University of Maryland President Copied Rocket Science Paper From Aussie Student

University of Maryland President Darryll Pines appears to have committed significant plagiarism, lifting large portions of two academic journal articles from a tutorial website made years prior by an Australian student, a Daily Wire investigation found.

A 1,500-word stretch of a 5,000-word paper by Pines and a co-author published in 2002 — accounting for nearly a third of the paper — is virtually identical to a tutorial website called “Surfing the Wavelets” published in 1996 by Joshua Altmann, who at the time of publishing was a university student in Australia.

Pines does not cite or mention Altmann or the website, which says it was last updated in October 1996. Pines and his co-author, Liming Salvino, then recycled much of that paper, including almost all the uncredited Altmann language, for another peer-reviewed paper in 2006.

Pines, a rocket scientist and diversity activist, does not appear to have made any changes to Altmann’s work except removing some sentences and Americanizing the Australian’s British spelling (turning “analyse” to “analyze,” e.g.) — but Pines missed two such words, “endeavour” and “modelling,” which remain in his work with the spelling commonly used abroad.

Pines’s systematic editing of British words suggests he did copy the language, but deliberately manipulated Altmann’s text to look like his own. The finding of significant past plagiarism comes after Pines this month presented what he said was “faculty research” defending a pro-Palestine rally planned for October 7, but which actually came from ChatGPT.

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Pines’s 2002 paper, “Health monitoring of one dimensional structures using empirical mode decomposition and the Hilbert-Huang Transform,” was published in the journal Smart Structures and Materials, part of the SPIE engineering association.

In 2006, Pines and Salvino reused a large portion of that paper — including nearly the entire uncredited Altmann section — for a paper published in the Journal of Sound and Vibration, “Structural health monitoring using empirical mode decomposition and the Hilbert phase.” The above chart looks almost the same whether comparing Altmann to Pines’s 2002 or 2006 papers.

Where Altmann writes the word “endeavor,” Pines’s 2002 article says “endevour,” as if someone tried to Americanize the Australian’s British-style language but removed the wrong letter. The 2006 article also mirrors Altmann’s language in using the British “modelling,” though the 2002 article does not, perhaps because an editor at that journal changed it to the American “modeling.”

Pines’ papers do not contain any footnotes to Altmann. Instead, his footnotes are the same as Altmann’s, down to the page numbers.

In virtually the only instance where Pines tried to paraphrase, he managed to add multiple errors. {snip}

Katie Lawson, a spokeswoman for the University of Maryland, did not deny that the language was copied, but suggested there would be no repercussions for the president.

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The Daily Wire reported this month that Pines plagiarized from ChatGPT and passed the writing off as original research he had gathered from faculty experts. “I have consulted with Middle East Scholars and Historians on our campus regarding the origin and history of the Palestinian Flag. The general consensus opinion from these faculty scholars is as follows,” he wrote, followed by output that in reality came from ChatGPT.

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