German Science Minister Faces Plagiarism Scandal 166
An anonymous reader writes "Germany's minister for science and education, Annette Schavan, faces allegations that substantial parts of her PhD thesis have been copied without proper attribution. According to the Wordpress blog that brought up the accusations(German), 56 out of 325 pages of her thesis contain instances of plagiarism. Schavan is the same minister who called an earlier instance of plagiarism by the former German defense minister to be 'embarrassing.'"
It's more about how to quote correctly (Score:5, Interesting)
What they found in her thesis is that she rightly referenced the authors she quoted word for word, but didn't reference the authors again in following sentences that were in relation to those first quotes in 56 cases.
german politics (Score:5, Interesting)
What american readers probably don't know is how much politics and politicians have changed during the past 20 or so years.
Initially, the "new" West Germany after WW2 had a functional (not without faults, but functional) representative democracy. People with vision, connections and public support would rise to power. We didn't have the pseudo-aristocratic US system of clans and super-rich. In fact, none of the chancellors were very wealthy.
Then, the political elite started to close and shut out insiders. The majority of the people in positions of power today are career politicians, people who have worked a small part of their lives - if at all - outside of their political parties.
For all the flaws they had, the old guard was a different kind of human. They were sometimes arrogant, often egomaniac, but they were in it for their vision of the future, not for the paycheck and the nice kickbacks from the lobbyists.
Our current government is just the worst of that kind. It has no vision whatsoever, no plan whatsoever and is purely reactive. We have satire magazines commenting the current political theatre with sentences like "sometimes I wonder why we are even doing satire anymore". You could take some of their talks straight from the protocol of the Bundestag (our parliament) and if you published it in a humor magazine, you'd love about it and applaud the author on a brilliant piece of mockery - except that they're serious.
There was indeed a former minister and hopeful to be next chancellor, a "superstar" of politics (which, these days, is about the same as being the winner of "Britain's Got Talent" or "American Idol") who had to drop out of politics because his Ph.D. was basically fraudulent. The affair damaged on of the most respected academics in his field, who had fallen for the young man's charm and trickery and issued the Ph.D. to him.
What was most telling, however, was how the political elite dealt with it. Basically, the MOTD was that it's not a big deal. Only massive and sustained public pressure finally made them carve in, one by one, until the guy had to step down.
These are the people who want to lock you away for 5 years for downloading a DVD. "Shame" was the rallying cry at some demonstrations asking for the guy to step down.
Oh yeah, did I mention that he tried a comeback earlier this year? The political class mostly welcomed him back. The public didn't. He went away again. I have no doubt he'll be back.
Yes, shameless about sums up the assholes that currently rule us. And it doesn't matter which party.
Re:Plagiarism and Attribution (Score:5, Interesting)
[raises hand]
Many moons ago (almost a whole yonk) I could remember fragments of a poem, but not its name. Couldn't find it in bookstores, nobody I asked (including som Eng Lit grads) had heard of it [1]. I wondered if I'd made it up, perhaps as a school exercise - today's homework is to write a poem in the style of ... - or if I was just a bit barmy.
Then I was at a party, in a house I'd never been to before. I picked a book of poetry off a shelf and not only was the poem in it, there was a marker in the exact page.
I also find I get confused about whether I saw something on TV or read it, and sometimes which language I read it in. I occasionally don't notice if words are upside down.
tl;dr version: stuff gets in my head sometimes and I have no idea how it got there.
[1] Brin & Page were still in short trousers.
Re:Plagiarism and Attribution (Score:4, Interesting)