Angela Benedetti

Someone named Richard Ridyard has been swiping lines from all over — including from Stephen King — and has just been exposed big-time by Angel Zapata. Thanks to Writtenwyrdd for the link.

One thing which makes this case notable is that, unlike every single other plagiarism case I’ve looked at in the last couple of years, there is no one sticking up for Mr. Ridyard here. Every other plagiarist who’s been shoved into the limelight has had dozens or hundreds of fans who’ve rallied round with their indignation and counter-attacks to let the accusers know just how horrible and mean they’re being. There’s nothing like that here, and I have to say it’s refreshing. Flash writers seem to be all on the same page when it comes to the evils of plagiarism and the need to find it, shine a light on it and stamp it out. Kudos to the flash folks.

It’s also nice to see so many flash editors and publishers saying straight out that they’re deleting Mr. Ridyard’s work from their sites and blacklisting him. (The only publisher which tried to deny the charge was Valentine Publications, where Mr. Ridyard is an editor.) After all the denials of interest or responsibility, and attempts to brush off accusations and queries, and to ignore clear evidence by the larger publishers in earlier cases, it’s good to see editors and publishers willing to take action and state in public that they’re doing so. Kudos to them too.

Angie

Also incompetence, but it’s the irony I’m mainly appreciating here.

This morning at around ten, the Coast Guard carried out some exercises on the Potomac near the bridge where President Obama’s motorcade passed by on his way to a 9-11 memorial event. Unfortunately they didn’t think to, like, maybe notify any other agencies of what they were doing, so the exercise resulted in CNN reporting ten rounds fired at a suspicious vessel, and departures from the nearby Reagan International Airport being held for almost half an hour while the FBI scrambled to respond to the hostile incident.

Oops.

Good to know our tax dollars are being used wisely in these harsh economic times, to say nothing of the government’s great respect for the time, money and feelings of its citizens (especially on this day — come on, people!) who get caught up in this sort of fiasco, whether they were near the bridge and worried that they were going to be killed, or were stuck at the airport being made late for meetings, missing connections, etc.

The gold standard of irony is toward the end of the article, though, where it says:

The Coast Guard is part of the Homeland Security Department, which was created in response to the 9/11 attacks. The massive reorganization was designed to promote sharing of information within the department and among other law enforcement agencies.

Umm, yeah. I think they need to work on that.

Angie

A quick compilation post because I have a story due tomorrow and a few thousand more words to go on it.

Rich Snobs in New York Blocking Children’s Library Expansion

My husband sent me a link to this article in School Library Journal.

Library Director Dennis Fabiszak has said that the East Hampton Village Board of Zoning Appeals has expressed concern that an expanded children’s collection would lead to more library usage by those who live in the less affluent areas of Springs and Wainscott.

East Hampton Village is a posh area where a lot of rich people (like Martha Stewart, Katie Couric, Rudolph Giuliani) have summer homes. Certain residents are objecting to a 6800-square-foot expansion to the children’s area (which last year was ranked last in available books per child, although the article doesn’t say whether that was last in the state or the nation or what) for which private funds — four million dollars — have already been raised. The expansion will add ten thousand children’s books to the library to go with all that floor space, and most libraries would be delighted with the project.

In fact, the library is delighted with it, and wishes they could get on with the implementation.

The problem is apparently that “The library serves not only the Village of East Hampton but also the less affluent communities of Springs and Wainscott.” Ahh, there’s the rub. Some of the locals (just enough, apparently) object to the expansion because one never knows what sort of child would come in to use the library if they actually acquired a decent children’s collection.

I haven’t done any demographic research on these areas (see above for time crunch) but I doubt very strongly that the people of Springs and Wainscott are, like, horribly poor or anything. One doesn’t generally build a fashionable community for wealthy people’s second (or third or fourth) homes right next to a slum. So my guess is that Springs and Wainscott are probably middle class. If anyone knows otherwise, please drop a note and I’ll post a correction, but seriously, I doubt any of the people who live near enough to East Hampton to send their kids to its library are getting government cheese, you know?

Which means that the people objecting to the expansion are horrified at the thought of having to pass actual Middle Class People in the halls of their public library. The horrors! O_O One has to wonder, if they’ll fight this hard to keep children who aren’t actually rich out of their library, just how much empathy or compassion these people have for those who are actually poor.

