You can't beat good on a Wellington Day

Mark Honeychurch - 23 January 2024

It was Wellington Day yesterday, so this newsletter is a day later than usual. It’s been a very warm weekend here in Wellington, but I’ve spent most of the weekend inside, with the air conditioning on, working on our plagiarism project (no, we’re not planning to plagiarise from elsewhere to fill our newsletter!). Between Dan Ryan and myself, we have enough coding skills to be able to write software tools that are making our job of detecting and displaying cases of plagiarism much quicker - so I’ve been spending the weekend writing software.

Sadly the automated plagiarism checker we’re currently using, from Grammarly, isn’t doing as thorough a job as we’d like it to when it comes to tracking down original sources. Often the software is only finding additional cases of plagiarism, where the text it gives us as a match appears to be copied from the same unknown origin - which, from what we can tell, is usually a paywalled scientific paper that we can’t find through a Google search.

As such, if anyone has access to TurnItIn through their work (maybe you’re a University worker, or a publisher), and you have permission to use the software for a personal project, and if you’re willing to dedicate a few hours to helping us, we’d love to hear from you! (Sadly TurnItIn doesn’t sell any off-the-shelf personal solutions, as their services tend to be targeted at larger organisations)

In this week’s newsletter, Bronwyn gives us updates on both ISTA (the weird spiritual sex group that appears to have problems with treating people well) and Roger Blake, our local bleach peddler. Al Blenney looks at how far down the rabbit hole one of NZ’s “vaccine hesitant” GPs has gone over the last few years. Craig has managed to watch a video debate between a local Intelligent Design apologist (or Cdesign Proponentsists, if you will) and a popular YouTube atheist without putting his fist through his screen. And, finally, I take a look into a mayoral response to an annoying Sovereign Citizen, and also peer into Circling.