Reputation is one of the big currencies of the academic world, so it makes sense that universities and research institutions want to do everything they can to preserve it. Nothing harms your credibility more than discovering that published papers were based on fake data or that somebody cut-and-paste another’s work and passed it off, uncredited, as their own.

And then there’s situations that seem like overkill, or that aren’t quite as clear-cut as some might have you believe. In undergrad, I had a professor explicitly tell us that studying from previous exams was cheating, and that if we were found doing it he would do UMBC’s equivalent of “prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law.” What I gathered from such a statement is that the professor wanted to be able to reuse similar test questions from year to year, a strategy that can more or less be taken advantage of by studying previous exams.

Something similar seems to have happened at the University of Central Florida, where a professor claimed that he wrote his own test questions, but in actuality cut and paste the ones he liked from a question bank. Some students got a hold of that bank and used it as a study aid. When the professor found out, he accused everybody of cheating. In my class this quarter we were told that using old data in a new paper was academically dishonest; that it was, in fact, possible to plagiarize yourself.

In a way, these situations strike me as the kind of illogical moral panicking we’ve seen extensively from the entertainment industries, where normal actions are reclassified as bad and the way in which these behaviors are now unethical are aggressively taught. The goal of classes is to learn the material, the common assessment of this being a test. Old tests are an excellent way to study, as they get students thinking about how the information will be tested and help them determine which areas they need to review further. It is the professor’s job to generate an exam that will actually test the students’ knowledge of the material, either by tweaking and rearranging old questions or writing new ones. The goal of research is to contribute something useful to the field. Referencing previous data is often important to establish a background for a new study, and since you are the one who did the work, it should always be impossible to “plagiarize” yourself.

To me, cheating and plagiarism are methods of circumventing doing the required work and lying that you did, so while they may be helpful in the short term, it ultimately harms the person doing it. These terms seem to have been co-opted to mean, “doing work in a way somebody doesn’t like.” Memorizing the exact question and answer combination for a test, or sneaking in study aids? Cheating. Learning the answers to a 250-question test bank so you’re prepared for the 50 questions on the test? That’s studying. Copy-pasting somebody else’s paper and submitting it as your own? Plagiarism. Tweaking a paper you spent hours writing in  another class for a new class? Not plagiarism. Forging data or submitting the same thing multiple times to inflate your list of publications? Dishonest. Building on your previous work? Not dishonest.

It’s important for academic institutions to not get caught up in a kind of “there are cheaters among us” witch hunt in their quest to improve the overall integrity of the community. Somebody who cheats their way through school will be unprepared for when that knowledge is demanded of them. Researchers simply repackaging old data or copying others aren’t going to make a name for themselves as leaders in their field. Because they cause people to assume that you’re this kind of person, accusations of cheating and plagiarism are already reputation-destroying – they aren’t something to be handed out lightly.

It always surprises me how many people call attention to an error in their favor. As soon as I started taking the test, I noticed that the answers I was selecting had an asterisk by them. It didn’t take long to surmise that the test had accidentally been made from the answer key, but I was still intending to solve the problems in case there were errors in the key. However, the professor’s attention was rapidly drawn to his mistake as students began going up to him and asking what the stars meant.

If nothing had been said, would those folks have gotten some of the questions wrong? Surely the professor would have figured out what happened when he was grading. Would it have mattered if he’d never found out? I suppose it is better in the end that people did say something rather than having him realize both the mistake and our silence about it after the fact. At any rate, he realized what happened and more or less invalidated the multiple choice section of the test.

Studying drove me underground over the past couple of weeks, so now that the test is over I’m hoping to have a bit more breathing room – at least for a few days. Tonight, Rachel put a kelp and honey mixture on my face, briefly transforming me into a green terror. Tomorrow night, I try playing racquetball.

I think that’s what gets to me the most: The necessity of pushing past the ever-present fear that spittle will somehow enter my bloodstream while dispatching zombies face-to-face, and having to coldly kill somebody who might have been warm in your arms mere hours before. Not surprisingly, my overactive imagination causes this concern to manifest in some interesting ways.

One of our animal rooms has a locked antechamber, and I often imagine that when I open the second door I will be greeted by an inhuman moan as one of the animal care staff, turned, clumsily rises from the floor. This is especially salient when the room is on a reverse (dark during the day) light cycle; I half-expect to turn on the red lamp just in time to see a hungry face approaching. Hey, these things have been known to start in animal facilities.

There’s also the shower, where I worry that the attack will come immediately after I close my eyes to wash my face. I will hear the sound and be confronted with my vulnerability; naked, weaponless, and with a zombie guarding the only exit. Around the house, Rachel has been known to taunt me by sneaking up and lunging for my neck, growling; I do not find this amusing.

These kinds of psychological aspects are explored by Max Brooks (a bona fide Anne Rice of zombie lore)  in World War Z. It’s a book that sounds like it’s going to be action theater a la Resident Evil, but in actuality invites you to share the in the physical and mental horrors individual people experience in such a scenario. While it has a bit more of the YA romance threaded in, The Forest of Hands and Teeth has a similar bent. With the addition of fast zombies that arise when the neighborhood is low on undead, Carrie Ryan details a world far more fragmented. It’s an excellent example of what could happen without the rapid implementation of ruthless-but-necessary defense strategies.

