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Russian President Vladimir Putin has been keeping Kremlinologists on their toes of late with the several surprises he’s pulled out of his bag. First, he dismissed his cabinet and appointed a relatively unknown technocrat, Vladimir Zubkov, as his new prime minister. Though unexpected, the procedure was in fact quite reminiscent of how Putin himself was appointed as prime minister by Yel’tsin in 1999. Lyndon has an incredibly detailed post on the Zubkov appointment over at his Scraps of Moscow site.

Not much later, when asked about successors to the Russian presidency at a retreat in Sochi, Putin first mentioned three possibilties: Zubkov, Grigory Yavlinsky (Yabloko leader), and Gennady Zyuganov (first secretary of the Russian Communist Party). Zubkov was a ‘given’ on that list, but mentioning Yavlinksky and Zyuganov seemed nothing but a joke. It was only after additional probing that Putin mentioned Sergei Ivanov or Dmitry Medvedev, the two first deputy prime ministers who have long been spoken of as serious presidential contenders. Putin’s been holding his cards closely and many are baffled as to what his real plan and strategy will turn out to be.

“Putin’s Plan - Russia’s Victory” (photo credit: MSLipsco)

Billboards praising ‘Putin’s Plan’ have been popping up all over the country since the end of August. According to an article in today’s Vedomosti newspaper, there are over 2,000 of them altogether. Interestingly enough, there seem to be two variations of the billboard: one features the United Russia logo and the other does not. Veronica has done a great job of rounding up some of the Russian LiveJournal commentary responding to the billboards in her Global Voices translation.

What’s most interesting, though perhaps not most surprising, about the billboards is that United Russia seems to be the only political party successful in installing their adverts nationwide. All other parties are being told to remove their advertising or they have been rejected by advertising agencies.
As the Vedomosti article explains, there are several explanations for this.

First, according to the Central Election Committee, until election campaign budgets are established, parties are prohibited from using outdoor advertisements to persuade the public to vote for or against a certain party or issue, nor to call on them to exercise their right to vote. United Russia spokesperson Viktor Tokarev argues, however, that the billboard does not break the law as it does not call on the citizen to vote one way or another.

Members of A Just Russia and the Russian Communist party say that they are being rejected by advertising agencies in Moscow and Rostov region. In Samara the Union of Right Forces (Союз Правых Сил) had their party’s signs removed due to ‘complaints’; no complaints were received about the United Russia billboards though, explained Valentina Kalgatina, a spokeswoman for the region’s administration. Tokarev himself claims that United Russia is asking the agency to temporarily take them down until election campaign budgets are established, but to this day the Putin’s Plan billboards are standing all around Russia.

By law, registered parties are supposed to be given the same media opportunities in preparation for the election.

The Putin’s Plan billboards were installed by News Outdoor Russia, the country’s largest outdoor advertising agency, which boasts more than 34,000 ad sites in 86 Russian cities and is run by Sergei Zheleznyak, who will more than likely be elected as a United Russia deputy in the December Duma elections. News Outdoor Russia says that they’ve had to turn away other political parties seeking ad placement due to the lack of ad space. “Autumn is the season with the highest demand and parties should have reserved advertising space in the spring, just as United Russia did,” says Natalya Semina.

The real question is, once election campaign budgets are set, will political parties other than Putin’s have an easier time gaining ad space?

If you’re a new reader to this site you may not be aware of an ongoing series I started back in 2004, when I was a student at Moscow International University. The series is called ‘Academic Integrity po-russky’ and explores the lax attitude towards plagiarism in Russian academic circles and the controversy that’s come up against initiatives to curb it.

My previous posts told of the wide-scale plagiarism I saw as a student, how one could buy research papers in the Moscow metro, the ingenuity of Russian shpargalki (crib-sheets), and Russian LiveJournal reactions to the accusations that Putin himself was a plagiarizer (gasp!).

I’ll just begin this post with a short humorous quip I heard as I was asking some Russians about this topic:

“Списывание с одного источника - плагиат, с двух - компиляция, с трёх и более - диссертация.”

“Copying from another source is called ‘plagiarism’. Copying from two sources is called ‘a compilation’. Copying from three or more sources is called ‘a dissertation’.

Whether or not you think plagiarism is a big deal, it’s clear that it’s becoming a hotter issue in educational institutions thanks to peer-to-peer networks, where users trade not only pirated music and video, but also documents and research papers. There are also a few websites, for example, 5ballov.ru (5 points, the Russian equivalent of an A+ mark), where Russian students can freely download tens of thousands of term papers on a number of subjects.

Kommersant Newspaper last Thursday ran an article entitled ‘Антиплагиат не пройдет’ (Anti-plagiarism Won’t be Tolerated) about the controversy over a website where Russian instructors can check their students’ papers for instances of plagiarism.

The web application, which resides at Antiplagiat.ru, has in fact been around since 2005. According to the website, the purpose of the initiative is ‘to improve the quality of the Russian education system, specifically in those areas where students are required to write research papers, term reports, and other original compositions’. As of September 21, 2007, the Antiplagiat database contains over 10,600,000 documents with which it compares the papers uploaded and checked by instructors. Since its launch, many institutes, universities, and even the Russian Ministry of Education have given their support to the project.

