The Senior Proctor has warned of a rise in the number of investigated plagiarism cases, and highlighted the need to improve the measures that deal with plagiarism.

 The past year has seen between 20 and 30 instances of investigated plagiarism. Of these, around 15 were deemed to be serious cases. This is around double the amount of cases that came to light the previous year.

 Professor Martin Williams, who has just completed his term as Senior Proctor, explained in the students’ motivation for plagiarism as often being “an act of panic caused by time pressure.”

 Jonny Medland, OUSU Access and Academic Affairs officer said, “Many cases of plagiarism stem from poor understanding of footnoting or lack of care in citing evidence and are completely unintentional.”
Professor Williams commented that there is perhaps less plagiarism at Oxford than elsewhere “due to the virtuous nature of our students”.

There have been three nominations for the prestigious role of Professor of Oxford Poetry.

Geoffrey Hill, Paula Claire and Seán Haldane are all in the running.Of the three, Geoffrey Hill is the favourite to win. He needs just 12 Oxford graduates as nominees, but has already secured the support of 49 serving dons.
Following the scandals that surrounded last year’s election process, a new voting system is now in place. Graduates will be able to vote online as well in person over a period of time.

Nominations for the role succeeding Sir Christopher Ricks close on May 5. Voting will take place between 21 May and 16 June. The winner is named on 18 June.

Ruskin College has sold its land in central Oxford to Exeter College, in a deal which includes improved links between the two colleges.

Exeter paid £12 million for the additional site in Walton Street. The deal includes a programme of joint academic, cultural and social activities between Exeter and Ruskin.

Ruskin sold the Jericho site in order to fund a £20 million redevelopment at its main campus in Headington. The plans include a new library and two accommodation buildings which will house 50 extra students.

Frances Cairncross has said that the new site will be Exeter’s “third quadrangle.”

Audrey Mullender, Principal of Ruskin College, commented, “[The deal] opens a fruitful new chapter in our century-long relationship with the University of Oxford.”

The final contracts were signed in 9th week of Hilary term.

Oxford University released documents this week showing it believes its investment in the arms trade is ‘socially responsible’.

The University Socially Responsible Investment Review Committee said that potentially providing arms to illegal regimes is not a “sufficiently compelling” reason to cease investment in weapons.

It also said that giving cash to arms companies was not “inconsistent with the objectives of the University”.
Minutes of the Review Committee’s February meeting, which relate these findings, have only been released this week.
The Review Committee was set up in March 2008 to “review the University’s policy on socially responsible investment”.

The board has therefore taken two years to make a decision about investment in the arms trade.

The Review Board did set some limits on investment in weapons. In the meeting on February 4th 2010, the Committee agreed to recommend, “Divestment from any company engaged in the manufacturer [sic] of arms that were banned by UN conventions (e.g. landmines, cluster bombs)”.

However, following the Investment Committee’s advice, the Review Committee agreed that a decision to divest from companies engaging in arms manufacturing would have an adverse effect on the University’s financial return.
The minutes stated, “Total divestment from companies engaging in arms manufacturers should not be recommended.”

The University currently invests over £6 million in UK and US arms companies, according to figures obtained by the Campaign Against Arms Trade in June 2008 under the Freedom of Information Act. This comprises about 1% of the University’s total investment, and is significantly lower than the £713m misreported in The Oxford Student yesterday.

A spokesperson from CAAT, from whom The OxStu also obtained their numbers, confirmed that the £713m referred to total investments, not to investments in arms.

The figure quoted by the paper is therefore almost three quarters of a billion pounds off CAAT’s actual estimate.

However, a spokesperson from the Press Office said the £6m figure could not be confirmed as the information is “confidential”. This figure includes investments in corporations such as BAE Systems, VT Group and Lockheed Martin.

It remains unclear how the Committee’s recommendations are likely to affect the University’s existing investments. According to figures supplied by CAAT, the University currently invests around £1.7 million in BAE Systems.

A spokesperson from CAAT stated, “While 1% of the University’s budget doesn’t sound like very much, it amounts to more than £5 million which could be invested in much more ethical businesses…This is outrageous.”

Despite the level of student opposition to investment in the arms trade, there is only one student representative on the Review Committee, Eorann Lean, OUSU VP for Charities.
Campaigners against University Arms Investment in Oxford remain “undeterred” by the Review Committee’s decision.

