News: March 2008 Archives

Internet is a path of information, lots and lots of information. People can get their own ideas on everything they want to write and know. But the biggest problem now is how to identify plagiarism. Plagiarism is now very rampant, streaming like wild fires in the internet. Articles may have different titles or different in some words but still it delivers the same thought- let us say it was just customized or paraphrased.

The big maze now is how the researchers will uncover the copycat study or article.

Dallas Research group provides some new solutions on this problem--the cut/copy and paste documents which is unethical practice in doing documentations.

This piracy leads to be a big problem especially in the medicine. "In medicine, researchers and clinicians rely on research, and so this has high potential for doing harm," said Harold "Skip" Garner, a professor of biochemistry and internal medicine at medical center and one of the project's co-leaders.

Garner and his colleagues originally devised their program, named eTBLAST, for biomedical researchers. "In this program you can check the originality of your idea and identify your competitors or collaborators" Garner said. Last year, their team select summaries from the MEDLINE database and put this eTBLAST to the test. They quickly discovered that their code works very well.

eTBLAST works...

1. eTBLAST compares the wording of other summaries in the database and retrieves the top 400 to 1,000 matches.
2. The algorithms then go sentence by sentence, scanning for match works. The program not only matches alternate spellings of the same word but also pick out synonyms of the words.

With the help of federal Office of Research Integrity, Garner's group conducted a more systematic review on the results of some medical research. The results were published in the journal Bioinformatics and follow-up commentary in the "Nature" journal. They found out that the potential plagiarism represented about 0.04 percent of MEDLINE's database or roughly 6,700 cases in all. With this, 1.3 percent of database's documents were represented by similar studies re-published by the same authors. The group aptly flagged more the 71,000 suspicious pairs as a whole.

So, cheaters beware! This unethical act will lead you to trouble...

AOL an internet arm of Time Warner Inc. decided to buy Bebo a social media network with a total members of more than 40 million for $850 million in cash. It transformed itself from a business to a public website.

Bebo is known as one of the largest social networks in Britain, and is the leading social network in Ireland and New Zealand and rank number three in U.S.

Social networking is useful this time since it has grown popular and has gotten insured fast return of investment. So, companies like AOL want to buy such networks. Example for a success in buying social network is New Corp., the owner of Fox Television wherein buy MySpace for $580 million in year 2005 but estimated the value now of the network to be more than $15 billion (quite big right for just 3 years of owning it). Another example is Facebook which was bought by Microsoft last year where it is just $240 million compare to its $15 billion value now.

Buying Bebo is a good idea of AOL; surely it will have a good impact on their company.

Google Inc. has been banned by the Pentagon because of the pictures it publishes to the internet. Those controversial images have been a threat to U.S. military bases. The Pentagon then had requested Google to remove selected images that can be a risk to the bases.

According to Larry Yu the spokesman of Google that they were contacted by the military for the request of removing some images they have posted and with the response for their request they then immediately accommodated it.  

The images worry the Pentagon because of the views of the bases including its security that are established in the bases. Some of the security measures are also shown in the images. The Defense Department is still studying how many images are available. And for this they banned Google teams from taking video images on bases.

Google Maps feature ground level, 360 degree views of streets in 30 U.S. cities. In this, Google Maps, surfers are then able to drive down a street virtually using the mouse to adjust the views of the scenery. This feature has become popular especially to those people who are in trip to an unfamiliar place. But, this also lead to be a privacy invasion of the people captured in the images and now a threat to the U.S. military.

But Google then disputes that the only images captures are those images that are only visible from the public roads. And with this Google draw criticism from countries that they provide sensitive images, such as military bases that are potential targets of terror attacks.

In this fast-world, phase of technology computers are still behind. It is quite ironic information though but it is true. We know that almost everything these days runs with computers. Businesses even conquer the power of computers for a fast return of investment but computers still are behind from all these fast technology.

Computers are still confused about the usage of apostrophe. It is a familiar problem to O'Connors, D'Angelos, N'Dours and D'Artagans across America, even among French-speaking countries such as France and Canada.

Names are usually the most affected of these apostrophe confusion and it is really been a big problem especially when booking for your flight, setting dental appointment, casting your votes or dealing with your businesses in the computer.

Foreign names such as French, Italian and African have o' with their names. Dutch's surnames with van and space in them are the usually affected by this apostrophe confusion. And this is such a hassle thing for their businesses.

Analysts say that this apostrophe problem is just about poor programming. Computer programs have set of rules for first and last names. Usually, they do not think of foreign sounding names. So, computers find these foreign names as input mistakes.

Some of these mistakes appears in computers when it is complicated to receive foreign names with apostrophe. This apostrophe is usually mistaken as a piece of computer code that corrupts computer. It also occurs in online forms which have filter that looks for unfamiliar terms that might be put in as a mistake. An awful computer system will not be able to handle apostrophe in last names and will block it immediately.

Thinks like computer should have to have a new set of rules in foreign names because this apostrophe confusion can be a hassle to computer users. Businesses could be much complicated if these things happen again and again.