The end of the first decade of the new millenium.
With hopes for
When is plagiarism not plagiarism?
Apparently when the editor of the journal BMC Medical Ethics finds that a paper published in his own journal has copied large chunks from a different (competing?) Journal – in this case Bioethics.
As Retraction Watch points out the retraction notice issued by BMC Medical Ethics is less than satisfying:
BMC Medical Ethics has retracted a November 2010 paper by two authors from Mayo Clinic whose manuscript — “End-of-life discontinuation of destination therapy with cardiac and ventilatory support medical devices: physician-assisted death or allowing the patient to die?” — contained passages that closely echoed those in another article, “Moral fictions and medical ethics,” published online in July 2009 in the journal Bioethics.
Retraction Watch continues:
We find the retraction notice more than a little opaque and confusing. It’s unclear how “similar” the article was to the Bioethics paper it offended. But why not use the word “plagiarism” to describe the similarities? Also, how convincing is that “no intention” disclaimer? (Not very, as it happens, as you’ll soon learn.) And why is the article still available?
We’ve emailed the editor of BMC Medical Ethics for an answer to these questions and will update this post when we learn more.
Retraction Watch spoke to Franklin G. Miller, a bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health and first author of the plagiarized Bioethics paper
Miller, to whom the retraction notice specifically apologizes, said he discovered the offending material this fall when he chanced upon the BMC Medical Ethics article.
I first saw a citation to a piece of mine in Bioethics, but then I had the feeling some of this language sounded a little familiar to me. I looked side by side at the two articles and I found extensive passages that were lifted—some were verbatim, some had a couple of minor word changes. There was a citation, but only one, and no quotation marks. They had essentially appropriated our language, our arguments, and our analysis as their own.”
Miller said he contacted the journal, which conducted an investigation.
At first they said they were going to issue a correction, which I said was not satisfactory. Finally the legal dept of the publisher of Bioethics got into the act, and that led to the retraction.
Miller said he is “very dissatisfied” with the retraction notice for its failure to use the word plagiarism and its claim that the misappropriation was inadvertent.
To say that it wasn’t intentional is mind-boggling. You cannot systematically lift someone else’s text without intending to do it. It seems not possible. A sentence or two, maybe, but not paragraphs.
It seems to me that at best the retraction notice is mealy-mouthed and at worst it represents a certain hypocrisy by the editor of BMC Medical Ethics.
Or perhaps it is only plagiarism when other Journals copy material published in yours but not when others are copied and published in your Journal?
IIT Kharagpur: Image via Wikipedia
The Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur is one of the original 5 IIT’s and perhaps the one enjoying the highest reputation of them all. But the case of the fake institute – Institution of Electrical Engineers (I) – being run apparently by a few rogue faculty members is now spreading and revealing that many faculty members were involved. The investigations which were first to be conducted by a panel of academics will now be shifted to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Many voices were raised against the proposed composition of the panel apprehending a “whitewash”.
The case was first broken in October by the Calcutta Telegraph:
The Centre today asked IIT Kharagpur to give a “factual account” of a professor’s alleged role in running an unapproved institute and duping students into believing it was a branch of the tech school. Amit Kumar Ghosh, the head of the department of aeronautical engineering, has been accused of having a hand in the running of the Institution of Electrical Engineering (IEE) in Kharagpur and offering diploma courses without the approval of the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE).
The ministry is livid that a senior faculty member could be involved in “fraudulent” activities. “The IIT Kharagpur authorities have been asked to furnish a factual account on the issue,” a ministry official said. A senior IIT official said Ghosh had been removed as aeronautical engineering department head following the allegations. An inquiry has been ordered.
The IEE has been operating from a temporary campus and offering courses such as a diploma in electrical engineering. Ghosh has allegedly been serving as the institute president. J.K. Tiwary has apparently been managing the institute for the last two years and luring students by claiming that the IEE is a branch of IIT-Kharagpur. Trouble started this year after students found out that the IEE had no connection with IIT Kharagpur. It did not even have AICTE approval, mandatory for an institute teaching any technical course.
Furious, the students registered a complaint with the IIT Kharagpur director. “They have spoiled our career. We want justice,” M. Ramu, a student of IEE, said.
