The Matrix?

Remember, it's a whole system!

Road to protective custody? (Photo: Adnan Ahmad)

Not your mother's intellectual property

Dr AQ has issued a clarification in The News about the plagiarization expose.

It reads thus:

"The acknowledgement as to the source was put at the end of Part II because it was originally written as one long article. Had Mr Dogar, who initiated this controversy, waited for the second part (Part I clearly said "To be continued"), all this would have been avoided.

"However, I would like to point out that a newspaper article is not the same as a research paper in a reputed magazine, which does, indeed, require full referencing. Since I had been receiving numerous requests from students to write on this topic I used notes I had made about seven years ago from various well-known university syllabuses, not even remembering which notes were from which university.

"I did not go online to any source. Obviously the syllabuses have not changed much in all these years! I purposely left the text in the same simple-to-understand original language because it was meant for students and laymen, not professionals. A university brochure is neither someone's personal intellectual property, nor does it require referencing.

"My friend and former colleague, Engineer Nasim Khan, provided information on various related American websites with comments -- what is wrong with that? Those who insinuated negatively about his professional capabilities are ignorant and disparate."

Disparate? Damn right they are!

Dr. A.Q. Khan Bombs... Yet Again

I was going to do a piece about our venerated Father of the Bomb, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, caught comprehensively, stealing other people's work yet again, but the good folks at fiverupees blog have beaten me to it (dammit, I always have too much work!).

So it would be fair if I simply linked to their post on the same. It pretty much sums up what I was going to say anyway.

But I do have an update on the issue: the Houdini of national interest thinks he can squirm, yet again, out of this embarrassment.

Keep in mind the timeline. A.Q. Khan publishes his 'thought piece' about the importance of computer technology on August 19 in The News. On the same day an Urdu version of the article appears in Jang. On August 24, a grad student at Carnegie Mellon University exposes his rather dimwitted plagiarism in the letters section of The News (see the link above). Two days later, i.e. August 26, Jang publishes the Urdu translation of the second part of A.Q. Khan's piece with the following addendum:

"Most of the information contained in this article has been taken from the syllabi of famous British universities."

Syllabi?!? Don't you mean, the web intros on their admissions pages? I mean, can we get more absurd? This guy is more stupid than I thought.