No, really. Jim Hines posted a thoughtful, down-to-earth entry about freedom of speech and censorship and the consequences of being a jerkwad, in response to this open letter on the Carl Brandon Society site, which went up in response to this series of posts/incidents and particularly the third one. The original incident is over and done, since someone explained to Mr. Ellison that he’d been misled and he apologized (sort of) and Ms. Bradford accepted (see the fourth link) but the basic principle being discussed applies to any discussion and Mr. Hines discussed it in a more general context. The core of his point:

* People disagreeing with you is not censorship.
* People stating that they don’t like your cover art and think its racist, sexist, or whatever, is not censorship.
* People banning you from their blogs is not censorship.
* For the writers out there, an editor rejecting your story for his/her publication is not censorship.
* People saying they don’t like something you said is not censorship.
* People telling you racial slurs are unacceptable is not censorship.
* People criticising, mocking, or insulting you for choosing to use racial slurs is not censorship.

Also this: Freedom of speech does not protect you from the consequences of saying stupid shit.

Amen.

Brazilian City of Belo Horizonte Ends Hunger with a System That’s Working

This Yes! Magazine article describes a system in which the government, the farmers and the citizens of the city all work together to end hunger, and all benefit. Usually programs to end hunger end up messing someone over. You can only live on government cheese and civil defense crackers for so long before the nutritional deficiencies become clear, and hunger programs based on government hand-outs both diminish the dignity of the beneficiaries and become an ever-greater burden on the taxpayer. Producers are often abused for the benefit of the poor, which drives the former producers into poverty themselves.

Belo Horizonte has figured out a way of making their program work for everyone, though. The poor have access to fresh produce at a reduced price, and the farmers are making more money selling their produce direct to the customers.

A farmer in a cheerful green smock, emblazoned with “Direct from the Countryside,” grinned as she told us, “I am able to support three children from my five acres now. Since I got this contract with the city, I’ve even been able to buy a truck.”

The improved prospects of these Belo farmers were remarkable considering that, as these programs were getting underway, farmers in the country as a whole saw their incomes drop by almost half.

One of the prime gauges of hunger in a population is the infant mortality statistics.

In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate—widely used as evidence of hunger—by more than half, and today these initiatives benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.

Sounds to me like it’s working. Major kudos to the people and government of Belo Horizonte.

There’s more — definitely read the article. They’ve got something here; it’d be great to see it spread to other areas.

Angie

The funny first. I was checking hits on my blog and I saw that someone was querying Google for “chasing fire by angela benedetti torrent” recently. Yay, someone else looking to steal one of my stories.

Except I’ve never published a story called “Chasing Fire.” Nor even written one. And when I checked, it doesn’t seem there’s anyone else named “Angela Benedetti” who’s written a story by that name either. (Although there are a couple others of us; one’s a meteorologist who publishes a lot of scholarly papers, and the other is a lady who works with children in Bogotá. So far as I know, neither one writes fiction.)

So it looks like this is one confused pirate. Not that I’m complaining or anything — confused pirates are the best kind. Hey, dude? If you can find a torrent copy of a story by me called “Chasing Fire,” go for it, with my blessing. [wave]

Moving on to the subject of slightly more competent pirates, someone finally did find a copy of “Learning to Love Yourself” and got it up on a torrent site back around the end of June. I sent a takedown note and, credit where it’s due, the site took it down. It was up for however many days, though, and a bunch of people got free copies.

It’s been argued at many times and in many places that piracy of this sort actually benefits the creative producer. That people who’d never have tried my work if they’d had to pay for it right off will instead download a pirated copy, and some significant number will like it and, being essentially good people, will then go and buy a legitimate copy. They might even buy more of my work, once they’ve tried my fiction and become fans. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the case with the person who made the original request for a free copy of “Learning,” judging by his/her comments in the request thread, but supposedly most of the people who use these sites are not actually selfish, entitled thieves, contrary to all appearances.

All right, fine — let’s test that.

Since the pirate copy was made available in late June, that’s too late for any Pirate Bonus Sales to show up in my upcoming royalty statement, but about three months from now I’ll be getting another one, covering sales in July through September. Surely that length of time is enough for most people to read a short story (about 3300 words), decide to buy a copy, and scrape together $1.29.

If my third quarter royalty statement shows a significant spike in purchases of “Learning to Love Yourself” — not necessarily a huge flood of sales, but a clearly noticeable increase over prior sales trends — then fine, I’ll assume that there is some significant number of ethical people who prefer to try before they buy, but who do buy, and that the net result of the torrent upload was a gain for me. “Learning” hasn’t been reviewed recently or anything like that, so there’s no obvious other source of sales stimulus right now; I’m willing to credit it to torrent people, if it occurs.

