but there are some simple things that we can. One is to say "Thank you" to others when they offer a helping hand. The other is to acknowledge someone's work by thanking them for providing inspiration or information. It does not make our contribution any less important, rather it just makes us better humans.

And to my friend, I would say this as well - incidents like this will happen. If we let us be disillusioned by this, we are only robbing our next generation of our courage and our creativity. It is too precious to be robbed. Let's not give those with faulty judgment that pleasure.

Traffic Sniglets

On my way to office, I was stuck in traffic and was going slow. My mind started wandering around and landed up on Sniglets. Sniglets, a word coined by American comedian Rich Hall, means a word that does not appear in the dictionary, but should. My uncle (more like my cousin) showed me a book when I was probably in my 8th grade or so and I found it to be extremely fascinating.

While the intent of sniglets is mostly humor and dry wit, I think there is a lot of truth in it also - why do most of the actions/mannerisms we experience in the day-today world not present in a dictionary? Goes to show that there is a lot of scope in a language still!

Here are some samples I pulled from the Internet:

• Bleemus (blee' mus) - n. The disgusting film on the top of soups and cocoa that sit out for too long.
• Crummox (noun) - The amount of cereal leftover in the box that is too little to eat and too much to throw away
• Laminites (lam' in itz) - n. Those strange people who show up in the photo section of brand-new wallets.
• Phistel (fis' tul) - n. The brake pedal on the passenger side of the car that you wish existed when you're riding with a lunatic (or wife!).

Back to traffic, here are some I thought of, while waiting for the traffic to ease.

• Blancoslug (blanko slug) - n. The big car/van that goes slowly in front just when you get into a lane with solid lines (so you can't cross)
• Biggaslug (bigga slug) - Bigger the size of the car, slower it goes in the left lane (and does not move to the right).
• Rubbaslugger (rubba slugger) - Person who slows down due to an accident on the other side of the road, even if he can do nothing about it, but congesting the traffic on his own side as a result.

As you can see, the running theme is drivers slowing down for apparently no reason!

The big red blob

After a bout of flu and some hectic schedule, it's good to get a short break - intentional or unintentional...

It was an interesting junction of events today - My flight was hopelessly delayed due to weather and I was getting restless, and I was reading Getting things Done by David Allen, reading about productivity and in some sense, time management. In the middle of it all, I looked out the window and saw nature in its usual glory and a poem popped out of my head.

As I look out the plane's window,
I see The Big Red Blob...
Bathing the ground in its amber glow,
Reflecting off the rivers that flow,
Oh, how I wish that time would go slow.

I believe that a good poem is not one that has flowery words or sophisticated rhyme, but one that is a reflection of true feeling - and in the midst of all the 'wasted' time, I did wish that time would slow down for me to take in the scenery a little longer.

As I think a bit more (not a good thing for a poem), it feels better as a Haiku...

Plane on the runway
Waiting to depart
"Getting things done" in my hand
Waiting to be read
Sunset outside the window.

How people respond to content online

I came across a great article called 9 ways people respond to your content online by Rajesh Shetty today, thanks to Guy Kawasaki's tweet that I am following. After reading, I can't help feel that Guy himself is ignoring the article, as sometimes I feel he just posts way too many tweets for me to keep up, resulting in me doing Spam, Skip, or Scan! However, he can be excused because of sharing some great articles like this.

In short, Rajesh says that people perceive content in one of the following 9 ways (quoted directly from the article):



Negative Return of Investment on Interaction

1. Spam: If your content does not provide a reasonable ROII (return-on-investment for an interaction) for the reader or is self-serving or simply useless, the reader will mark it as spam. Posting something that may be assessed, as “spam” is the fastest way to losing credibility.
2. Skip: The reader makes an assessment that he or she won’t lose much by reading it. In this case, the reader has not written you off yet but if you consistently create content that is worth “skipping,” the reader might write you off.
3. Scan: The reader thinks there are only a few parts that are of relevance and wants to get right to the core of the content and skip the rest.

Transform

1. Stop: The reader is touched by the article and stops to think about the article, it’s relevance and what it means to him or her personally and professionally.
2. Save: The content is so good that the reader might want to re-visit this multiple times.
3. Shift: The article is transformational. The reader is so deeply affected (in a positive way) by the article that it shifts some of their values and beliefs. In other words, this piece of writing will transform the reader and make him or her grow.