Amy Gilligan, Co-Chair of Oxford Anti War Action, told Cherwell that the campaigners “will be calling for even larger protests” than those organised by activists last November.

Decisions made in the follow-up meeting on March 4th will not be made public until mid-May.

Oxford Anti-War Action has voiced concerns regarding how slowly the Review Committee reports back.

The society complained, “That the [latest] decision has only come to light over two months after it was made is indicative of the impenetrable nature, and the secrecy that such committees operate under.”

Oxford University start-up Plink Search Ltd has is the first UK Company to be purchased by Google Inc.

Mark Cummins and James Philbin, Information Engineering graduate students at the Department of Engineering Science, founded the firm in 2009.

PlinkArt, available as a mobile app on the Google Android Market, enables users identify works of art by photographing them with their phone.
The company applies technology developed during the pair’s doctoral research to create a search engine based on visual art, rather than text. 

Cummins explained, “We started by talking to the university about licensing the IP from our PhD work – that was almost two years ago.

“We’d been taking steps towards it for a year or two before that, though.”
Plink won a $100,000 prize from Google last December after winning a public vote for the best reference app on Android. The company was also a finalist at Seedcamp, a London-based event offering advice for European start-ups.

Following the public launch of the company, over 50,000 users downloaded the app in just four weeks.

The Mona Lisa is the picture most searched for by PlinkArt’s users, with Leonardo da Vinci and Claude Monet the most frequently snapped artists.

Plink’s founders are both members of Oxford Entrepreneurs and hired subsidised office space in the OE Incubation Centre on St. Giles to set up the company whilst studying at the university.

Google’s acquisition of Plink reflects its continuing focus on the mobile platform as it competes with Apple’s iPhone for dominance in the fast-growing smartphone market.

In a blog post announcing the deal, Cummins and Philbin wrote, “We’re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works for everything you see around you.

“There are beautiful things to be done with computer vision – it’s going to be a lot of fun!

OE President, Jordan Poulton, congratulated the pair’s success, “It has been an absolute pleasure having them in the OE Incubation Centre, and it will be a shame to lose them to Silicon Valley”.

For other potential student entrepreneurs, he added, “OE are launching a new programme this summer – Kick Start – offering up to £15,000 cash investment as well as mentoring, support and advice to startups in the web/tech space.”

Café Rouge in Jericho was forced to close temporarily due to poor standards in hygiene.

The restaurant was reported to the City Council after a customer spotted a mouse running around the restaurant. The business was issued with a hygiene emergency prohibition notice following an inspection by the Council.
Ian Wright, Health Development Service Manager at Oxford City Council, said that, “We were left with no option but to close the place down.”

On Friday, Oxford’s magistrate court heard the reasons for the closure. These included mice droppings in a bag of red onions, a dead mouse in external areas of the premises next to the kitchen, and live adult cockroaches in the restaurant area and in a walk-in chiller where ready-to-eat food is stored.
Andy Forbes, who lead the investigation for Oxford City Council, said to the Oxford Mail, “conditions had deteriorated to a level where we considered there to be an imminent risk to health”.

The restaurant reopened last Tuesday after an inspector deemed sufficient work had been carried out to make the premises safe.

A spokesperson for the restaurant said, “We can confirm that our Café Rouge Oxford restaurant is open for business. We strive to ensure the highest standards of food safety and service are undertaken”.

Ian Wright explained that the management had carried out the necessary action very quickly. He said, “To be fair to Cafe Rouge, they did carry out quite a lot of the works that we expected. We would hope that they’ve learnt a lesson.”

Café Rouge is one of four food businesses in Oxford to have been forced to close by the food safety team in the past 12 months.

The Oisi Master Sushi Bar in St Clements, J.M. Halal on the Cowley Road and the Al-Shami restaurant in Jericho were all closed by Environmental Health Officers.

Fears were raised at LMH recently as pranksters circulated a mass email warning that the LMH Arcadia Ball was also called off.

Following the cancellation of Balliol Ball during the vacation, many were concerned that Lady Margaret’s would meet a similarly disappointing fate.

 The prank came about after the Ball Committee sent an email to all those who had bought non-dining tickets, but did not hide the list of email recipients. 317 people received the prank message, sent at 1.30am last Sunday morning.

