One day in November of 1996, I sat in a dark theatre on the Warner Studios lot near Hollywood, California. Around me were a dozen colleagues I knew, and another couple hundred I didn’t, who had all worked together on the movie we had just watched, Space Jam.
After long months or years of work, the project was done. Names filled the screen, and moved quickly upward. We didn’t care about the actors: Michael Jordan, Bill Murray, and all the rest. We were waiting for the crew credits, and then they were there. Dense blocks of text raced up the screen as we strained to catch either our own names or our friends. I remember seeing Gokhan Kisacikoglu’s name first, possibly because, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, it stood out from the rest.
Then mine came up and was as quickly gone. It was very satisfying to see my name there. The project had been difficult. We had mandatory 7 day weeks and had to work a minimum of 13 hour days for the full 4 months on the project. Quite often, I did 18 hours in a day, raced home for dinner and sleep, and then back again the next day at 8am for another 18. We were glad it was over, and glad to be acknowledged.
Except, not everyone had their name on the screen. The animator I replaced wasn’t there, though he had worked on the project twice as long as I had. That didn’t seem right to me, so I asked my boss, an art director named Carlos, about it. “Greg doesn’t get an on screen credit because he wasn’t on staff the day the project wrapped.”
That didn’t seem right. The cast got credit even if they only worked one day. But, I had no say in the matter, so I let it go. Later, I worked for the video game developer Square, makers of the Final Fantasy series, and saw a much more egregious example: my boss, who had been on our project from day one, the game Parasite Eve, didn’t get a credit because he had left the project after more than two years of hard work, just a couple weeks before it was released. Instead, the man who took over for him got his credit.
At Rhythm &Hues, I was hired to work on the Daredevil movie, but I also did incidental work on other projects. One of those was X-Men 2. I spent about a week on the project, and thus earned my spot on the credit list. However, I was told that R&H, as a sub-contractor, was only allowed so many names on the credit roll, No matter how many people actually worked on the film. Somehow, I made the cut and was on the list. Remembering Space Jam, I asked them to give my slot to someone who had worked longer on the project than I had.
A couple years later, I had the opportunity to sue Fox Television and X-Files producer Chris Carter over credit. Carter and Fox had made a TV series, Harsh Realm, based on a comic I made with James Hudnall for Harris Comics a few years earlier. I considered James the real creator because he came to me with the idea and the first script fully written, but in comics, the first artist on a series always gets a co-creator credit. For that reason, James and I are co-creators of the series. The same would be true if I had come up with the idea, brought some pages of art to James, and he had agreed to write the dialogue and subsequent issues.
James and I settled the lawsuit after receiving a very favorable ruling in New York. The case hinged on the fact that Fox wanted to give Chris Carter sole credit as series creator, though it was based on our comic, used its title, and had many of the same story elements. Further cementing the connection, they had paid our publisher for the rights, as well as the right to credit Harris Comics, but not James and me.
The most notorious type of credit-related dispute is when a famous Hollywood producer or writer is handed an idea by a random person, then proceeds to write it up to great success. For the most part, these disputes are caused by naive people who don’t understand that their suggestion that a certain person write a movie about space aliens visiting earth does not always become a blockbuster like Close Encounters or E.T. because of their “idea.”
The much larger contribution, and the contribution(s) that matter, are all the research done by the people who actually wrote the script and produced the movie. Their credit claims are on par with suggesting that a childhood friend of a now famous athlete deserves monetary damages for the friend’s success, because he once suggested taking up baseball.
I had a friend get embroiled in something like this, but in reverse. Instead of the tiny idea guy suing the guy who did all the work for credit, my friend and an associate were hired to create a TV series based on two sentences left behind on a scrap of paper by a deceased producer. They did it and the series was successful, but the deceased producer was listed as sole creator. So in this case, the tiny idea guy got the credit, though he did none of the work.
A few years ago, I accidentally caused a rift with two friends due to a credit-related issue. In the academic world, it is customary for PhD students to list their supervisors on any journal article as co-authors, regardless whether they contributed so much as one period or comma to the document. The idea is that they are guiding your work, so they are assisting even if they don’t look at your papers for publication.
In my case, I did this with papers that were related to my thesis, the development of expertise, but not on other papers. This is because my supervisors didn’t want their names on my papers about paranormal dream research. It is a controversial subject, so they asked me not to extend the usual courtesy on those papers, and I didn’t.
One of my paranormal dream papers got into the hands of celebrity parapsychologist Daryl Bem, who was asked by my editor to help me “tighten it up.” He gave me so much help over so many iterations that I wanted to add him as co-author. He refused, saying it would be inappropriate for an editor to receive a co-author credit. That article became the most read article of all my research papers.
