Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Pennsylvania State Law prohibits Servers…

… in the cage

My logs recently have been getting a lot of traffic from TurnItIn.com. They sell a plagarism detection service. Here is an example report from their system. Presumably they are scraping my site to populate their databases.

Interesting business, lots of nice aspects. First notice how they can sell their service to both the creators and the consumers of written works, i.e. they are middlemen. Nothing like a protection racket: sin, crime, fraud, paranoia, etc. Finally you have a great little network effect; only the most a paranoid customer is going to check for plagarism at more than one such site but you certainly are going to be drawn to the #1 site.

In time they could manage to become a standard; any work submitted to anyone might require an originality score from these folks. Maybe then can get some state legislators to make this a requirement for all the state schools. When all is said and done they can turn around and start collecting licencing fees for IP rights holders.

But, they better move fast. Lots of companies have a big pool of data they can use to check for plagarism: Google, Northlight, or even one of the big 80s online info services. They better move fast, get that brand advantage going.

Of course a system like this isn’t much help if your problem is with a journalists who’s just making it up. In fact it could be that what you want your writing to aspire the Goldilocks plagarism score. “Not too hot, not too cold.”

Raising the debt ceiling: $1,000,000,000,000.00.

My nation: 300,000,000 people

Added debt:$33,000 per person

My town: 42,000 people

Our share: $1,400,000,000.00

Our tax override: $4,000,000.00

If we passed one override every single day for a year: $1,460,000,000.00

Wonder were all that money from the rising debt is going!

“Ambiguity and heterogeneity, rather than planning and self-interest, are the raw materials from which powerful states and persons are constructed.”  - Padgett and Ansell

It’s amusing to notice that the model that power-law distributions are more likely to arise in emerging markets, ones where user’s are reduced to follow the leader behavior, is similar to Gossling’s phase model of standardization.

One of the roles of standards making is to provide the market with metrics they can use to measure product quality. That’s obviously the function of standards like weights and measures. I suspect that many buyers hold back from entering a market until they see the emergance of open standards. They then use that event as a signal that the market has matured sufficently that they can rest assured that the knowledge institutions have appeared. Such buyers are, presumably, not intending to reap the advantage of being an early adopter, i.e. the chance that by moving early they can trigger a transformation in their own upstream markets.

Meanwhile you can see other analogies in this story about how fast a rumor/panic spread in Hong Kong regarding SARS. Here the prankster managed to yell “fire” in the crowded theater by fradulently claiming to be a reputable local news paper. Individuals who heard the rumor all try to assess it’s quality. After a while they are reduced to looking around and noting that other people seem to be acting on the rumor. That’s all you need, ignorance and users who are ready to act. Ready to link into the graph. In this case the nodes in the graph are behaviors to take regarding SARS rather than vendors in a marketplace.