When is it okay to plagiarise?

Answer: When you are a university vice-chancellor.

Well, that's what Professor Ian O'Connor of Queensland's Griffith University must think.

The Weekend Australian reports that O'Connor lifted information straight from online encyclopedia Wikipedia and confused strands of Islam as he struggled to defend his institution's decision to ask the repressive Saudi Arabian Government for funding.

In September, The Australian revealed that the Queensland university had accepted a grant of $100,000 from the Saudi Government. Last week, it was revealed that Griffith had asked the Saudi embassy in Australia for a $1.37million grant for its Islamic Research Unit, telling the ambassador that certain elements of the controversial deal could be kept a secret.

Griffith - described by Professor O'Connor as the "university of choice" for Saudis - also offered the embassy a chance to "discuss" ways in which the money could be used.

Professor O'Connor denies that by lifting sentences from Wikipedia he has breached his university's guidelines on plagiarism. The Griffith University council, of which Professor O'Connor is an ex-officio member, considers plagiarism an example of academic misconduct.

It gives an example of plagiarism as "word for word copying of sentences or paragraphs from one or more sources which are the work or data of other persons (including books, articles, thesis, unpublished works, working papers, seminar and conference papers, internal reports, lecture notes or tapes) without clearly identifying their origin by appropriate referencing".

Professor O'Connor yesterday tried to distance himself from the university's standards. "It was not as a piece of academic scholarship, therefore did not follow normal citation methods used in academic publications," he said.

On Wednesday, Professor O'Connor published a full copy of his opinion piece on the Griffith website. Yesterday, the university added references to Wikipedia as footnotes.

Read The Weekend Australian article here.

Rocky Mountains see watermelons under the bed when it comes to climate change

Yesterday the US online Rocky Mountains News published the following article which reduces climate change to a pawn in that old Cold War debate.

Interestingly this news website did not inform its readers that the 500 mentioned were gathered for a conference sponsored by groups receiving fossil fuel and energy industry funding.

 

Even Jennifer Marohasy must cringe at this media distortion of her views on global warming.

Although it is possible that Tim Blair would embrace the disc jockey-style journalism of Colorado's Mike Rosen.

 

A growing contingent of scientists has been brave enough to stand athwart the politically fashionable global warming steamroller. More than 500 such skeptics convened in New York at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change last month. They argue factually and persuasively that what warming the world has seen in the last hundred years is at best minimal and at worst exaggerated.---

Global warming hysteria is steeped in politics and a strange collection of bedfellows. Along with sincere environmentalist true-believers are the camp followers who embrace this as a quasi-religious calling.

Then there are the watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. They embrace ecological arguments to achieve ideological goals, exploiting fears of enviro-Armageddon to regulate and control evil capitalists and redistribute world income and wealth. Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, recognizes the signs. "As someone who lived under communism for most of (my) life," he warned, "I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning."

As grocery prices bite one North Coast resident thinks it's time for price fixing to return

Each day we hear that the cost of food is getting out of control and it is beginning to develop into a bigger problem than global warning.
It is time to reintroduce price fixing to stop the greed of our large supermarkets and also the greed of our banks.

Up to 1000% mark up is just not on. After the war it was 331/3% and the country managed. People could budget and live comfortably. Now that things are getting out of hand it is time to get rid of the middle man as he is not needed and let the profits go to where they belong namely, the producer.

Economists will disagree but if the situation can't be corrected by present day practices new drastic measures must be undertaken to rectify the situation.

Fair go for all, not just the rich and the greedy.

APPSIE
Clarence Valley

* Guest Speak is a North Coast Voices segment allowing serious or satirical guest comment from Northern Rivers residents

Our Janelle brings home $2.2M in family support funding

After what seemed like an unending drought when Nationals Ian Causley was the Federal Member for Page, it feels good when Labor's Janelle Saffin announces that five family support programs have secured funding to continue running.

The reality of course was that Page did receive some Commonwealth money during the Howard era, but the Nats did not go out of their way to make sure the Clarence Valley got a decent slice of the cake.

Let's hope our Janelle can keep it up, because the NSW North Coast has a lot of catching up to do.

Finally Miranda Devine almost hits a nail squarely on the head

In The Sydney Morning Herald this week.

 

"In that way it was, as Rudd said, a uniquely Australian exercise in egalitarian conviviality, with captains of industry, media moguls, politicians, generals, film stars, doctors, teachers, journalists, prostitutes, public servants, scientists and lawyers (lots) munching chicken wraps from recycled cardboard boxes - and being bullied equally by the McKinsey-esque "facilitators" who ran the meetings, pro bono.

The mushy quality of the Big Ideas that came out of the summit - the cliches, vague motherhood statements and the bleeding obvious - was not the fault of the summiteers but these management consultants.

Of the 10 facilitators, seven were professional management consultants, at least three formerly with McKinsey & Company. It is their business to turn concrete ideas into gobbledygook, and they did not disappoint.

Amid a flurry of paper, whiteboards, marker pens and Blu-Tack, clear ideas were churned up in the management jargon-generator and spewed out as empty slogans, "priority themes" and concepts worthy of little more than a PowerPoint presentation. It took until mid-afternoon on Saturday for a woman in our group, the media "substream" of the governance "stream", to cry: "I'm sorry but I don't get the difference between a concept and a theme."

This prompted a storm of pent-up fury from exasperated summiteers.

As The Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote in their book on the lucrative management guru industry, The Witch Doctors, such facilitators have infiltrated corporate life, and are the "new, unacknowledged legislators of mankind".

Their language is "remarkably flatulent … If you buy the argument that the lingo of management theory is the language by which … people run companies and governments run countries, then it's no small thing when that language doesn't make sense."

In Canberra, it was the journalists, creatives and doctors who were most peeved their good ideas had been "lost in translation". The business streams didn't seem to notice.

Exasperated with his recalcitrant mob on Sunday, the governance group facilitator, Tim Orton, a Rhodes Scholar, former McKinseyite and founder of The Nous Group management consulting firm, told them their Big Ideas needed to be reduced to a "slogan on a T-shirt by 4pm". It was close to the truth."

Dawn Services - where's ABC TV?

Although this morning's Anzac Day Dawn Services were very well attended many people (especially the aged, ill and infirm) were not able to to get to a service.

Hence, one has to ask why the national broadcaster, the ABC, did not see fit to provide a live television broadcast of a service.

Surely, it's not beyond the ABC's capacity to cover at least one of the services. Pay TV provided coverage of the service conducted in Sydney's Martin Place, but the vast majority of persons who may have been keen to watch a service don't have pay TV.

Gallipoli's Lone Pine Cemetery - floodlit as workers prepared for today's dawn service.

Photo: Penny Bradfield (The Age, 25 April 2008)

Anzac Day 25th April 2008

Corporal Athol Goodwin Kirkland
34th Battalion Australian Infantry A.I.F.
Aged 23 years and 2 months
Killed in action between 3rd and 5th of April 1918
Resting forever in an unknown grave, Villers-Bretonneux, France

Lest We Forget

NOTE:

On 27 April 2015 it was reported in The Sydney Morning Herald that Athol Goodwin Kirkland’s grave had been identified in Crucifix Corner Cemetery outside of Villers-Bretonneux and a headstone with his name, rank, battalion and the inscription “I once was lost but now am found” erected and unveiled in the same month.

The Figg Family descendants of May "Maisie" Webb nee Kirkland rejoice in the finding of a beloved brother of May Webb, an uncle to her children, grand-uncle to her grandchildren and, great-uncle and great-great-uncle to the younger generations alive today and one who has always been treasured in family memory.