Leverage and Engage

1. Send: The content is not only useful to the reader but also to one or more people in the reader’s network. The reader simply emails the article or a link to it to people that he or she cares.
2. Spread: The reader finds the article fascinating enough to spread it to anyone and everyone via a blog, twitter or the social networks that he or she belongs.
3. Subscribe: This is the ultimate expression of engagement and a vote of confidence that you will continue to provide great content. When the reader wants to continue listening to your thoughts, he or she will subscribe.

He goes on to suggest some things to consider to re-think the way you write online content. I think this is a great way to look at how you create online content. In addition to his thoughts, I feel that you can still improve things more than just the content.

• Make it easy for readers to ignore (1-3) if you can't avoid having some content in that category. An example would be to mark it in the title with a specific type or prefix that your readers will know to ignore better. Thus, you can remove the prefix for content where you want your readers' attention. This would be great for Twitter, for example.
  
• Make it easy for readers to read (4-6) by proper spacing and lot of visuals to enhance their pondering capabilities. Visual cues are always great to help improve your thought process as people tend to think visually. If you have a transforming point, better to add a bunch of visuals to strengthen that point. For example, your blog content can be improved by adding some visuals.
  
• Provide unobtrusive tools to facilitate readers to perform (7-9) without having to search for it. Lot of systems do this already by providing links to share, send, or social bookmark and it's a great use of unobtrusive technology.

Kudos to Rajesh for a nice article.

Better Documentation

One of the interesting things in IT I have seen so far is how people tend to learn less of what they use more. I call this Inverse law of IT learning. For example, we take training courses, read books, and participate in discussions about say, Weblogic or WebSphere or SAP or any other technology we tend to use sporadically in different projects. However, we barely tend to read a book or take a course about Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. We have come to see them equivalent to a DVD Player or a TV where we're just supposed to 'get' it without RTFM.

I don't think the analogy we developed applies much. Desktop publishing software such as the Microsoft Office Suite are much more complicated than Notepad for example. They are excellent tools to deliver quality documentation, if only we spend a little bit of time understanding them a bit more. I have seen experienced professionals spend minutes (which adds up significantly over time as we use Word almost every day) in cutting/pasting/selecting by fumbling with the mouse without knowing some basic keyboard shortcuts that can let them do the same in seconds.

We are more happy to crib about the 'user unfriendliness' of Microsoft Office than trying to spend a few minutes to understand the design and concepts involved, such as the Style library and Paragraphs.

I made a presentation (in the traditional death-by-bullets style) a while ago for my colleagues on how small tricks in Microsoft Office suite can significantly improve documentation that is produced daily by teams - be they defect reports, project status, or design documents.

While writing the presentation, I ended up reading Presentation Zen and Non-designers design book, which completely changed my perception on how to create presentations. You can see the final version in SlideShare. Please comment!

Better Documentation

View more presentations from Sathya Srinivasan.

Blogging again!

Not that anyone cares, but it took me ages (as can be seen from my last post) to get back on track to start blogging again. I have lived through one of the biggest hurdles to blogging that one can go through - I am not doing anything interesting, so what exactly can I blog, and that too daily?!

It's a fairly easy state of mind to get into, especially if you are working constantly. I got a chance to take a breather and realized that I have quite a bit to blog actually. I read a lot, I surf a lot (and no, I don't spam-a-lot!). That's good fodder for the blog.

As a software consultant, I always end up getting another doubt. Consultants by profession, are supposed to get into the heart of the problem, understand it quickly, and provide a solution. In most cases, we have to pretend that we know all the answers to build customer's confidence and then, in the background, cram as much information as possible to be one-step ahead of the questioners. This poses a problem with blogging. Let's say I get into a new domain or technology. It's hard to blog in the process of learning for the fear of letting the customer, who may potentially stumble upon the blog, that I am learning. And once I am done learning, I move on to other things, and end up not blogging about what I learned. A kind of a catch-22 situation I guess.

Well, in any case, I have taken my keyboard up again and hope to put it to the page. Let's see how long it lasts this time.