Thankfully for the 650 ball-goers who have already bought tickets, the story is not true.

“Please do not refund your dresses in panic, and be assured that this will not be taken lightly by the Ball Committee”, said Ball Secretary Emily Roberts, in a follow-up email headed ‘Damage Control’.

The prank certainly ruffled some feathers among LMH members, who had paid £130 for dining tickets, or £90 for non-dining. The spoof message “regretted to announce the cancellation of the LMH Ball” and assured students that they were “trying to organise refunds”.

 The message was particularly surprising for first-year History student at LMH, Ewan Short. The email was sent from [email protected] – an email address that has nothing to do with him.

“At first I thought I might have sent the prank email”, Short told Cherwell, “because I remembered being quite drunk that night. But then I quickly realised it wasn’t from me. I think it was probably some third years who set up the account and sent the emails.”

Short thought it unlikely that the joke caused any serious distress. “I don’t think anyone in LMH would have attached any credibility to the email, because to be honest, I don’t have any credibility. But some recipients at other colleges may have thought it was serious.”
 
The real senders of the email have since come forward and apologised to the Ball Committee for the confusion.
 
Presidents of the Ball Committee, Charles Streeten and Emily Stott, were happy to accept the apology. “It’s water under the bridge now, and both College and the Ball Committee are satisfied it has been dealt with satisfactorily,” they said.
 
College authorities, JCR representatives and the Ball Committee were keen to play down the prank. Roberts said, “I could count on the fingers of two hands the number of people who thought it was serious”.

JCR President, Genevieve Clark, added “it wasn’t funny for the people involved, but everyone felt very quickly reassured that the ball will still be happening”.
 
This prank cancellation email is reminiscent of the apologetic online message from the Balliol Ball Committee, who actually did have to cancel the Balliol Ball last week, due to “underwhelming ticket sales”.
Balliol The Ball Secretary said “we were unable to sell enough tickets to even approach breaking even.”
It is reported that the Balliol Ball Committee spent a large proportion of its budget securing DJ Yoda as a headline act.

Students at Oxford are more likely to convert to evangelical Christianity than those at less prestigious universities, according to new research.

This is due to the high pressure and stressful environment at Oxford, and the fact that Oxford students are inherently more creative than average.

The hypothesis was put forward by Dr Edward Dutton, a researcher for the Finnish Lutheran Church. Dutton claims that “students from state schools where [sic] over-represented amongst those who became Christians while at Oxford”. He attributes this to the mind-broadening effects of gap years on private school students.

Ellen Harvey, a Magdalen undergraduate involved in the Christian community, attacked Dr Dutton’s hypothesis. “The fundamental flaw with his argument is that it excludes God, assuming that someone becomes a Christian because of solely human factors, the influence of other Christians, psychological impulses… It is astonishing that in an extensive bibliography the Bible has not been referenced”.

To this claim, Dr Dutton responded, “This is a piece of social scientific research which draws upon the empirical method at the heart of science. The existence of the Christian god – by its very nature – cannot be proven empirically or, entirely, disproven. It is a doctrine of faith you can take or leave, something which stands in contrast to the scientific position.”

Dr Dutton himself was careful to downplay his findings. “Obviously, at this stage, and as I stress in the paper, there is a degree to which the intelligence research is speculative. But it is, I think, a plausible observation in light of the evidence so far accrued by myself and others”.
Other Oxford academics are skeptical about the conclusions that Dr Dutton has drawnfrom his research.

Dr Justin Barratt, an Oxford experimental psychologist working on cognitive science of religion, said, “I applaud the attempt to bring social, cognitive, neuro-, and evolutionary sciences together, but I don’t find the result compelling in this case …The paper reads more like an intelligent speculation based on some preliminary findings than a rigorous and compelling scientific study.”

Dr Dutton conceded that his results should not be taken too seriously. He insisted “I entirely agree that the case is not proven yet…[but]there is a strong tradition of ‘intelligent speculation’ in the sciences, justified because it provokes debate and may take us closer to the truth. To really prove it – or disprove it – we would, of course, need to conduct a major survey of student religious experiences, intelligence and creativity.”

The paper was published in the Romanian online “Journal for Interdisciplinary Research on Religion and Science”. It draws on interviews conducted by Dr Dutton with 25 members of OUICCU, the university-wide Christian union, as well as similar interviews at three other universities.