In the beginning of December, evidence surfaced that many more faculty members were involved. The Times of India reported that:
IIT-Kharagpur has all along been in denial that its faculty members were involved in the running of fake institute — Institution of Electrical Engineers (I). But the hollow claims now lay in tatters, thanks to a photographic proof showing teachers of the institution along with J K Tiwari, the brain behind the institute, who, incidentally, has nothing to do with IIT-Kharagpur.
Police recovered the photograph during a raid and are soon going to question faculty members — both serving and retired — who are seen along with Tiwari. The photograph shows A K Ghosh, former head of department of aerospace engineering and an ex-chief vigilance officer, who has since been suspended for his alleged involvement in the scam.
The others caught in freeze frame are N K Kishore, professor, department of electrical engineering; Jayanta Pal, head of department, electrical engineering; Pallab Kumar Chattopadhyay, retired professor of agricultural and food engineering; Punyabrata Dutta Gupta, retired professor of electrical engineering; J C Biswas, retired professor of electronics & electrical communication engineering.
Tiwari, who conceived IEE (I), and even managed to get an official quarter for the institute, is seen sitting along with a section of IIT-Kharagpur faculty members. Police sources said they are investigating if the photograph was taken during the convocation of IEE (I) as claimed by many students of the fake institute.
Yesterday, the Indian Express revealed that
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) will probe the fake institute scam that was allegedly run from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, by some of its faculty members……. HRD Minister Kapil Sibal is learnt to have decided that a CBI probe was the best course to follow and the issue would be formally referred to the agency in the next few days.
The stench of corruption in the Indian body academic is not restricted to the private “education industry” but is present even in the most respectable institutions.
Kashi (Kashgar) and Hotan are major towns on the old Silk Road. To complete 488km of high-speed railway line in just 2 years of construction – even for China – must be some kind of a record.
Kashgar Region: Hotan to Kashi
A railway linking Kashi and Hotan in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region opened Thursday for cargo transportation, and passenger transport is expected to begin in June, according to a local official.
The railway, with a cost about 5.1 billion yuan (773 million U.S. dollars), covers 488.27 kilometers running through the south part of Xinjiang, an important section of the ancient Silk Road. The railroad is expected to have an annual freight volume of 15 million tons, and carry ten passenger trains every day, said Tang Shisheng, director of the Urumqi Railway Bureau. The Kashi-Hotan railway will help promote the development of Xinjiang’ s mining industry, tourism and agriculture, said Tang.
Construction of the railway began in December 2008.
The Ministry of Railways and Xinjiang regional government will invest 310 billion yuan to build more than 8,000 kilometers of railway in Xinjiang during the next 10 years.
Manatees clearly are not too impressed by the effects of global warming and are swimming out of the chilly Gulf of Mexico waters and into warmer springs and power plant discharge canals. On Tuesday, more than 300 manatees floated into the outflow of Tampa Electric’s Big Bend Power Station reports Physorg.com:
Manatees congregate in a canal where discharge from a nearby Florida Power & Light plant warms the water in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Tuesday, Dec. 28, 2010.
“It’s like a warm bathtub for them,” said Wendy Anastasiou, an environmental specialist at the power station’s manatee viewing center. “They come in here and hang out and loll around.”
Cold weather can weaken manatees’ immune systems and eventually kill them. State officials said 2010 has been a deadly year for the beloved animals: between Jan. 1 and Dec. 17, 246 manatees died from so-called “cold stress.” During the same time period in 2009, only 55 manatees died from the cold. In 2008, only 22 manatees succumbed to chilly temperatures.
Manatee deaths documented from Jan. 1 through Dec. 5 are nearly double the five-year average for that time period, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission statistics.
“Obviously we’re very concerned as an agency about the unusually high number of manatee deaths this year,” said Wendy Quigley, a spokeswoman with the state-run Fish and Wildlife Research Institute in St. Petersburg.
A total of 699 manatees were found dead between Jan. 1 and Dec. 5; state officials say it’s likely the cold temperatures also contributed to many of the 203 deaths in the “undetermined” category and the 68 deaths of manatees whose bodies could not be recovered.
Quigley noted that the statistics don’t even include this week’s cold snap, which sent temperatures plummeting into the 30s in parts of South Florida overnight and into the teens in the central part of the state.
