DID YOU COPY THAT?

You can't always trust what you read on the internet. This may not come as a surprise to you but I confess it did to me, innocent that I am.

I've been doing a piece of research and I have discovered that much of the 'writing' in factual blogs and pseudo-reference sites is simply cut and pasted from elsewhere. This makes it pretty impossible to tell where it was originally written and whether or not it is true.

In case you don't believe me try this little experiment. I think you'll be as surprised as I was.

Type the following piece of text which defines what charcoal is into Google or your preferred search engine.

Charcoal is the dark grey residue consisting of carbon obtained by removing water and other volatile constituents

Now see how many totally different websites it appears in - either exactly as written or in a few cases very slightly altered.

Incredible isn't it?

Some of these sites are commercial, some of them are personal blogs but it is very obvious that they have been 'cut and pasted' over and over again.

Now try it again with the following text:

Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work

I rest my case.

OPEN INTERNET?

If you are of a nervous disposition or easily upset I advise you not to read on. I'm serious.

My friends regard me as strong-stomached. Its true. I can indulge in 'toilet humour' whilst having a meal without any difficulty. In fact if someone were to vomit next to me I would carrying on eating - and yet.........

I vividly remember going to watch 'The Exorcist' in 1974. As I left the cinema I felt waves of utter disgust at what I had seen. I had a strong feeling of revulsion and I remember thinking that whoever had made the film had done so with the single intent to shock the viewer. In my case it worked. That was the moment when I parted company from the whole genre of the horror film. The experience is branded on my soul. I wish I had never seen the film. In the 36 years since that day I have never felt that way again despite seeing and reading all manner of disgusting things........until now.

I have always been a strong supporter of 'the open Internet'. I am aware that there are some horrors on it such as disgusting pornography for instance, but as far as I know, these items are only available on closed sites for which you have to subscribe. Like the pin-up magazines on the top shelf, they are out of our reach and our eyes shouldn't alight on them unless we're searching them out. Not so.

When I read that an international conference was taking place behind closed doors to discuss the future of the Internet, I was worried. However, after my recent experience I now feel that the Internet does need to be policed to prevent certain images being freely available.

I stumbled upon a news report from 2009 of a missing 6 year old girl in Sri Lanka. She had been abducted from her school and brutally murdered. Her remains were found in a bag near the roadside and there were vivid photographs of her little body which had just started to decompose. Her arms were taped behind her back and her ankles taped together to prevent movement. The same strong tape had been used to cover her eyes so that she could not see and her mouth so that she could not scream and her nose too so that she could not breathe. If this description disturbs you, imagine what seeing the actual photographs did to me.

I wish I had not seen these images and I firmly believe that they should not have been placed on a freely available internet news site.

One other thing is clear. The emergency service personnel who have to deal with this as part of their job, deserve our greatest respect and our sincere thanks.

LIFE IN THE DARK AGES

Imagine for a moment that you need to place a classified advertisement in a Gothenburg newspaper. Now this would not be a difficult task if you lived in Sweden. You could perhaps look up the phone number in a directory and call them.

But for the sake of this exercise you live in England. How will you set about the task? I'm going to reveal my amazing mind-reading powers and predict that your plan involves making a search on the Internet - right?

However, when I needed to place this advert, it was 1967 so there were no home computers let alone internet. So what did I do first in order to accomplish my mission?

While you are thinking how you will achieve this, it's worth reflecting on just how reliant we are on computers and the internet for such matters. However did we survive before they existed?

The way in which I began the task was to contact what was my first port of call whenever I needed help. I went to "The Citizens' Advice bureau", an amazing organisation who could find out anything about anything. Their offices were manned by volunteers back then and it was a free service.

It was set up as a temporary measure but is just celebrating it's 70 year anniversary! Their brief history is as follows:

"In 1938 when the prospect of a world war loomed, the National Council of Social Services, the forerunner of today's National Council of Voluntary Organisations, established a group to look at how to meet the war-time needs of the civilian population. The group recommended that Citizens Advice Bureaux be established, particularly in the large cities where 'social disorganisation may be acute'.

War was declared on 3 September 1939 and the first 200 bureaux opened on 4 September. Arrangements for bureaux varied wildly; one even operated out of a horsebox. Seven decades later we are, each year, advising two millions clients on six million problems from 3,300 locations."

Back in 1967 they managed to locate a firm in London who could perform the service for me and my mission was soon accomplished. You may wonder why I needed to place the advert but this will be the subject of another post.