[Caveat: if "Learning" is reviewed within the next couple of months, or if irony strikes and this challenge is publicized all over the web, that would clearly taint the experiment with multiple sources of attention for the story, and it'll be impossible to sort out what caused any given number of sales. If the situation remains as it is now, though, then I'll assume extra sales are to people who downloaded the torrent copy.]

So there you go. To BUGCHICKLV and associates: if you’ve read a stolen copy of my story, this is your chance to prove to the world (or at least to me) that you’re not just a bunch of thieves. If I see that spike in the sales numbers, then I’ll admit that all the pirate apologists who make the “But letting people read for free results in more sales!” argument are right, and I’ll shut up about the issue. I’ll let my publisher go after pirates and torrent copies if they want, but I’ll personally leave it alone. Fair enough?

I think it’s more than fair, myself.

So, let’s see what happens. I’ll check back in on this subject when my third quarter royalty statement comes in, in late October or early November, and then we’ll find out whether piracy is actually “to the writer’s benefit” in the long run, or whether that claim is just a bunch of thieves whining and making excuses.

Angie

Thanks for expressing interest in my story, “Learning to Love Yourself,” as well as a number of my colleague Mike Shade’s stories. It’s great to know there are people out there who want to read my stuff.

But seriously, dude, it costs $1.29. You can buy a copy right here for, like, a quarter of what a cup of coffee costs these days.

Now I’ll admit that with the many, many stories which were passed around on that particular Demonoid thread, you ripped off saved quite a lot more money than that. I’m afraid I can’t find it in my heart to admire your frugality, however, since it comes at the expense of my own earnings and those of other writers I know.

If you’re really that strapped for cash, there are plenty of legitimately free stories around on the internet. There’s some great stuff in fanfic fandom (look for rec lists) plus a lot of published writers have free stories on their web sites. Archives like Nifty are free and specialize in gay erotica. Oh, and there are also places called libraries where you can borrow books for free — I’ll bet there’s one near you.

But you know, the pirated e-book thing? Please knock it the fuck off. Thank you.

Angie

[EDIT: Comments closed because of spam.]

As you might have heard, it seems the doctoral dissertation of William Meehan, who was granted his Doctor of Education degree by the University of Alabama in 1999, and is currently president of Jacksonville State University, contains a significant amount of plagiarized material. Check out the graphic in Michael Leddy’s blog — the verbage copied word-for-word from the 1997 dissertation of Carl Boening, is hilighted in yellow.

Leddy’s been reporting on this for a while — also see his posts on 23 April and 9 May.

Backing up a bit, this all started when Prof. David Whetstone sued Meehan over some plant specimens which Meehan claimed belonged to the university and Whetstone claimed belonged to him. Whetstone pointed out the plagiarism in Meehan’s dissertation as a way of establishing “a pattern of behavior of him stealing others’ work.” Most people commenting on the situation seem to be more concerned with the plagiarism than the plants, which is probably understandable to everyone but Prof. Whetstone. I think we’re still grateful to him for bringing this up, though.

According to the Tuscaloosa News story linked just above, two UA administrators are fighting subpoenas to testify regarding the plagiarism of Meehan’s dissertation, on the grounds that “it will subject them to annoyance, embarrassment and undue burden.” Umm, right. The great burden of being called to testify in a matter as trivial as a plagiarized doctoral dissertation (especially when the accused is, on the strength of that dissertation, currently the president of a university) is just too onerous. Clearly someone should have sympathy for these poor people. [/sarcasm]

Sandy Gordon, a lawyer for the University of Alabama, claims that the two administrators shouldn’t be called to testify because the plagiarism issue has nothing at all to do with the dispute over the plant specimens, and besides there’s this other guy you should talk to about it ’cause he’s on our side.

That being Mike Miller, who chaired Meehan’s dissertation committee. And, interestingly enough, also chaired Boening’s dissertation committee. That makes him a not-disinterested participant, since if it’s officially decided that Meehan did plagiarize Boening’s dissertation, the obvious question will be, why didn’t Miller spot it? Or Harold Bishop, who was also on both committees?

Interestingly enough:

Miller, a former UA professor, said in an interview last week he was never contacted by anyone at the university to discuss Meehan’s dissertation, contradicting Meehan’s statement that Miller was called upon by UA to investigate the accusation two years ago.

Miller told The Tuscaloosa News that he doesn’t believe Meehan plagiarized.

