The anti-social media arrives on the wine-blogging scene!

I have previously been subject to professional plagiarism, as I have described on my other blog:
          Unacknowledged re-use of intellectual property

However, I was not expecting to have my wine blog plagiarized. Sadly, this has now happened, too. There is a Blogspot blog, called "artsforhealthmmu" that, as of today, consists entirely of copies of 19 of my posts from the Wine Gourd, without an iota of reference to me or my blog. Needless to say, I am not going to put a link to that blog here, but you will find it if you search for the name on the web.

It is not immediately obvious what the game is, here. That other blog is well designed, and there is currently no advertising or rogue links that I can find, although that may change. Interestingly, there is a genuine site called the "Arts and health blog" that has almost exactly the same web address as the plagiarizing blog. (The latter has an extra "s" in the address.) So, there are other people who seem to be as much a victim of this situation as I am.

I have submitted a request to Blogger to have the offending blog removed, but that will take some time to implement. I am hoping that this will result in a better resolution than happened the last time I was plagiarized (mentioned above), where the offending (well-known) author had no real excuse or apology, and the (well-known) book publisher metaphorically just shrugged his shoulders. A pox on all of them!

Update 4 Nov.:

Notice from Google:
"In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have completed processing your infringement notice. We are in the process of disabling access to the content in question"

Introduction

A gourd of red wine and a sheaf of poems —
A bare subsistence, half a loaf, not more —
Supplied us two alone in the free desert:
What Sultan could we envy on his throne?
                                                        —Robert Graves

Calabash Palm Wine Gourd
from Cameroon

The wine world is full of opinions; and the blogsphere is full of opinions. It is therefore not unexpected that there are countless blogs offering opinions about wine. Some of these opinions are interesting, and some are informative.

However, behind these opinions is a world of information, showing how the world actually is, rather than how we perceive it. Sometimes these data are hidden and sometimes they are in full view. Either way, I figure that we could do worse than have a look them.

As a scientist, I am interested in exploring the data, rather than reading opinions about it. Data are often fascinating, sometimes they are controversial, and not infrequently they challenge received opinion.

So, in the interests of doing something different to everyone else, this blog will delve into the world of wine data. My intention is to ferret out some of the interesting stuff, and to bring it out into the light, for everyone to see. In particular, I have noted that many (if not most) research studies about wine do not show us an actual picture of their data. So, I would like to do this, rather than provide some theoretical assessment of those data.

At heart, I guess that I want to compare the opinions that people hold to the underlying data (the "facts", as the media naïvely like to put it). Naturally, there will also be opinions of my own along the way. However, I am hoping that the primary interest will be in the information itself, and the use of exploratory data analysis to look at it.

The source for the name of the blog will be obvious to anyone who knows how to say "vineyard" in Swedish.