Gemini Legal AI Document Analysis

Following is a narrative summary from a formal paper I wrote on an old website, The Mortal Danger of Posting New Ideas in Academia.” I submitted this paper to an AI for a legal analysis versus several standards:

  • The AAUP Redbook, universal standards for graduate education
  • Title IX
  • The ADA/VA disability guidelines
  • Disabled Veterans Guidelines

The analysis for each incident is provided on the links. There are over 200 violations overall.  And that's only for a select set of major incidents. . . .

Introduction

Young, naïve, narcissistic graduate students who claim to have made a remarkable breakthrough are a staple fodder for faculty. Campus bureaucracies are finely tuned to get rid of these disrespectful reprobates, and soon, before they sicken the pure academic (blue) blood.

The problem is that I was neither young (which is relative, I was in my early 40s), naïve, nor narcissistic. I was, in fact, one of the leading consulting engineers in the nation at the time. I published two McGraw-Hill textbooks (Retrofitting for Energy Conservation and Electrical Design Guide for Commercial Buildings) in my first year in grad school (1997-98), backed by 20+ conference papers, more than enough for tenure.

Nobody writes a computer program that bests NASA’s – best. Can’t fool us! Except I wasn’t a nobody. All my published papers were on computer programs I wrote to design engineered systems in the most complex buildings possible, hospitals and schools. I had my own startup, Bar X Software, which distributed free design programs to promote my McGraw-Hill books.

Of course, the faculty knew none of this because, in their supreme arrogance, once I told them about my Mars algorithm all doors SLAMMED in my face, quite literally.

Methods

In retrospect, this was the perfect scenario to test the “NASA cult” alleged by the US Navy investigation to be the root cause of the Space Shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters. The NASA culture, they said, is “a bureaucracy and process that tramples reason, stifles professional differences of opinion, and that doesn’t reflect reality.

Is there an atmosphere that stifles creativity? Prove it! Does the aerospace culture obliterate innovation like white blood cells attacking an invasive virus? Delusion! Exactly what happened after I made this important discovery? First a little backstory to set the stage.

This was back in 1998. NASA had recently lost several Mars landers. Crash. Boom! A pile of twisted metal on the Red Planet. The Japan Space Agency, the UK’s “Beagle” lander – ditto. Crashdown. The Russians had given up decades ago after a dozen failed landings.

You’d think the aerospace gearheads would have been keen on my discovery. Or at least curious. How did you do it? What were your parameters? Can we study the hard-copy printout of your 3D trajectory accurate to sixteen significant digits to be sure you didn’t take any shortcuts? Can we see your FORTRAN source code? Only twenty pages? Awesome! This is very exciting.

FYI: This is exactly the response I got from 20+ experts at other major universities (and, yes, a couple were from NASA) I emailed after I was expelled. The university refused to consider their emails in the formal appeals process after I was expelled. You have to follow the process set out in the document we sent you. A document which I never received and, I dare say, does not exist.

Results

We have set up the experiment to test the veracity of the “NASA Cult.” We have established guardrails – the 40 acres of the University of Texas campus in Austin. Woolrich Labs, home of the aerospace engineering department, is as close to the “NASA culture” as you can get. UT Austin is a short drive from NASA’s headquarters in Houston. The UT Center for Space Research, a NASA Space Grant Consortium campus, is where all the Mars data is processed, and – when you see all those space cowboys celebrating at JPL after a successful mission? Most of them are UT aerospace grads. So. What exactly transpired? Gemini Legal.