So either Meehan or Miller is lying about whether anyone talked to Miller about this two years ago. And Miller’s statement to the press doesn’t carry much weight either; if he wasn’t called on to investigate the plagiarism accusation two years ago, then can we really believe he remembers enough details about two dissertations he read ten and twelve years ago to be able to say with any assurance that there was no plagiarism? If he had investigated the matter two years ago then I’d be slightly more likely to believe at least that he believes there was no wrongdoing (although I still wouldn’t take his word for it without a lot more supporting evidence than his bare assertion) but he says he did no investigation and was never asked to. One might suspect that his assertion that there was no plagiarism rests more on the fact that his own academic reputation is on the line here, than on the likelihood of him remembering specifics of two papers he read a decade or more ago.

Patty Hobbs, PR Director at Jacksonville State (where Meehan is president) said in a press release [link to PDF] on 23 April that:

Litigation is currently pending in a lawsuit filed by a JSU professor against the University claiming the professor owns plant specimens located in the JSU herbarium. Unrelated to this case, attorneys for the professor have leveled unfounded plagiarism claims against the university president. These claims have been investigated not only by the university, but by third parties and the university is completely satisfied that there is no substance to the allegations. President Meehan has been clear from the beginning that he used Mr. Boening’s dissertation as a spring board for his own, and Meehan’s dissertation duly credits his predecessor’s work. It appears these false charges have been made in an unfair attempt to pressure the university to pay money to resolve a questionable claim regarding ownership of the plant specimens. The two matters are totally unrelated.

So the two matters are completely unrelated, have nothing to do with one another, and besides he didn’t do anything wrong.

Except the statement that “third parties” have satisfied the university that Meehan is in the clear is questionable. Leddy references an AP article in which

Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today examined the dissertations and “concluded that ‘extensive portions’ of Meehan’s dissertation were plagiarism of Boening’s work.” In other words, the third-party investigation supports, not discredits, the allegation of plagiarism.

One has to wonder just which third parties gave Meehan’s dissertation a thumbs-up? It would’ve been nice if the press release had been more specific on just who was supporting Meehan.

The main argument in favor of Meehan seems to be that he acknowledged Boening. In his abstract, he says: [link to PDF]

Using a case study and content analysis design, this study replicated at a regional comprehensive institution a study of sabbatical leave patterns that had first been conducted at The University of Alabama in 1996 by Carl Boening.

That’s fine so far as it goes, but that’s an acknowledgement that the original idea for the study, and perhaps the method, came from Boening. This very general acknowledgement doesn’t give Meehan wholesale leave to lift extensive phrasing and passages from Boening’s dissertation without further, line-level citation. Boening’s dissertation is included in Meehan’s References list, and Boening’s name is mentioned ten times in the body of the document. That’s not nearly enough to account for all the lifted passages.

The fact that Meehan duplicated Boening’s study, but at a different institution, isn’t the problem. An editor’s note in the Tuscaloosa News describes the situation, then says:

So far, so good. I can’t see anything wrong with extending one line of research in new directions. In fact, that’s what the scientific method is all about. We do similar things with news stories. If one newspaper looks at an issue in their hometown, we may look at the same issue here.

This is common practice in both academia and journalism; whether or not a thesis applies in a larger context or a different setting is a completely legitimate question for research. The problem isn’t with what Meehan chose to study, or even how he conducted his research, but rather with the extensive verbage lifted directly from someone else’s paper.

What’s really outrageous about this isn’t that, unless there’s a fairly huge chunk of mitigating data hiding somewhere, an extremely prominent (and well paid) academic plagiarized large chunks of his dissertation, although that’s bad enough. No, what’s really outrageous is that neither the institution which granted his doctorate nor the one which currently employs him seem at all interested in pursuing the matter.

DRMT, commenting on BoingBoing’s post on the subject, [Comment #108] says:

When a university president is found to have plagiarized, it’s the alumni and donors who need to raise their voices and force the board of regents to fire him or her. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the only way these things get done. Plagiarism is an increasing problem in our classes and students need to understand how serious it is.

I’d say that the alumni and donors of both Jacksonville State University and the University of Alabama need to call for a thorough, independent and transparent investigation of the matter, followed by a firing if the results go against Meehan rather than dismissal without some sort of due process, but otherwise I agree. It’s hard enough to convince other people — writers, readers, students, teachers — that plagiarism is a serious violation and not to be tolerated when someone as prominent as a university president seems to be getting away with it, and profiting handsomely from his stealing and cheating, even after the matter has been made so public. This is outrageous, and I wouldn’t expect anyone to want to be associated with any institution which condones or overlooks such behavior, much less support them with funding.

[ETA: comments closed because of spam.]

Angie