Pressure Rises On German Science Minister In Plagiarism Scandal 130
An anonymous reader writes "Germany's minister for science and education, who is currently under investigation by her alma mater for plagiarizing parts of her Ph.D thesis, is facing new accusations: a total of 92 alleged incidents of plagiarism (German) have been documented by a blogger, who calls 'this number of violations inexcusable.'"
Re:State of the question (Score:5, Informative)
Funny, but fundamentally wrong. Copy and give credit = standard scientific proceeding. Copy and say it's yours = plagitism. It quite easy, really.
Re:She should step down. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, no. In fact, the supreme court found that the rules that were in place before the election were unconstitutional. In particular, the rules regarding recounts were unconstitutional because there was no statewide standard for counting ballots, and thus ballots could be counted differently in different counties. This, the Supremes ruled, was a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.
Those counting rules were in place prior to the election, but the SCOTUS ruled that the recount had to be stopped because (in part) of this violation. The other part was that putting a statewide standard in place would take too long, and would prevent certification of the vote in time to meet the mandated date that certification was required (December 12th, which was also the date of the decision).
Basically, it was all a huge cluster fuck, with conflicting rulings, laws, standards, etc.. In fact, because the counting process was ruled to be in violation of the 14th amendment, SCOTUS should have ruled that the original count was not valid as well, and forced the SCOFL to mandate a standard and then do a full recount by that standard. That way, the rules in effect prior to the legitimate count would have been the same as after the legitimate count.
Seems to become a national hobby... (Score:5, Informative)
... after Mr Guttenberg had to quit as Defence Minister because of plagiarism, it seems to have become a sport [wikipedia.org] to topple politicians this way. It's a fun thing to watch.
No actual plagiarism (Score:4, Informative)
This is actually old news... And it has been quickly determined that the accusations are bogus. It's a desperate plot by political enemies against the minister.
For example, the first instance of alleged plagiarism is the following text:
Schavan's thesis:
Dabei haben sich – vergröbernd dargestellt – zwei unterschiedliche Verhältnisbestimmungen herauskristallisiert: [...]
Allegedly plagiarised text:
Er hat nachgewiesen, daß jedes Tier mit seiner artspezifischen Umwelt in einem Funktionskreis verbunden existiert.
Even if you don't understand German, it should be obvious that no text has been copied. The accusators of schavanplag call this "concealed" plagiarizing. There would be some truth to this if Schavan had actually known the source and paraphrased the text without citing. It is, however, equally likely that she had just came to the same conclusions based on the same sources.
Some minor quality problems have been found, too. For example, some citations contain typos. While that should not happen, it's far from plagiarism. (Furthermore, the thesis was published in 1980. Without computers, it's much harder to avoid such errors.)
Re:The Germans are self-policing... (Score:4, Informative)
The difference is that the Germans self-police (in standard volunteer wiki-style), while the US and Sweden do not, to my knowledge.
Even in Germany, this is quite new, and only started when one infamous dazzler (who I'm not going to name because it would only improve his Google rankings) was uncovered, denied everything and went on the offensive as PR experts tell you to do in such cases - except that the Internet geeks banded together and ripped his PhD thesis apart page-by-page showing massive abuse so much that he not only lost his PhD but also had criminal investigations for copyright violations launched against him and public pressure forced him to give up all his political positions.
He's since twice tried a comeback, both times the public made it clear that we don't like liars and fraudsters.
That was a part of recent history that makes me proud, but it is very recent history.
Re:No actual plagiarism (Score:2, Informative)
This is actually old news... And it has been quickly determined that the accusations are bogus.
Do you have a reference to this?
He doesn't because this is wrong as well. The news is that the amount of plagiarism that had been detected has increased substantially since the original accusations. And even back then, several leading experts on plagiarism talked of "grave scientific misconduct", "scientifically worthless work", "suffcient for revoking her degree" [spiegel.de].