As it turns out, the site is also frequented by students themselves, no doubt using the service to see if the complex algorithms can indeed detect instances of ‘borrowing’ in their course work. In fact, one of the more active threads at the Antiplagiat Forums is titled ‘How to get around the system’, where many students have voiced their frustrations:

Наша кафедра взяла на вооружение антиплагиат…. млин, я никогда так не мучался с курсовой!!! (Петров Иван Аликович

Our department is now armed with the Antiplagiat system… Dang, I’ve never been so tormented by a term paper!!! (Ivan Alikovich Petrov)

and

Готов заплатить больше, чем Министерство образование (за создание сайта) - только бросьте этот, по-моему, “дурацкий” проект. (Пономарев Алексей Владимирович)

I’m willing to outpay the Ministry of Education (to build a site) - just abandon this stupid project (Aleksei Vladimirovich Ponomarev)

The commentary goes on and on with people’s suggestions on how to ‘fool’ the system and the moderators’ claims that it cannot be fooled. The author of the Kommersant article tracked down a Russian hacker named Georgi who claims to have created a program called ‘Killer’, which can effectively fool the Antiplagiat system.

Here’s a screenshot of the results of feeding a plagiarized paper through Antiplagiat:

The table shows three instances of plagiarism and their original sources.

Whether or not any such services could effectively curb plagiarism is still up for debate; students will either use their creativity to write original papers or they will use it to find ways around the system. Student groups in the United States have been successful in pressuring their universities to cease using such systems under the premise that it’s an infringement of their intellectual property rights for their papers to be added automatically to these databases.

In my opinion, the real test of determining whether such a system could actually work actually rests with the instructors and professors. Do they really have the time or will power to digitize and upload each paper of each of their students, then weeding out false positives? With the relatively low salaries of teachers, I highly doubt that many of them would consider it worth their time. I’d give the Antiplagiat site an ‘A for effort’, but I don’t think it passes the test in practicality.

Cool. Google has just released a new tool called Google Patent Search. It currently searches through over 7 million patents; so far, it seems much better than the US Patent and Trademark Office’s search feature.

The president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbaev, has revived talks of reforming the Kazakh alphabet to use a Latin script rather than Cyrillic. After the collapse of the USSR several other former Soviet republics did the same (Turkmenistan, Moldova, and Uzbekistan in the mid 90’s; Azerbaijan in 2001) in order to cut some of their ties to Russia.

“There are many, many myths people hold about copyright law. However, the most dangerous by far is the myth of poor man’s copyright (PMC).”

From Kyle Spector at the Foreign Policy blog:

Instilling national pride is important for any country. It can be done through patriotic songs, the erection of monuments, or even fostering a great environment for foreign investment to boost the economy. But don’t tell Russia that. It has chosen a different path - fining officials for using the word “dollar” in any instance when they could have used “ruble” instead.

Earlier this month, the Duma approved (almost unanimously) a bill requiring Russian ministers to use the word rubles instead of foreign currency terms. Last Friday, Russia’s defense minister called the dollar “that thing you are not allowed to say” while discussing sales of military equipment to Venezuela. Today, the economy minister almost used the word dollar, corrected himself by announcing a statistic as “700 million rubles,” and then added “30 million not rubles” instead of 30 million dollars. The law also outlaws the use of “euro.” Some finance bureaucrats are certainly going to have their work cut out for them, given that customs duties in Russia are listed in euros, and the country’s foreign debt is counted in foreign currency.

It’s not often that I delve into issues of crime and punishment on my blog, but the recent not guilty verdict in the Andrea Yates retrial has got me thinking about the insanity defense. First of all, let me make it clear that this is not a post about capital punishment; this entry is solely to express my feelings that the insanity plea at the stage of conviction is morally suspect.

I realize that much of my readership is out of the United States, so let me give you a little background here. In 2001 Andrea Yates killed all five of her children by drowning them in the bathtub. She confessed to the crime and was found guilty in a 2002 trial. In 2005, the Texas Court of Appeals reversed the convictions due to false testimony of a psychiatrist hired by the prosecution. So, the case headed back to the courts.

Now, I have no doubt that Yates’ mental condition was diminished. She attempted suicide twice and had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital four times. The diagnosis of schizophrenia was probably right on. Add to that postpartum depression and dealing with 5 very young children and I’m sure her condition was one far beyond what I can comprehend.

But at what point can we say that one’s mental condition changes the criminality of acts they commit? I would argue that it should never have that effect.

I’m certainly not arguing that we should completely disregard mental illness in such cases. All I’m saying is that it should not be part of the conviction stage, but rather only part of the sentencing stage. What does that mean? Well, one’s mental illness does not remove their culpability from a crime, but it may mean that they are in need of treatment rather than punishment. The point here is that we at no time declare these criminals ‘not guilty’ of their crimes.

I guess one of the biggest flaws with the insanity defense is this: Who defines insane? We could also argue that there are some crimes that could only be committed by an insane person.

Andrea Yates was declared not guilty of the crimes of which she confessed. Regardless of the verdict, she’ll be receiving court-supervised psychiatric care, which is exactly what she is in desperate need of; in that sense, justice was served and this sick person is getting help.

Still, it says a lot about the moral objectivity embraced by our justice system when moral judgments concerning things like murder can no longer be made, and that worries me.