Lost Angeles, CA

April 16, 2013

The Plagiarism Hunter: One Former Student’s Quest To Uncover Plagiarism in Masters’ Theses at Ohio University, and the University’s Response

The Chronicle of Higher Education 52. 49 (Aug 11, 2006): A8-A11.

by Paula Wasley

Former student Tom Matrka has made a hobby of uncovering plagiarism in masters’ theses at Ohio University, and thus far has found thirty examples. The university was slow to act on his discoveries, and a scandal has erupted over the plagiarism.

Full text:

In a conference room in Ohio University’s Vernon R. Alden Library, Thomas A. Matrka takes just 15 minutes to hit pay dirt.

Scattered before him on a table are 16 chemical-engineering master’s theses on “multiphase flow.” He examines them in pairs. With a hand on each manuscript, eyes darting back and forth, he quickly scans the pages.

Identical diagrams in two theses from 1997 and 1998 strike him as suspicious. Turning a few more pages, he confirms what he suspected.

“This one needs to be turned in,” he says, pointing to an introductory chapter that not only mirrors the structure and content of the earlier one, but also includes whole paragraphs that are virtually identical. “This guy didn’t do a literature review,” he says. “His literature review was opening this guy’s and copying it.”

He reaches for another thesis. “Give me time,” he says. “I’ll find some more.”

Over the past two years, ferreting out plagiarism has become Tom Matrka’s hobby, maybe even his obsession. And he’s gotten very good at it. So adept, in fact, that the former graduate student at Ohio University — now a project engineer at a nearby explosives factory - - has single-handedly blown the lid off a hugeplagiarism scandal at his alma mater. Dozens of former students are now caught up in the investigation, several professors have been reprimanded, and the university is wrestling with how one department fostered a culture of academic cheating.

Regardless of whether Mr. Matrka was driven by revenge or ethics, this much is certain: The scandal would never have erupted without one graduate student’s doggedness.

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April 16, 2013

And From Another Angle: How an academic ghostwriter for hire produced thousands of pages for undergraduates as well as master’s and doctoral candidates.

By Ed Dante, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2010

Editor’s note: Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.

The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): “You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?”

I’ve gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. Seventy-five pages.

I told her no problem.

It truly was no problem. In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won’t find my name on a single paper.

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(Notes: 2)

Filed under: essaymills plagiarism writing college collegestudents academia chronicleofhighereducation longreads journalism ivorytower school universities

April 16, 2013

Cheating Goes Global As Essay Mills Multiply: One Writer’s Search Across Continents For Where These Papers Are Being Produced

by Thomas Bartlett, The Chronicle of Higher Education 55. 28 (Mar 20, 2009): A1,A22+.

The orders keep piling up. A philosophy student needs a paper on Martin Heidegger. A nursing student needs a paper on dying with dignity. An engineering student needs a paper on electric cars.

Screen after screen, assignment after assignment — hundreds at a time, thousands each semester. The students come from all disciplines and all parts of the country. They go to community colleges and Ivy League universities. Some want a 10-page paper; others request an entire dissertation.

This is what an essay mill looks like from the inside. Over the past six months, with the help of current and former essay-mill writers, The Chronicle looked closely at one company, tracking its orders, examining its records, contacting its customers. The company, known as Essay Writers, sells so-called customessays, meaning that its employees will write a paper to a student’s specifications for a per-page fee. These papers, unlike those plucked from online databases, are invisible to plagiarism-detection software.

Everyone knows essay mills exist. What’s surprising is how sophisticated and international they’ve become, not to mention profitable.

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Filed under: essaymills plagiarism academia highereducation longreads writing essays students college collegestudents articles thomasbartlett chronicleofhighereducation

April 16, 2013

“She Used My Work and Now Her Reputation Was In Tatters, Was That Fair?” New Yorker, ‘04 by Malcolm Gladwell

By Malcolm Gladwell

One day this spring, a psychiatrist named Dorothy Lewis got a call from her friend Betty, who works in New York City. Betty had just seen a Broadway play called “Frozen,” written by the British playwright Bryony Lavery. “She said, ‘Somehow it reminded me of you. You really ought to see it,’ ” Lewis recalled. Lewis asked Betty what the play was about, and Betty said that one of the characters was a psychiatrist who studied serial killers. “And I told her, ‘I need to see that as much as I need to go to the moon.’ “