The problem with my PhD supervisors was related to the thesis. Their names are on the thesis as part of a traditional acknowledgements block. However, my publisher asked to publish my thesis as a book, which is somewhat unusual for a PhD thesis. My supervisors were very pleased about this.
The publisher, Springer UK, wanted it on a certain date, so long as the thesis was approved by then. They intended to publish it as-is except for one change: like all theses, mine had a page of administrative information followed by signature lines to show the document was formally accepted as satisfactory by my school, King’s College, London. I was asked to remove the page, and did. When the book came out, I sent copies to my supervisors.
About six months later, I asked them for a recommendation in a job search, but neither responded. I asked again, with no response. After some months, one of them got back to me. He said that it had bothered them that I hadn’t put their names in my book. I was surprised to hear this, because I distinctly remembered the opposite, and asked him to look again. He affirmed his previous statement.
This made me curious, so I took out my copy and saw he was right. I wondered how it had happened. Next, I opened the manuscript I sent Springer and saw the problem. My acknowledgements were on the same page as the signature lines Springer asked me to remove. It was too late to do anything about it by then, so I had to accept that the oversight had the potential to prevent me from ever teaching again, because no recommendation would be forthcoming from my senior supervisor, and I couldn’t trust what the other would write.
Ironically, most theses are never published as books, and my actual thesis is bound and in the King’s College, London library with my supervisor’s names intact. Just like every other thesis. And yet, because mine was published, that unintended affront has had a real career impact.
The comic book writer and editor Stan Lee, and comic book artist Jack Kirby, have famously tussled over who created Spider-Man, among other characters at Marvel Comics. The tradition today is to give creative teams like them equal credit, but for such a valuable property created so long ago, both men seem to think it is important to be acknowledged as the sole “creator.”
TV writer Mark Evanier, knew Lee and Kirby. He said that both men sincerely believed they had created Spider-man. He’s had conversations with each about it, and both presented convincing cases to support themself as creator. Mark felt that both were right and that both had created Spider-Man together. Never mind that it was a third man, Steve Ditko, who is thought to have made the series popular and is often considered by fans to be the true creator.
You may have noticed by now, the term “credit” sometimes refers to different things. It can be the new hire who hasn’t contributed much, if anything, to a project, but happens to be there when the credit list is drawn up. It might be denied to someone who made vast contributions but wasn’t present when the list was made. It could be given to more than one person as a joint work, where each can credibly claim to have originated the concept, but neither could have fully realized it without the other. It can be given when undeserved, withheld though deserved, and even refused in cases where it should have been given.
Most recently, I did some election-related research for the group New York Citizen’s Audit (NYCA). I sometimes write about that research here, but I don’t mention NYCA much. This is because I left the group almost a year ago, and don’t want people reading my articles to develop the mistaken impression that I speak for the group. It would be easy to think I do speak for NYCA , because as former research director and occasional presenter of that research, I have spoken for them in the past.
However, on those occasions, the messages were negotiated internally, which had an effect on the content. On the Zark Files, I write what I want, and that will sometimes be different from what NYCA is saying publicly. For that reason, I don’t want misunderstandings on this point and have avoided mentioning NYCA. This might look like I am denying them credit, so I would like to correct that here.
NYCA is loaded with wonderful people. I enjoyed my time there, and appreciated the help of other volunteers. The group uses code names for members, so I never knew the names of most. Some, like NYCA co-founder Marly Hornik, have revealed their names publicly. Most have not. For that reason, I’ll refer to them by title rather than name.
My interactions were primarily with the research and leadership teams. Occasionally I met volunteers from other teams, but this was unusual.
NYCA provided the raw data that I relied on for my analyses. Without them, I wouldn’t have had much to look at. As I recall, I may have found and obtained only one or two documents on my own, both from the NYSBOE website.
Sometimes I requested the data be obtained, sometimes it was done independently and then handed to me for review. Other times, I was told the data would be obtained in advance of a request, and I was asked to advise how the request should be made, to maximize the utility of the data for the research team. The FOIL team was fantastic at getting useful data, though I primarily dealt with one person from the team, their lead, who I remember as irascible, funny, and determined.
Marly and the communications director created many opportunities for me to get out of my home studio to talk with other researchers, law enforcement, and other interested officials. Without them, I wouldn’t have made presentations to sheriffs, a DA or two, the state legislature, citizen groups, or Gregg Philips and Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote fame. Marly presented with me on almost every occasion. The only exception that comes to mind is a sheriff I met along with our IT lead at the time. I talked numbers and then Marly brought home the reason those numbers mattered to the people of New York.
