Blake's Junction 7 DVD on pre-order

Amazon UK informs me that the DVD with Blake's Junction 7 and two other short pastiche films from the same gang is now available to pre-order at a special price of 10.98, release day being 21 January:

Blake's Junction 7 / 'Ant Muzak' / World of Wrestling

Useful reference site

This is a medical wiki run by doctors, which may be a useful reference source for the writers amongst you:

http://www.ganfyd.org/

There's not a huge amount there at the moment, but what there is has a lot of links to other sites. Some of the entries are about being a doctor, rather than about medicine as such.

Another plagiarism case

The Smart Bitches have been posting evidence of repeated and extensive plagiarism by a well-known romance author. Cassie Edwards appears to have been copying passages verbatim from her reference sources, without bothering either to paraphrase or to acknowledge the source material. So far the series of posts is:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
part 4

Please note what plagiarism is -- it's the unacknowledged use of someone else's work, in effect passing it off as your own and thus claiming the credit for it. Exactly what constitutes "unacknowledged use" depends on context, but at the very least the passages cited by the Smart Bitches should have resulted in an acknowledgements page or bibliography. Copying word for word, as seems to have been done here, would require the passages to be explicitly marked within the text in many contexts.

This is something that gets me where I live in two different ways. One is that as a fiction writer, I'd be disgusted by someone who deliberately lifted my words and passed them off as her own, and mortified if I unconsciously did the same to someone else. It's something that many authors worry about from time to time, because we're magpies, and genuinely can retrieve something from the depths of memory without realising that it is a memory. But it's hard to believe that this was subconscious, given the extent of it.

The other is that in my day job I'm a scientist. As the English teachers and lecturers have been pointing out all over the comment threads, plagiarism is a serious offence in academia; and that goes for the science faculty as well. It is part of the basic ethics of the field that you do not steal the credit for someone else's work. Doesn't stop it happening, of course, and there are some appalling examples and quite outrageous self-justifications, but that's the ideal.

This really is unethical behaviour. More, it's bad writing, because simply copying a reference verbatim in this way generally leads to obvious swings in tone and writing style. That is in fact how this example was picked up. How did this get through the editing process at the publisher without anyone noticing? Either they didn't notice, which says one bad thing, or they noticed and didn't care, which says another.

And yet there's already a rabid fangirl in the comment threads, attacking the Bitches for daring to criticise her favourite author. It appears to be genuine rather than a troll (although one can never tell). It would seem that theft of another's writing is perfectly reasonable when it's an author she admires doing the thieving. I wonder if she'd feel the same way were the copyright dates on the books to be reversed.