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?

Here are a few photos to spark your curiosity:

Yellow leaves.

More fiery autumn leaves.

Historically speaking, the area is home to the former Bogorodskoye Estate, which belonged to Tsarina Irina (sister of Boris Gudonov) in the 16th century. The estate was acquired by Catherine the Great in 1775 and renamed in her honour. For the next 20 years, architects built and rebuilt a palace for the tsarina, but it was never completed.

In 2001, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov signed a bill that would provide a great deal of money for the restoration and completion of the Tsaritsino Palace. It was finished a few years ago and it looks spectacular. There’s a history museum on the premises and one can frequently catch concerts on the ‘bread house’.

If museums aren’t your thing, you can enjoy the fresh air by walking around the forest and ponds.

A couple relaxes near the ponds.

Two elderly men playing chess on a park bench.

The sign reads: ‘No walking on the grass or archaeological monuments’, but the families were treating it like a playground.

To get there, go to metro station Tsaritsino on the southern end of the green line. For more info about the park, see this unofficial website (in Russian).

UPDATE: Here’s a video of the new musical fountain which was installed this summer.

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.

Their suggested uses:

Are you a butcher? Set your SnūzNLūz to donate to PETA
Are you a republican? Set your SnūzNLūz to donate to the ACLU!
Are you a land developer? Set your SnūzNLūz to donate to the Wilderness Society!
Enjoy your freedom? (Blue state version) Set your SnūzNLūz to donate to the GOP. or
Enjoy your freedom? (Red state version) Set your SnūzNLūz to donate to MoveOn.Org
Are you a hippie? Set your SnūzNLūz to donate to the American Coal Foundation.

Are you a snoozer? How many times do you hit the snooze button each morning and to which organization would you begrudgingly lose your money if you had this alarm clock?

It goes something like this: You’re working on a blog post, a translation, or whatever have you when you come across a term and you need to consult an online reference site. Sure, you could easily open a new tab/window, type ‘www.wikipedia.com’ in the address bar, wait for the page to load, scroll down the page to the search box, type your search query, and be on your happy way four steps later when the search results have loaded…

Or you can set up a streamline keyword search. Here’s how:

1. Load any webpage (in Firefox) where you anticipate you’ll frequently perform search functions. For the sake of example, let’s take dictionary.com.

2. Find the search box and right-click on it. An options box will appear and you should select ‘Add a Keyword for this Search’ (sorry, mine’s in Russian, but you get the idea)

3. A new box will appear and you’ll fill in the following details.

Then click ‘Ok’

4. Now we can test our quick search feature. From any page just go to the address bar and type ‘d query, which ‘query’ being the term you wish to know more about.

Voila!

As you can see, I like to take it a step further and use key letters instead of just ‘keywords’. Afterall, if you’re gonna make shortcuts shorter for quick common tasks, why not go all the way?

I figure there are about 20 sites I visit frequently for reference searches, so I’ve decided to use a letter of the alphabet for each:
Need a synonym for exuberant? Just type ‘t exuberant’ (thesaurus.reference.com)
Need to know how to say ” in English? Just type ‘m меценат’ (multitran.ru)
Forget the definition of the word defenestrate? Type ‘d defenestrate’ (dictionary.com)
Want to quickly look up a passage from the Bible? Type ‘b 1 Cor 13′ (esv.org)
Need to know what year the whole Napoleon Great Fire of Moscow affair took place? type ‘w Fire of Moscow’ (wikipedia.com)

The possibilities are endless. Also, as you can see from one of my examples above, you can use multiple character encodings and languages.

(via A Mac Tip Every Day, but you can use it with PC Firefox as well)

Most notably, Katya and I were married on September 8th. Planning a ‘western’ style wedding in Moscow proved to be an arduous undertaking, regardless of the fact that we set aside eight months to do so. I feel like I could write a book (or at least a few blog posts) about it all. Surprisingly enough, the simplest part was actually the legal paperwork, something which is usually a terribly long and bureaucratic process in Russia. The ZAGS ceremony, which was at the end of June, was actually a breath of fresh air. We kept it simple, just showing up with a handful of friends and family and signing on a few dotted lines, but the day was still a special and memorable one.

Then on September 8th, two years to the day since we started seeing each other, we sealed the deal po Amerikansky with an all out traditional wedding at a local Protestant church, followed by a reception at the Marriott Courtyard. Family and friends flew in from abroad (the US, Haiti, and Switzerland) to celebrate with us. Though the 8 months of planning was laden with unexpected changes of plans which were out of our control, the Big Day itself went on without a hitch!

We took a short trip to St. Petersburg and are now enjoying settling into our new apartment.

I’m also working in a new job as of May. Things are going well, though I’ve had to work extra hard to climb the learning curve in an industry that’s quite new to me. Perhaps I’ll share more about that later. I’ve also finished up the two side projects I took on with Moscow State University Geography Department and Russian Standard Insurance.

Needless to say, I anticipate having a schedule slightly more conducive to blogging. Along with more frequent posting, I intend to do some housecleaning as a restored Wordpress backup seems to have botched up the Cyrillic encoding of some older entries. Do let me know if you see anything quirky or have any suggestions.

Cheers!

We have an extra day off here for a Russian national holiday, so I’ll be playing catch up on the MGU project I’m working on. Katya and I are also planning the first rollerblading outing of the year; hopefully we won’t see any rain.

For now, here’s another recent picture from my Flickr stream:

On that note, I’ll mention that I’m participating in 24 Hours of Flickr, an upcoming global community event with the purpose of chronicling May 5th in photographs and posting them to Flickr with the stories behind the pictures. That day promises to be interesting as there’s a Cinco de mayo party on the agenda.

Users will also submit their best photo from that day to the 24 Hours of Flickr group. The creme of the crop will be published in a book later this year and featured at various Yahoo/Flickr events.

See also John Gruber’s comments.