Melinda Bossenmeyer: Plagiarist?

Here's a fun evening task: read this post of mine from July 5, 2007, and then read this one "posted by Melinda Bossenmeyer, Ed.D." on July 9, 2007 at Peaceful Playgrounds, Inc.'s "recess blog".

Anything look familiar? If not, I'll point it out for you: Dr. Bossenmeyer's post of July 9 is copied nearly word-for-word from my July 5th post. There have been a number of small changes made throughout the post, but not nearly enough for Dr. Bossenmeyer to call the post her own. Take, for instance, the introduction. Here's mine:

One of the exercise mantras commonly floated about is that adults should get 30 minutes of moderate activity exercise at least five days a week. While this is a good goal, the majority of Americans don't get this amount of exercise¹. And, for a lot of beginning exercisers, exercising for 30 minutes a day probably seems like a huge commitment, if not an insurmountable challenge.

My SO and I have long viewed exercise in the "some is better than none" category, and thus try to do even little amounts whenever we can (e.g., walking to the store instead of driving, always taking the stairs at work, doing our own gardening). A recent paper (Church et al., 2007) has shown, via a randomized, controlled trial, that even small amounts of exercise are better than no exercise at all (at least for the subset of people they tested).

And here's the one posted by Dr. Bossenmeyer:

Most all research indicates that adults should get 30 minutes of moderate activity exercise at least five days a week. While this is a research based recommendation, studies indicate that the majority of Americans don't get this amount of exercise¹.

A recent paper (Church et al., 2007) has shown, via a randomized, controlled trial, that even small amounts of exercise are better than no exercise at all (at least for the subset of people they tested which were post menopausal women).

And some of the post was simply copied verbatim. Once again, here's my post:

Church et al. divided overweight, post-menopausal women into four groups:

• Control: Did no exercise a week (other than normal walking)
  
• 4kcal/kg: Exercised about 70 minutes a week
  
• 8kcal/kg: Exercised about 135 minutes a week
• 12 kcal/kg: Exercised about 190 minutes a week

Participants were randomly assigned to a condition, and all exercise was performed in a lab². The participants exercised at their given level for six months, at which point physiological data were compared to data taken at the start of the study.

Fitness improvement correlated linearly with the amount of exercise:

And here's Dr. Bossenmeyer's text:

Church et al. divided overweight, post-menopausal women into four groups:

• Control: Did no exercise a week (other than normal walking)
  
• 4kcal/kg: Exercised about 70 minutes a week
  
• 8kcal/kg: Exercised about 135 minutes a week
• 12 kcal/kg: Exercised about 190 minutes a week

Participants were randomly assigned to a condition, and all exercise was performed in a lab². The participants exercised at their given level for six months, at which point physiological data were compared to data taken at the start of the study.

Fitness improvement correlated linearly with the amount of exercise:

She even included the three footnotes verbatim, the last of which includes links back to my exercise-tracking blog (and which makes no sense in the context of her blog):

In fact, it was the realization that our fitness was slowly declining (and would continue declining until we would no longer be able to walk when we were 70) that finally motivated my SO and me to start regularly exercising (and tracking our exercise goals and progress here) a few years ago.

There are no links back to my blog (other than the accidental ones to my exercise blog in the footnote), no acknowledgments that I wrote the original post, and she's even added her own copyright notice ("Copyright 2008 Peaceful Playgrounds, Inc." is in the footer of the page). I've never had any communication with Dr. Bossenmeyer that I know of, and certainly never authorized the use of my work on her blog.

I would expect more of a person who's "spent 27 years as an educator and is the author of six published books on playgrounds and numerous articles on recess, playgrounds and play."

[Many thanks to monado, whose recent comment on this post led to me finding this plagiarism. And, just in case something should happen to Dr. Bossenmeyer's "original" post, here are some screenshots of it: 1, 2, 3, 4]