Setting aside some of the more exotic über-mutants to focus on average specimens, I think Half-Life’s headcrab zombies are the worst of the bunch. Although the host retains some level of consciousness while headcrab’d, once the binding is secure it becomes unable to survive without the parasite. Unlike regular viral zombies, where the infected are already brain-dead, you are faced with a human remnant trapped in a grotesque shell. Though it cries in agony for help, death is its only escape.

This week I’ve been reading The Dead-Tossed Waves, the sequel to Forest. Due to heightened sense of alert such stories engender, I am showering with one eye open, the soapy sting in my eyes a small price to pay for an extra moment to react. It’s okay, people laughed at Louis, too. There is a guide to being prepared, the tenants of which should be committed to memory. You can find it at your local library where I did: the non-fiction section.

The past couple of episodes have been following Dr. Chase’s decision to fake a test result to passive-aggressively kill an evil dictator, most likely averting a genocide the latter had planned. Chase is plagued by the murder and visits a priest seeking absolution. The priest tells him the only way to atone for his sin is to turn himself in, presumably meaning that he will lose his ability to practice as a doctor, not to mention his personal freedom.

This has set me thinking: Is there ever a time when a rational person can kill another and not feel bad about it? In superhero movies like Batman they often avoid this question by having the bad guy accidently step off a bridge or kill himself in some way, but what if that didn’t happen? Would it be okay to not incarcerate but actually end the life of “bad” people? It would sure solve a lot of problems at Arkham Asylum.

I’m not sure what the answer to this question is. It seems to me that if you believe killing the other person was the right thing to do, as Chase did, you shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. In the show, thousands of lives were most likely saved by the one death. Chase must take personal responsibility for his actions, but I don’t think he should have to essentially end his own life to do so by officially confessing to murder. He did break the law, and if caught, accept full responsibility, but he shouldn’t have to make it easy to get caught.

Killing obviously should never be taken lightly, but in some cases it seems like it is the right choice.

In Society, Sharing is Good

As children, our parents encouraged us to share as soon as our concept of “mine” began to develop. Sharing is one of those behaviors that benefits society as a whole and helps to break us out of a strictly Darwinian existence. If I have two sandwiches, and you have none, I can share with you. We’ll each have a sandwich to eat, helping both of us survive. Instead of a zero-sum situation, where my having food denies you food, sharing creates a net positive situation where both of us can win.

It is through sharing that we develop a culture and advance humanity. Creative works like art and music are, at their core, about sharing with others. They tell stories, reveal personalities, or comment on the world in ways that others can appreciate, forming a part of our culture as they are spread around. Gregor Mendel’s discoveries about genetics had no value while they were gathering dust on the monastery bookshelf; it is only when those discoveries were shared with the world that they became vital.

Infinite Goods Should Be Shared

Say you have something that is good for others, and it is infinite, so you will not lose any of it by giving some away. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most people’s idea of morality would dictate that they should share that thing. In general, information is something that can be seen as a public good. If somebody has a discovery or an idea, it costs nothing to give it away, it is not scarce, yet it can potentially benefit the world. Thomas Jefferson said it well:

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Content is an Infinite Good

The 21st century has transformed the content that comprises our shared culture from a scarce good to an infinite good. When we were constrained to physical media, a situation was created where only one person could have a given item at a time. Today, thanks to digitization, anybody can make an exact, lossless duplication of their content, effectively increasing the total “units” available. In a situation rather similar to Jesus pulling bread and fish out of a basket, no matter how many times something digital is copied there is always one left.

Thanks to p2p (people-to-people) filesharing technology and the internet, we now have a global distribution network that allows these infinite goods to be shared with anybody who wants it. Anybody with access to content in the form of digital information can spread it around the world, and why wouldn’t they want to? There is no loss to them, yet sharing it can improve the lives of any interested person anywhere in the world with a computer and an internet connection.

Putting it Together

Faced with an infinity of good things in the form of content information, why would somebody chose not to give it away? What is gained by hoarding something that can help others and costs nothing to share? Let’s say you figure out that you can protect people from a deadly virus, say, influenza, with a vaccine. While it costs something to manufacture physical vaccines and mail them to everybody in the world, sharing the information behind it is free. Others can chose whether or not they want to invest money in creating their own, but sharing has given them the option to do so where before it did not exist. Faced with this situation, who would chose to let thousands of people perish by denying them even the potential opportunity to save themselves?

Yet this is exactly the choice many people are making in the name of “intellectual property.” They would rather see others suffer than share something infinite with them, desperately clinging to business models that depend on scarcity. In the 21st century, ideas, information, digitized content are all infinitely available. For these things, the Star Trek replicator has been made, and it’s time to use that as a stepping stone to greater things.

Faced with an infinite supply of information that can potentially benefit billions of people, I chose to share. Those who try to hoard this information are both attempting to drink the ocean and doing wrong.