Lewis has studied serial killers for the past twenty-five years. With her collaborator, the neurologist Jonathan Pincus, she has published a great many research papers, showing that serial killers tend to suffer from predictable patterns of psychological, physical, and neurological dysfunction: that they were almost all the victims of harrowing physical and sexual abuse as children, and that almost all of them have suffered some kind of brain injury or mental illness. In 1998, she published a memoir of her life and work entitled “Guilty by Reason of Insanity.” She was the last person to visit Ted Bundy before he went to the electric chair. Few people in the world have spent as much time thinking about serial killers as Dorothy Lewis, so when her friend Betty told her that she needed to see “Frozen” it struck her as a busman’s holiday.

But the calls kept coming. “Frozen” was winning raves on Broadway, and it had been nominated for a Tony. Whenever someone who knew Dorothy Lewis saw it, they would tell her that she really ought to see it, too. In June, she got a call from a woman at the theatre where “Frozen” was playing. “She said she’d heard that I work in this field, and that I see murderers, and she was wondering if I would do a talk-back after the show,” Lewis said. “I had done that once before, and it was a delight, so I said sure. And I said, would you please send me the script, because I wanted to read the play.”

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Filed under: malcolm gladwell serialkillers articles journalism longreads bryonylavery mentalillness insanity criminaljustice plays theater frozen plagiarism intellectualproperty theft

February 21, 2013

FLASHBACK: They were the kids of Malibu Colony

By Michele Willens, LA Times 2004

In the ’60s, beach-roaming kids discovered the Byrds playing at Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim’s open beach bash. A decade later, Cher’s son Elijah Allman’s first birthday party featured elephants and an Army tank. More recently, a lemonade stand served Tom Hanks, Kevin Kline and Tori Spelling, and every year, kids watch Fourth of July fireworks shot off from a private barge.

Los Angeles has no shortage of wealthy private enclaves, but none has quite the allure of the Malibu Colony, a mile of about 115 densely packed houses, off Pacific Coast Highway, mostly on 30-foot- wide lots, half of them on the “land side” (where prices have reached $6 million), half on the more desired beach side (where a home sold for $15 million this summer). Every house behind the simple wood guard shack and gate has a number (30, for instance) and many of them a celebrity provenance (No. 38 passed from Timothy Hutton to Bette Midler to Woody Harrelson.)

But the Colony is also a place where families have lived since it was established, and where thousands of kids (including this writer and later, her children) grew up, at least part of the year. Memories of the colony’s beauty, close-knit community, its storied residents and sun-drenched privilege drew about 150 people to the Littlejohn family’s tennis court recently for a first-ever Malibu Colony reunion. Ranging in age from 7 to 77, the group was ebullient but well aware of the obvious seductions and potential liabilities of growing up in the Colony.

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Filed under: malibu beach malibucolony thecolony michelewillens byrds cher celebrities hollywood latimes los angeles losangelestimes longreads

February 21, 2013

GHOSTS OF DOWNTOWN: How You Get From $1.75 Lunches to $2,000- a-Month Lofts Depends on Many Things, Such as the Death of Urban Self-Loathing

By Carol Lynn Mithers

Publication info: Los Angeles Times [Los Angeles, Calif] 22 Sep 2002: I.14.

Photo from Skellum on Flickr

The windows are the same, though I never realized how grand they are, how high and wide. Maybe that’s because back then they were masked by cheesy drapes. I probably never saw them this clean either. When no one in the tour group was looking, I rested my hand on one, for connection. Each night when my father and I left the office, we’d open these windows for fresh air; in the morning, I’d flip on the AC and pull them down to shut out the street’s noise and stink. Even so, a smell lingered, stale and depressing. The walls were dirty beige, the carpet oatmeal, the furniture a utilitarian mix of file cabinets, water cooler, battered wood desks. All gone now. Everything from those days is gone, everything but the windows.

From 1970 to 1984, the northwest corner of the seventh floor of the Continental Building at 4th and Spring was my late father’s bankruptcy law office. It was the epitome of old downtown, a bleak two-room suite in a seedy building just a block from the skid row missions.

