According to Dictionary.com, plagiarism is:

1. an act or instance of using or closely imitating the language and thoughts of another author without authorization and the representation of that author’s work as one’s own, as by not crediting the original author: It is said that he plagiarized Thoreau’s plagiarism of a line written by Montaigne. Synonyms: appropriation, infringement, piracy, counterfeiting; theft, borrowing, cribbing, passing off.
2. a piece of writing or other work reflecting such unauthorized use or imitation: “These two manuscripts are clearly plagiarisms,” the editor said, tossing them angrily on the floor.

According to the Globe & Mail’s own investigation, Margaret Wente has copied material from other authors and not given them credit. In other words, she has plagiarized something.

In fact, the Globe & Mail’s Editor-in-Chief even published a memo to G&M staff concerning the allegations. Magaret Wente defended herself in a column that should have been a sincere mea culpa apology, but was more of a “waah.. the nasty blogger caught me for something I wrote three years ago” gripe. She complained that the blogger over at Media Culpa has filed a number of complaints over the years and that the editors at the G&M “have been quick to correct the record when warranted”.

The fact that the editors have even had to “correct the record” on multiple occasions should be raising a red flag for them. Honest mistakes happen from time to time, but when an editor has to repeatedly issue corrections for omissions of attribution for a columnist the honest nature of the mistakes has to be called into question. The credibility of Globe & Mail as a whole suffers as long as this type of behaviour is tolerated.

A tweet on Twitter caught my eye and prompted me to write this entry:

Margaret Wente needs to resign or be fired by the Globe.

— Velvet Prison Warden (@andyferris) October 1, 2012

Unfortunately, the Globe & Mail needs to fire Margaret Wente in order to restore its credibility and send out a strong message that plagiarism isn’t tolerated at their newspaper.

Saw this story on CBC’s website earlier. It looks like Bev Oda found this sticky note on her most recent pay stub…

First, @TheBrazman (aka Senator Patrick Brazeau) disappears off the face of Twitter shortly after behaving in a most un-senator-like manner to a reporter. Now, the Minister of $16 Glasses of Orange Juice is “stepping down”.

I wonder who’s next?

Hey, it’s the second Friday in April 2012, which means it’s Friday the 13th!

If you happen to suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia then you’re basically screwed today. You should immediately throw salt over your shoulder and tap doorways three times before passing through to  ward off the bad luck.

If you don’t suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia then you might want to read about the lore surrounding Friday the 13th in a blog entry I posted in 2008.

Oh, and if you happen to live in the UK, you should check out this article in the British Medical Journal that observed that although there were consistently fewer vehicles on the road on Friday the 13ths compared to Friday the 6ths, the number of admissions to hospitals due to traffic accidents was significantly higher. The abstract for the article included the following:

CONCLUSIONS–Friday 13th is unlucky for some. The risk of hospital admission as a result of a transport accident may be increased by as much as 52%. Staying at home is recommended.

Enjoy!

Yup, it’s that time of year again. The time when we adjust our clocks forward by an hour. Unless, of course, you live in one of the more enlightened parts of the country like Saskatchewan, in which case carry on with whatever you were doing.

I, however, don’t live in Saskatchewan (or certain parts of Alberta, British Columbia, northwestern Ontario or Quebec), so come Sunday morning at 2am I’m going to set my clocks forward. (Actually, I’ll probably do it a little earlier because I hope to be asleep at 2am.) Fortunately, with the exception of my alarm clock, microwave and the little clock in my car, the various things that tell time in my life automatically adjust themselves when the clocks change.

Unfortunately, people don’t cope with time change quite so readily. This means that in the days immediately following the time change, there will be more accidents as a result of people being tired because their bodies haven’t adapted to the new schedule.

And given that the clocks are changed ostensibly to save energy, people are going to be disappointed because there’s never been any reliable proof that it has saved energy. Mostly, it just results in people shifting when they use the energy they’re using.

If you want to learn more about the history of daylight saving time, check out David Prerau’s book Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time (hardcover: 1560256559; softcover: 1560257962). It’s actually more interesting than it sounds. (But don’t tell Ken because he doesn’t want to hear about it!)

