East of Istanbul

  It’s only a coup if it happens in Africa or the Middle East. Otherwise it’s just sparkling insurrection. 

Preventing academics from plagiarizing is, it turns out, a hard problem. Reviewers don’t want to act as plagiarism-checkers (reviewing is time consuming enough as it is) and nor do journal editors.  Here’s a modest proposal to address the issue:  why not give extra administrative responsibilities to those who are caught plagiarizing? This would act as a disincentive (no-one wants extra administrative responsibilities) as well as ensuring that those who are not deterred have less time to submit the fruits of their dishonesty for publication.  It might not work, but it’s probably worth trying. 

I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to be doing in this space other than making a single-handed attempt to return the world to the golden age of artisanal handcrafted blog-posts. But last year I kept a record of all the (non-work) books I read on Twitter, and while that was fun in its way, there wasn’t really enough room to say as much about them as I might have liked to have done. So I’m going to try doing it here instead. (Maybe I’ll stretch a point and include some of my work-related reading as well - why not?) So far this year’s haul includes Allie Brosh’s ‘Solutions And Other Problems’ and Martha Wells ‘Network Effect’, both of which I started before the New Year and finished this morning, along with Barbara Nadel’s ‘A Knife to the Heart’, which I read on either Christmas Day or Boxing Day, and Seishi Yokomizo’s ‘The Honshin Murders’, which I started some time in December and finished just after Christmas. I’ve enjoyed all of them, though I’d have preferred to have paper copies o

I’d like to think we’ve seen the back of 2020. Unfortunately, I suspect this is just the mid-season hiatus. There’s a whole bunch of unresolved plot-lines, and they’ve just introduced a new mega-villain. Welcome to #Long2020. 

It’s probably time I started a blog. I gather it’s what all the cool kids are doing nowadays.