Tampa Bay and Gulf water temperatures are hovering around 50 degrees, said Anastasiou. When the water dips below 68, manatees seek warmer waters – usually springs or the power plant discharge canals. The water temperature in the power plant’s Big Bend canal ranges from about 65-75 degrees, Anastasiou said. Even though they’re huge animals, manatees are very cold sensitive……… During last year’s cold snap, some 329 manatees congregated at the Tampa Electric power station. In Broward County on Tuesday, some 50 manatees gathered in the outfall of a Florida Power and Light plant.
Krypton the drug (and not the element nor the fictional planet nor anything related to Superman’s kryptonite) is thought to have led to the deaths of 9 young people in Sweden.
http://www.thelocal.se/31134/20101229/ reports:
A team of Swedish forensic physicians have concluded that nine young people have died over the past year after having taken the legal drug Krypton. Krypton is sold widely over the internet and is marketed as a safe drug but the risk of overdosing is high, the physicians have observed.
“Krypton reminds me of other opiates such as morphine. It is not some sort of party drug,” said Björn Bäckström, who works at the National Board of Forensic Medicine in Umeå, to the local Västerbottens Kuriren daily. Bäckström, together with colleagues Gisela Classon, Peter Löwenheim and Gunilla Thelander, have penned an article published in the medical journal Läkartidningen warning of the risks of Krypton.
The National Board of Forensic Medicine receives intakes after deaths from across Sweden and one case involving Krypton led the physicians to consider the effects of the drug and found several more cases. The Krypton-related deaths are spread across Sweden and involve both heavy addicts and occasional users, while they all concern people born in the 1970s and 1980s, the newspaper reported.
Krypton is derived from the south-east Asian plant kratom which has been traditionally used for potency and to improve mood. Aside from the leaves and extracts from kratom, Krypton has also been found to contain caffeine and the synthetic opioid O-Desmethyltramadol.
O-Desmethyltramadol is a breakdown of the product tramadol, which is prescribed in moderation to alleviate severe pain and when taken as Krypton is turned into tramadol in the liver and becomes more potent. It is due to this high potency contained in the O-Desmethyltramadol that the risk of overdosing is considered high, leading to respiratory paralysis. The Swedish physicians expect the extract and opiate to turn up in other forms if they are not classified as narcotics.“That is one of the purposes of the article – to bring attention to this drug so that it should be narcotics classified,” Björn Bäckström told the newspaper.
50 Deutsche Mark banknote: image commons.wikimedia.org
As long as there is no economic and fiscal union in Europe, the Euro is going to be plagued by the inherent weaknesses of errant nations. The current economic weakness in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy and the political inability – or unwillingness – to deal with the simple financial housekeeping that any competent housewife would handle as a matter of course suggests that the fiscal union will never happen. Non-compliance with the stability rules by nations lead to few sanctions. This in turn leads to the question whether the Euro has any long term future in the absence of fiscal rectitude across all the participating nations.
100 Euro banknote from Germany
The weakness of the Euro has in fact helped to boost exports from Germany and the relatively strong growth in Germany is mainly export driven. Nevertheless many Germans are beginning to worry about the value of their Euro when this value is being diluted by the “less responsible” nations. Germans are remembering that “German” Euro notes are easily identifiable (as are the notes printed in the different countries). There are calls for the German government to maintain the value of the “German” Euro when the Euro loses value! (German Euro banknotes can be identified by their serial number, which will always start with the letter “X”.) It is already noticeable that money changers in Asia are beginning to check the country of origin of the Euro banknotes they are dealing with. I can imagine their future reluctance to deal with notes having serial numbers beggining with “Y” (which would be a note from Greece). Some are calling for the Euro to be separated into a “Northern Euro” and an “Olive Euro”. It is only a short step to different values appearing unofficially for Euros from different countries.
Der Spiegel reports on the growing calls for the return of the Deutsche Mark:
Surveys show that many Germans are worried about the future of the euro, but the country’s political parties are not taking their fears seriously. The number of grassroots initiatives against the common currency is increasing, and political observers say a Tea Party-style anti-euro movement could do well.