If you’re a *NIX system administrator you probably updated your systems a couple of years ago, but in case you haven’t you probably should take a look at this. The zdump command should give you something like this:

[gordon@seedling gordon]$ /usr/sbin/zdump -v /etc/localtime |grep 2012

/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 11 06:59:59 2012 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2012 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 11 07:00:00 2012 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2012 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400

/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  4 05:59:59 2012 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:59:59 2012 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400

/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  4 06:00:00 2012 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:00:00 2012 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

Friday morning turned out to be quite exciting, particularly for my colleagues in one of the neighbouring buildings here in Tunney’s Pasture. In the middle of the morning, I heard emergency vehicle sirens coming into Tunney’s this morning, so I glanced out the window to see where they were going. Given the number of people and buildings in Tunney’s Pasture, it’s not particularly unusual to see firetrucks going to one of the buildings from time to time. However, a minute or two later I heard more sirens and looked out to see the hazmat response truck passing by.

Hmm.

Hopping on Twitter I found the following tweet…

Hmm?! (more…)

2012 is a leap year, which means today is February 29th instead of March 1st.  Many people probably simply accept leap years as one of those weird little curiosities in life, without really knowing why they occur.

Once upon a time, the “year” was quite malleable, with days and even months being inserted into the calendar by priests when they wanted to keep their favourite politician in power. Julius Caesar found the chaos this caused highly annoying so he decided to sort it out once and for all and introduced the Julian calendar in 45 BC.

His solution did away with much of the chaos, but there was still a certain amount of “slippage” caused by the difference in the length of the calendar year and the tropical year (aka the solar year), which was roughly 365.25 days long.  This “slippage” resulted in an error of 1 day every 128 years, meaning the tropical year started a day earlier every 128 years.

To compensate for this, the Romans added a “leap year” every four years to get things back in sync.  However, due to a counting error, the first few years the calendar was used, a leap year was took place every three years rather than every four.  The emperor Augustus compensated for the extra days by skipping a number of leap years, which resulted in the 8th month of the year to be named after him.

By the mid-1500′s the difference between the calendar year and the tropical year had become about 10 days and calculating when Easter took place was quite difficult.  So,  in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII decided to remove the extra days and align the vernal equinox with March 21st because that’s when it occurred during the Council of Nicaea in AD 325.

Leap years under the Gregorian calendar occur every year that is evenly divisible by 4, except centuries (eg: 1600, 1700, 1800, 1900, etc) unless the century was evenly divisible by 400.

The last day of the Julian calendar was Thursday, October 4, 1582 and the first day of the Gregorian calendar was Friday, October 15, 1582.  However, the Gregorian calendar was not adopted by everyone at the same time.  For example, Spain, Portugal, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and most of Italy adopted it on Friday, October 15, 1582, but other countries waited.  Sweden transitioned to the Gregorian calendar sometime in the early 18th century.  One of the last countries to adopt it was Greece in on March 1, 1923, which followed February 15th.  China seems to have adopted in 1929, after first adopting it in 1912.  (There was a certain amount of chaos between 1912 and 1929.)

None of the national Orthodox churches, however, recognized the Gregorian calendar when it was introduced and many instead adopted a Revised Julian calendar in 1923 which saw 13 days dropped and a different leap year rule.  This will see the two calendar systems in sync until 2800, at which point it will be someone else’s problem.

Other Orthodox churches didn’t accept the Revised Julian calendar, either, so they’ll continue to celebrate Christmas on the 7th of January (until 2100).

Other orthodox churches use their own calendars to set their religious holidays.

With respect to Easter, the eastern Orthodox churches still use Julian Easter.  Except the Finnish Orthodox Church, which uses the Gregorian Easter.

So, all this is to say that it’s Wednesday, February 29, 2012.

By now, you’ve probably heard about An Act to enact the Investigating and Preventing Criminal Electronic Communications Act and to amend the Criminal Code and other Acts, otherwise known at Bill C-30, which was put in front of Parliament by the Minister of Public Safety, Vic Toews.

Bill C-30 seeks to, among other things, give the government and law enforcement warrantless powers to invade your privacy. In other words, they’ll be able to ask your ISP for all sorts of personal information about you and your online habits without first obtaining a warrant.

Needless to say, this has made a lot of people very unhappy and resulted in a number of campaigns against it, including the #TellVicEverything hashtag on Twitter.

When questioned about the warrantless access in the House of Commons, the minister basically said that there was nothing about warrantless access in the bill and told people that if they didn’t support the bill they were supporting pedophiles. (Even though the bill makes no reference to pedophiles or pornography.)

And then it appears he actually read the bill he’s endorsing. (more…)