The research team looked into a lot of things. It is true that I asked them to do most of those things, but they did the work. There were people comparing addresses with the NCOA database, constructing complex files full of election results from every county and every recent election, database masters who put together a tool that allowed county and state records to be easily compared, and more.
One person stands out for his contribution to my understanding of the algorithm. Because of a couple of his insights, I asked him if he wanted me to list him as a co-author on the research paper I published last year. He said no, he didn’t want any attention. For that reason, I’ll call him “Agent X.”
After discovering the algorithm, Agent X was the first person I called. He didn’t get back to me for a while thanks to his day job, and by the time he did, I’d discovered even more. I wanted his opinion whether he agreed the algorithm was present and designed to obfuscate. He agreed on both points. As an expert programmer, I appreciated the confirmation.
We discussed it when we could, me spending all my waking hours on the project, and then reviewing progress at night with X a couple times a week after he returned home from work. It was X who discovered that the value of 2778, frequently found at the beginning of a series of repunits (numbers like 1,111, 11,111, etc) was related to repunits. 2778 is 25% of 11,111, just as 278 is 25% of 1,111, and so on. This was an important key that helped unlock the puzzle.
Agent X managed to create a program to imitate the Spiral algorithm. At the time, I hadn’t yet discovered some of the details, so his program wasn’t perfect and required some manual adjustments, but it did an excellent job demonstrating what the Spiral algorithm was doing, even if it missed a couple of steps.
It was X who brought my attention to the Shingle algorithm, though I hadn’t named it yet. The records bothered him because many seemed to be purged. At the time, research was focused on active, not purged, registrations, so we dropped it. Later, X left the team. I looked at the Shingle region again and realized he’d been right to be concerned about it. Nearly 100% of the records were suspect.
After the discovery of the algorithms, I applied nearly 100% of my effort to studying them, though I still kept track of other work. Marly made a short presentation based on NYCA research at the Pit in Arizona with Gregg Philips on the eve that I discovered something big related to the algorithms. X had thought New York City counties used a different algorithm, but I found that they used the same as others, but a county-specific transformation was performed before the numbers were attached to the primary algorithm.
At the Pit, Marly met Harry Harry, among others, who introduced the word “steganography” to the conversation. I’d never heard the word before, so I had to look it up. Then he introduced another new term, “in band signal.” According to him, the Spiral algorithm was an example of an in band signal used for the purpose of steganographically concealing information.
Today, I’m not sure I agree, but Harry was right that the Spiral algorithm is like steganography (concealment in plain sight). The question is, what is concealed? As far as I can tell, the presence of the algorithm is concealed, and the ranking it applies to numbers. That’s it.
A lot of work was done in the 2 years I was with NYCA. There is no way I could possibly write out a credit for every person who participated, or every task completed. We had an amazing lady who managed to get data no one else could get, who boldly walked up to county commissioners and asked questions we all wanted answers to, and got those answers. One man was almost always available to throw together an SQL query for a rush county report, needed within days for a presentation. A late addition to the team proved to be an insightful programmer, and then another, this one a woman, had the same quality. Both came up with original queries and interesting answers related to changes made to the voter roll database over time.
Many contributed generously of their time. From what I’ve heard, at one time there were over 2,000 volunteers. That work cannot be adequately represented in this post, and it is already much too long. I would like to acknowledge that work, including the work not mentioned.
I may bring it up now and then in later posts, but only if relevant. As you may have noticed, just like in movies, credit rolls can be very long, could be longer, and have a tendency to obscure the work itself if presented together.
The standard I use when writing is similar to the academic standard for journal articles. I cite the source, not the person who pointed the source out to me. For instance, I cited the Coy (1888) case in either my Caesar Cipher paper or an article here (I forget which). I didn’t find the case on my own. Harry told Marly about it and she told me. I didn’t mention either because it is not normal practice to do so. Citing a source is for the convenience of the reader, so they can find the authority used by the author. Telling them who directed my attention to the authority is a distraction that makes the text more burdensome to read.
Any omissions are not intentional, beyond protecting the privacy of people who belonged to a group that utilized code names, or to keep the text readable.
I talked with Marley the other day about the HAVA case being worked on in our state, but had the opportunity to briefly let her know how groundbreaking I thought your findings were. I think you have to be something of a math or finance person to appreciate the implications of these algorithms. Unfortunately, most folks running our elections have no math skills, and less imagination.
Now I know why I feel guilty when I zip thru the end of a movie, though without the benefit of this discussion, I wouldn't know or understand the "science" of accrediting, or the detailed work represented by the credits. As a latecomer to the NYCA research group, I appreciate your description of your role there, and always thought that the country needed to hear Marly's story. That actually happened today when she presented on the Steve Bannon Warroom show, using PA data as her discussion point. She did us all proud.