Madras University bans scholar for plagiarism

Dear all,

Here is a news item that awakens us all about being authentic in our research publications.  Read the news item for yourself.




CHENNAI: The University of Madras has rejected a research scholar's doctoral thesis on charges of plagiarism and has banned the student from re-registering for the degree at the university.
"Plagiarism has affected the quality of research papers. Quality is very important. With this action, we want to send out a strong message that the University of Madras will not stand by such practices and ask colleges and guides to be very careful while selecting projects," vice-chancellor G Thiruvasagam said.
Declining to reveal the name of the candidate or his guide, Thiruvasagam said, "The foreign examiners who looked through the candidate's thesis refused to recommend a PhD saying some passages were copied from other articles. Local examiners had cleared the thesis." He said action would also be taken against the guide. "It is the guide's responsibility to be cautious while checking the thesis for such issues," Thiruvasagam said.
The vice-chancellor said the university had been receiving several complaints about plagiarized research papers when he was attending a public event in February. He said the university was considering procuring a software called Turnitin for Rs 15 lakh to check for plagiarized passages in research papers.
Speaking to TOI on Saturday, Thiruvasagam said the university would use software that can be accessed through Inflibnet, an autonomous body of the University Grants Commission that allows sharing of library and information resources among academic and research institutions, to check for plagiarised titles or passages in a research paper.
Plagiarism reared its ugly head in February when a top scientist and advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, CNR Rao, had to apologize to a leading scientific journal for reproducing work by other scientists in a research paper.
"The corresponding authors sincerely apologize to the readers, reviewers, and editors for this oversight and for any miscommunication," Rao and his co-author S B Krupanidhi had said in an apology. to Advanced Materials, a peer-reviewed journal covering materials science.

Source | Times of India | Chennai | 20 May 2012

Now Google Creates New Search Engines That Think Like Humans!!!

Google announced a major revamp of its web domineering search engine on Wednesday, just days after Microsoft’s rival Bing service announced upgrades of its own.

Google’s new search powers are encapsulated in what the company calls a Knowledge Graph, in which the new algorithms attempt to understand exactly what people are looking for and present basic answers on the results page, without users needing to click on any secondary links.

“We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want,” blogged Amit Singhal, Google’s senior vice-president of engineering. “And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for.”

Using what Mr. Singhal called the “collective intelligence of the web,” the Knowledge Graph shows results for Tom Cruise, for example, that manage to answer 37 per cent of the next questions that people usually ask.

“This used to be the stuff of dreams because we didn’t really know how to accomplish it,” Mr. Singhal said. “The dream has always been to understand things like you and I do, so this really feels like a sea change.” The new information will be contained in a special panel next to the traditional search results, Google said, and will be rolled out to users in the United States in the coming days before going international.

Jack Menzel, director of product management at Google, said that the initial version of Knowledge Graph has information on 500 million people, places and things and uses 3.5 billion defining attributes and connections to create categories for them.

Microsoft is investing billions of dollars in Bing in an attempt to close the search gap with Google, which serves some two thirds of all U.S. web searches compared to 15 per cent on Microsoft’s Bing.