Last night we went to see Mamma Mia! at the Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco. It is a hilariously funny show and, of course, packed full of feel-good ABBA music.

Amazingly, it is almost exactly thirty years since ABBA burst onto the scene as winners of the Eurovision Song Contest in the seaside town of Brighton in the south-east of England on April 6, 1974. That song, Waterloo, is not part of the show itself, but was part of the closing sequence with the audience all standing and dancing along. Many of their best known songs are in the score though: Dancing Queen, Super Trouper, S.O.S., Thank You For The Music and The Winner Takes It All to name a few of the 22 songs listed in the programme.

The story is set on a small Greek island. Sophie is about to get married and is trying to work out which of three men (a travel writer, a banker and an architect) is her father. Her mother is not sure, and hasn’t seen any of them in years. Sophie has invited all three to her wedding, but sent the invitations in her mother’s name.

If you get a chance to see this one, go for it! One of the best musicals I have ever seen for sure.

Trust Me, a short story by Frederick Waterman was in the December 2003 copy of United Airlines Hemispheres Magazine. I started reading it only after I’d read everything else in the magazine, and just one page in I was hooked. Unfortunately, the Hemispheres website seems to be down so I cannot tell if they have the full text online.

The link above though is to the Row22.com website, and the story is one of a number that have been collated in a new book Row 22, Seats A&B, available from that webpage. None of the other online bookstores I searched had copies (and only Barnes & Noble and Campus I even knew about it).

I haven’t posted anything about this before on the grounds that I didn’t really have anything to add to what appears to be one of the biggest scams of all time. Then, while tidying up, I read an article in SD Magazine that had a new angle on the whole episode.

The article is available online, but you will need to register (free). The part of the article that caught my eye was a bullet list following a quote from the Salt Lake City SEC office boss, Kenneth Israel, that was first published in a Forbes article by William P. Barrett. That quote was simple: “There is a lot of fraud here per capita.”

The list can be summarised as follows:

• David Boies’ law firm joins a partnership in which they received $1M & 400,000 SCO shares. They make the most if the stock rises and the parties settle (though it seems highly unlikely that IBM will settle at the moment).
• Before the lawsuit SCO stock was hovering around the $1 mark; since then it has been as high as $22 (though it is only $8.71 at the time of writing), and they’ve issued 300,000 new shares at a par value of $0.0001 (yes, 1/10 of a cent).
• Several SCO officers have sold large quantities of stock, and also received new options to buy the stock at that $0.0001 price. Could this whole lawsuit simply be a new take on the classic “pump & dump” scheme?
• Finally, SCO used some of the new stock to buy another company, Vultus. So what? Well, Vultus was founded by the Canopy Group who also founded Caldera, the company that became SCO. They share a board member too: SCO Group Chairman Ralph J. Yarro III was a board member at Vultus. Conveniently, they were also located in the same office building as SCO before the acquisition.

The blueDonkey.org Executive Ratings for SCOX doesn’t have many votes at the moment, but they are all negative!

Checking the logs for blueDonkey.org yesterday I noticed a bot/crawler that I hadn’t seen before (though it may well have been there before since I don’t normally look in the agents list): the TurnitinBot. Unlike most bots though, this one was polite enough to leave not just its name, but also the URL to the page that explains what it is, who owns it and how to stop it scanning your site if you want. Top marks to the folks at Turnitin for netiquette!

What is Turnitin though? Well, it is a fully featured school assignment management system as far as I can see, including a feature that scans student papers for plagiarism. That is where the bot comes in: it scans the internet and builds up a database of information on the internet that it can compare with submitted papers to look for possible plagiarism. Check out the sample report from their website (and also notice the use of Apple’s Safari browser in the screen shot).

Times have changed it seems since I was writing essays. Now there are websites that contain large numbers of essays available for a few dollars. They’re not hiding their purpose either using names like Evil House of Cheat. I’m not going to provide any URLs (if you’re going to cheat, at least show enough initiative to find the sites on your own). That said, it still seems to be a very low number that are really abusing these services and just submitting papers they buy online directly – check out the pie chart on Turnitin’s site that shows less than 1% of students handing in papers from the internet unchanged.