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Filed under: carollynnmithers losangeles losangelestimes dtla longreads LA urban cities urbanplanning urbanrevitalization

February 21, 2013

Los Angeles writer Janet Fitch on introducing L.A. to itself

by Janet Fitch, Los Angeles Times, 22 Apr 2012

To write about this city is in some essential way to create it. Not in cement and steel, but in the imagination of its citizens, as well as in the minds of people who will never come here but who nevertheless carry an image of it in their heads. An image that is, in its way, as important as the concrete place where people live and sleep and look for places to park.

So many people come to Los Angeles with an idea of the city, some apotheosis of the American Dream with palm trees plus a really nice car. Then they settle down into ordinary jobs and don’t even understand the part of town they live in, let alone how it fits into the city as a whole or how the city started and grew.

Is it that they lack curiosity? Or is it that curiosity requires a nub of knowledge, as a pearl requires that first grain of sand to irritate the oyster? All they feel is that vague dissatisfaction that the Los Angeles they came here for must be somewhere else, and if only they had enough money or success, they could find it. Meanwhile, they live in a sad vacuum of car and home and freeway.

My project in writing about Los Angeles is to introduce the city to itself. I grew up here, my mother grew up here, my grandmother came here in 1922, at age 15, married to a wardrobe man. I’ve seen Culver City go from a quiet nowheresville where you visited the Helms Bakery on a field trip and got a small loaf of bread, a place so anonymous Patty Hearst hid there before being discovered by the FBI, to a flourishing biosystem of galleries and restaurants.

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(Notes: 6)

Filed under: losangeles janetfitch LA writing americandream city cityreads

February 21, 2013

A 2008 profile of downtown Los Angeles’s notorious Cecil Hotel, where “the hip and the near-homeless meet.”

Check-in at the Cecil Hotel had to wait a few minutes because Kerri Torrance, the clerk working the graveyard shift one night in November, had to deal with a heist.

A man staying on the 10th floor had called down to report that a woman had grabbed his money and bolted.

After the woman dashed through the lobby and burst out the front doors onto Main Street, Torrance called police while a handful of guests waited.

“She’s right out there … you see … well … he said they were doing drugs, cocaine or something,” Torrance told police officers.

Then she cupped the receiver and mouthed, “I’m sorry, just a minute.”

This was not the type of greeting the new owners of the Cecil desire as they try to “re-brand” the 80-year-old hotel between 6th and 7th streets. “We are not a missionary, we are not a halfway house, we are a tourist’s hotel,” Torrance explained.

In its early years, the Cecil and hotels such as the Million Dollar, the Alexandria and the Rosslyn catered to the city’s elite out-of-town visitors, and lavish parties were held in their grand ballrooms.

When the wealthy abandoned downtown during the Depression, the Cecil and others like it became residential hotels that for generations housed those who were one step above homelessness.

But downtown is becoming a hip destination again, and these hotels are sought by developers who say they can turn a profit by luring university students, working professionals and tourists.

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(Notes: 1)

Filed under: longreads noir cecilhotel losangeles skidrow

February 21, 2013

And while we’re discussing the Cecil Hotel, a fascinating 1994 LA Times article about Skid Row’s aging hotels.

Welcome to the Hotel Californian. There are no mirrors on the ceilings or pink champagne on ice. Still, like the near-namesake hotel immortalized in the 1977 Eagles hit, this could be heaven. But it seems more like hell. In this five-story, single-room-occupancy building in the middle of cacophonous Westlake, gaping holes in ceilings, trash-strewn hallways and roach-infested rooms welcome tenants.

Conditions like these at the Hotel Californian beset a host of dwellings in Central Los Angeles creating a legion of substandard housing, or slums as they are commonly called. The problem is especially acute in the Westlake and Pico-Union areas, home to some of the city’s oldest buildings. Scores of those neighborhoods’ deteriorating 1920s and ’30s apartment buildings and hotels are rife with fire and safety hazards and unsanitary living conditions.

About 7% of Los Angeles 780,271 multiple-dwelling units are considered substandard, according to the city’s Department of Housing. Local regulatory agencies do not find scads of earth-shattering violations-such as an open elevator shaft or a collapsed roof. But violations are cumulative, in some cases adding up to 20 or more for a single building.

And small problems can grow.

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(Notes: 1)

Filed under: Losangeles LA cecilhotel noir latimes longreads crime

January 30, 2013

"Social misery has inspired the comfortably-off with the urge to take pictures, the gentlest of predations, in order to document a hidden reality, that is, a reality hidden from them."

— Susan Sontag, On Photography

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