Transcript
BOB GARFIELD: A few years ago, a group of researchers at the University of California at Berkeley were fed up with widespread academic dishonesty. So they invented a technology that could finger students who were using the internet to craft cut-and-paste term papers. That software, called Turnitin, works by matching up a string of 8 or more words with original sources to catch the copycats. It is very popular in the halls of academe. Now there's a new professional grade version of Turnitin known as iThenticate, beloved by lawyers because its data-sifting power quickly spots white collar thieves with sticky fingers for intellectual property. So what would happen if this software were applied to journalists? John Barrie is the president and founder of iParadigms LLC which developed iThenticate, and is here to tell us. John, welcome to the show.
JOHN BARRIE: Thank you very much, Bob.
BOB GARFIELD: I'm going to go confessional on you for a moment. When I was in high school, and this is a shameful episode, and I apologize to all involved, but everybody else in my German class had to write a, an essay on Beethoven, and almost to a, a student they went to the World Book Encyclopedia and plagiarized the essay therein about Ludwig von Beethoven. I alone, in this entire class, had the foresight and intellectual rigor to plagiarize from the Grolier Encyclopedia which was much more obscure, and they all got caught, and I didn't, and-- I live with that guilty memory to this day. Is there an equivalent these days of being able to go to the more obscure source to cheat from?
JOHN BARRIE: There is so much information on the internet from, you know, World Book Encyclopedia to the encyclopedia you may have taken from to, you know, the most obscure books that you could even imagine, and interestingly enough, even if those primary sources are not on the internet, so many people have taken from sources like that, incorporated that into their work, posted that work on the internet, that maybe our technology really doesn't find the book that you've taken your material from, but it's found another source that's quoted that book, which then ultimately leads the faculty member or the editor or you name it, to the original source that you cheated from.
BOB GARFIELD:Let's talk about the Hartford Courant. One of its op-ed contributors who was the president of Central Connecticut State University, Richard Judd, had plagiarized from several sources for an opinion piece he wrote for that paper. Tell me the Judd story.
JOHN BARRIE: The journalist from the Hartford Courant gave us a call, and she said well, one of the stories that we published in our newspaper has been found to contain some factual inaccuracies and some possible plagiarism, and we're doing a follow-up piece regarding that story, and I said well I'd be happy to answer your questions, but you may be interested, just for the heck of it, to run this piece through our iThenticate system just to see if you've missed any bits and pieces. She took us up on our offer and ran it through the system, and the thing lit up like a Christmas tree, and that led to the resignation of Mr. Judd from Central Connecticut State University.
BOB GARFIELD:I'm a columnist in my other job, and what would happen if I randomly took a paragraph from my column or one of my columns in its entirety and ran it through iThenticate? Is there any chance that you would get a false positive? I mean I know I haven't stolen from anybody (since high school). Is there a chance that some random assemblage of words would trigger a, you know, a false accusation?
JOHN BARRIE: The probability of stringing the same sixteen words together by chance that somebody else has strung together is less than one in a trillion. It's just not going to happen. And the probability of stringing, let's say, the same paragraph together somebody else has by chance is on the order of our sun exploding. Our technology will not begin to flag anything until we see at least eight contiguous words matching another source.
BOB GARFIELD:In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal and USA Today and so forth, many news organizations have declared publicly that they're going to be more vigilant. Is that enough alone to deter plagiarism, or is the need for iThenticate or similar digital watchdogs an absolute necessity?
JOHN BARRIE: The addition of other human editors, the addition of ombudsmen, the addition of a whole warehouse of people screening articles is not going to make a dent in this problem. It won't deter anybody from committing the same acts, and in my humble opinion, what the New York Times has done is essentially set themselves up for another Jayson Blair incident. Again, this is a digital problem, and it really can only be addressed by some type of digital solution.
BOB GARFIELD: How many news clients do you have at the moment, vetting their own reporters?
JOHN BARRIE: As I mentioned earlier, the Hartford Courant is really the first large newspaper that has signed up for iThenticate.
BOB GARFIELD: This time next year how many you think you'll have?
JOHN BARRIE: The majority of them.
BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well, John, thank you very much.
JOHN BARRIE: I really appreciate it. Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: John Barrie is the president and founder of iParadigms LLC which created and markets iThenticate. [MUSIC]