  1. Once I started classes in the fall of 1997, I never received any advice from my advisors on course selection when registering for classes. I just filled out the form, and my advisor signed it.I did not receive any supervision, mentoring, advice, or any other attention regularly given to graduate students. Gemini Legal.
  2. I did not receive any support, advice, or assistance whatsoever for 21 hours formal thesis and research classes. Gemini Legal
  3. My advisor(s) did approve my thesis topic, a computer model of the Earth-to-Mars trajectory, but that is the extent of their involvement. Gemini Legal.
  4. I complained to the Chairman of the ASE Department about the aforementioned, and in the fall of 2000 he assigned a second advisor (in orbital mechanics) in addition to my regular advisor in celestial mechanics. It wasn’t quite that easy, though. I had to boycott all my classes that semester before they did anything. I was also a regular columnist for The Daily Texan on campus at that time. Gemini Legal.
  5. At my insistence, my new orbits advisor set up a seminar for me to present my Mars research. He quit as my advisor right after my Mars seminar because I refused to attend his introductory Celestial Mechanics class (I had already taken that class from two lecturers Dr. Broucke and Dr. Jeffries, and, in fact, had already taken Celestial Mechanics I, II, III (Theory of Orbits), and IV (Regularization).) LOL. He actually derive Lambert’s Theorem wrong my fist day in class. I did’t attend his class agin. That’s one of the most fundamental theories in orbits. Gemini Legal.
  6. I was assigned a new (second) advisor in orbital mechanics, who still refused to give me any feedback on my Mars research. It was always, “Not until after you pass your qualifying exams.” Gemini Legal.
  7. So. I’m a consulting engineer. I’m self-motivating. I created a full windows program, called Mars Pathfinder 2.0, and put it online to get comments from people at MIT Mars, the Mars Society, NASA, and experts off campus. Nobody in the orbits group at Texas ever looked at this program (it had color printouts, help screens, and was completely transparent about my technique). There were hundreds of downloads. Thousands! No issues.
  8. The American Institute of Astronautics and Aeronautics (AIAA) published a tech paper I wrote on the program on their grad student projects website. The ASE Department immediately made them take my paper off the AIAA website. Gemini Legal.
  9. The Mars Society accepted the same paper for their 2000 annual conference. The ASE Department, as is customary (even for poster presentations, much less formal papers), did not provide encouragement – much less financial assistance – to present that paper. Gemini Legal.
  10. My celestial mechanics advisor quit after I failed the math qualifying exam in the summer of 2001. I passed the oral re-exam in mathematics a week later. I now had just one advisor. One of the three professors who did the oral examination, now chairman of the department, actually voted to fail me even though I didn’t miss one single question in the entire three hours. Talk about malice. Gemini Legal.
  11. By this point, I had passed all the coursework for a Ph.D. with a 3.7 GPA. I applied for an MSE and received it at the end of the fall 2001 semester. The Mars computer program was supposed to be my Master’s thesis, but since nobody ever even looked at it, much less helped me prepare a formal thesis, I got the MSE based on course hours. Gemini Legal.
  12. My orbital mechanics advisor refused to give me one or more practice sessions for the oral qualifying exam, which is customary for all grad students. Gemini Legal.
  13. I complained about this neglect to my graduate advisor put a bar on my registration: if I did not pass the oral qualifying exam, I would not be able to register for classes and would thereby be expelled. I never did get a practice session for the oral exam. Gemini Legal.
  14. I then filed a grievance with the Students with Disabilities Office, asking them to help me get reasonable accommodation – i.e. help preparing for the oral qualifying exam. They claim to have never received my written request. This is a lie because they (1) set up a meeting for me with a dean in the College of Engineering who likes to help people with disabilities (I never had a chance to meet with him), and (2) they got the ASE Department to set up an ad hoc committee to review my Mars research. I had to resubmit the grievance to the Disabilities Office the next semester. Gemini Legal.
  15. Absent any help from the Graduate College or the Disabilities Office, I wrote to ABET, the licensing authority that lets colleges award engineering degrees. They wouldn’t investigate because the ASE Department claimed I was in the Ph.D. program (ABET only certified Master’s programs back then). They lied to ABET!! AND ABET BELIEVED THEM… I was a Master’s student. I didn’t get my MSE until the end of that semester. Then my advisor quit, citing my correspondence with ABET. That’s retaliation for a protected act. Gemini Legal.
  16. I was asked to come in and meet with an ad hoc committee to talk about my research.This was two weeks before the oral qualifying exam, for which I had received no preparation by my advisor.  Also, I was on notice by my graduate advisor that if I failed that oral exam I would be expelled (most students get a second chance, often more, because once you pass the written qualifying exams you’re worth your weight in platinum). I decided my time was better spent studying for the oral exam than wasting a couple of days preparing to defend my work and a whole day traveling to campus (I lived a 2+ hour commute from campus). Gemini Legal.
  17. When I went in to take the oral exam I was told I had already been expelled because the ad hoc committee did not like my Mars research.  They had notified me by mail. I had not received the letter yet. In other words, I had to prove I was capable of Ph.D. quality research before I was admitted to candidacy, whose sole purpose is to; well, teach you how to do Ph.D. research. Gemini Legal.
  18. Five orbital mechanics professors had agreed to be on my dissertation committee earlier that semester. I visited each of them in their office, talked about my Mars research, and the graduate advisor set up the oral examination. This committee was dissolved per #18. I did not have a chance to talk to any of them or any other orbits people to find an advisor. I was just summarily expelled. Gemini Legal.
  19. I appealed the dismissal. It was first rejected by the disabilities office;which I appealed. It was then rejected by the University President. Gemini Legal.
  20. The dismissals took 12 months. During that time I submitted a polished, formal thesis on my Mars research (the ad hoc committee only had random, disorganized pages copied off my website). The security guard at the Center for Space Research shredded my formal thesis. While I watched. Gemini Legal.
  21. Right after I was expelled I sent out 20 or so emails to experts at NASA and elsewhere, asking for them to please look at my Mars research online and to write back. I submitted their letters to my graduate advisor. He refused to consider them as part of my appeals. Gemini Legal.
  22. The main OFFICIAL reason cited for my dismissal was that I failed to take the qualifying exams after one year in graduate school. This guideline applies to one year after you get a Master’s Degree; I started grad school with a 20-year-old BS in mechanical engineering.  Gemini Legal.
  23. I even found four professors from among that batch of emails who wanted to be on my dissertation committee. You can do that but you still need at least one faculty at UT. Nobody would do that. Not one.  Gemini Legal.
  24. The VP of Legal Affairs had the final word, essentially banning me from campus, and threatening me if with a civil suit “to take away your house, your car, and everything you own” if I ever told anybody anything about that had happened.  Gemini Legal.

All of this is very well documented. Many more official documents are available on request. The Mars research has been published as, “How to Save 20% on Any Interplanetary Trajectory (in the same time of flight), exactly as it was created at the time.

Conclusion

Those are the facts. For almost 25 years I have assumed all of this was an act of discrimination. The details were so horrific I could not even review the many documents. It was a long, slow process.

Recently I approached the University again. I sent them to a website where I had all of these details with the many official documents linked, including my Mars research. The VP of Legal Affairs reviewd the documents. The Disabilities Office. Even ABET.

“Nobody did anything wrong.” Well, yeah – say that to my face.