Rolf Hochhuth is campaigning against the euro — and his stage is Germany’s Constitutional Court. “Why should we help rescue the Greeks from their sham bankruptcy?” he asks. “Ever since Odysseus, the world has known that the Greeks are the biggest rascals of all time. How is it even possible — unless it was premeditated — for this highly popular tourist destination to go bankrupt?”In the spring, he joined a group led by Berlin-based professor Markus Kerber that has filed a constitutional complaint against the billions in aid to Greece and the establishment of the European stabilization fund, which was set up in May 2010. Hochhuth wants the deutsche mark back. “I don’t know if this is possible. I only know that Germany lived very well with the mark.”
It’s an opinion that suddenly places this nearly 80-year-old man in a rather unusual position, at least for him: on the side of the majority of Germans.
Japan joins the growing list of nations who have shelved, postponed or cancelled carbon trading schemes (and there is not a single carbon trading scheme anywhere which is not built on fraud).
Japan postponed plans for a national emissions trading scheme on Tuesday, bowing to powerful business groups that warned of job losses as they compete against overseas rivals facing fewer emissions regulations.
The government has submitted a climate bill to parliament that includes a one-year deadline to design a national trading scheme. After Tuesday’s delay, that bill faces revisions in the next parliamentary session that begins in January.
The decision is a blow to the European Union’s hopes that other top greenhouse gas polluters will introduce emissions trading schemes and follows setbacks to similar efforts in the United States and Australia.
A U.N. meeting in Cancun, Mexico, this month failed to clear uncertainty over a global climate framework beyond 2012. This is likely to cause some big emitters to take their time in rolling out tougher greenhouse gas regulations, particularly for carbon dioxide (CO2) from burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil.
Neighboring South Korea has delayed the introduction of its emissions trading laws into parliament until February because of business concerns.
China’s Yellow River has frozen up to 677 kilometers in Inner Mongolia so far. The freezing is more typical of mid-to-late January. Preventive work has been organised for possible ice damage.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/photo/2010-12/29/c_13669452.htm
Dec. 29, 2010 Frozen Yellow River at Sanshenggong Water Project. (Xinhua/Li Yunping)
December 29th 2010. Floating ice on Yellow River in Jinan, capital of east China's Shandong Province. (Xinhua/Guo Xulei)
NASA has made a new reduced forecast for the peak sunspot number and the time of occurrence of the peak of Solar Cycle 24. The peak number has been reduced from 90 to 64 and the time of the peak is unchanged at June 2013.
I have superimposed the development of the forecast peak and time of the peak on the base forecast. This is not any criticism of the forecast. It only emphasises that the forecasts are about something which is not very well understood. So far the forecast development is only in the direction of reducing sunspot numbers and delays in the time of attaining the peak. As the peak actually approaches the forecasts should stabilise but there is still some room for further reduction. It is not inconceivable that the SC24 will not peak till early 2014 and will only achieve peak sunspot numbers around 55. Solar cycle 24 could well have a length of 150+ months instead of the nominal 132 months.
SC24 forecast development superimposed on NASA forecast (http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif)
That SC24 represents a very quiet sun and that taken together with SC23 this Landscheidt minimum represents a behaviour similar to the period leading up to the Dalton minimum is quite clear insofar as sunspot number is concerned. But the length of Solar Cycle 23 and its extended quiet period also has precedence.
Further similarities to SC4 and 5 were reported in
The extended length of solar cycle 23 and the associated deep quiet period (QP) between cycles 23 and 24 have been examined using the international sunspot record from 1755 to 2010. This study has also introduced a QP definition based on a (beginning and ending) mean monthly threshold value of less than 10 for the sunspot number. Features addressed are the length and intensity of cycle 23, the length of the QP and the associated number of spotless days, and the respective relationships between cycle intensity, length, and QP. The length of cycle 23 (153 months) is second only to cycle 4 (164 months), with an average of 132.5 months for the 11-yr cycle. The length of the QP between cycles 23 and 24 ranks eighth, extending from October 2005 through November 2009 (but subject to continued weakness in cycle 24). The number of spotless days achieved within this QP was 751 (and for all days within the transition from cycle 23 to cycle24, a record number of 801 spotless days had been observed through May 2010). Shortcomings of solar-convection-model predictions of sunspot activity and intensity are also noted, including the failure in the initial predictions of cycle-24 onset.
It would not be too surprising if SC24 only reached levels which were lower than the Dalton minimum and perhaps even approaching the lows of the Maunder minimum.
