Support makes it worthwhile

THE aches and pains suffered by those taking part in the annual Surrey 100 event were nurtured by Guildford physiotherapists who helped the 370 cyclists raise money for charity. Participants set off from Guildford in one of two races: 100 miles or 100 kilometres, which included a zig-zag climb up Box Hill to raise funds for Action Medical Research, a charity that specialises in helping children and babies. Physios from Mount Alvernia Hospital, along with a large team of sports therapists, sports massage therapists and students from nearby colleges, were on hand to help the cyclists take on the challenge. Joanna Hudson, physiotherapy manager at the hospital, said: I must commend all the therapists who supported the Surrey 100 event. They provided essential massage support and advice to cyclists who had just completed a tough challenge. The therapists worked nonstop to massage the weary riders aching calves and provide advice to those with injuries and sprains. We hope our support will encourage all the riders to come back next year. Mark Trott, UK cycling development manager at Action Medical Research, added that the 100 miles and the 100km routes on Sunday July 10 were quite a challenge and the riders did not undertake the event lightly. He said: That is why were so pleased to have had almost all the cyclists finish the ride. We really appreciate each and every persons support for Action Medical Research and the funds the event raises to help make a difference for children affected by debilitating diseases and infections. Last years event raised more than 25,000 and the charity anticipates another bumper amount to help fund its work to prevent, cure or treat babies and children.

This cyclist was one of many who took advantage of a massage by Mount Alvernias team of physios.

Surrey software could end plagiarism

by Melanie Hall
NEW software developed by experts at the University of Surrey could prevent information leaks, as well as detect cheating students and lazy authors. The system, which analyses and flags up highly similar content across sets of documents, is said to be significantly quicker than known rivals and can process thousands of documents to detect cases of plagiarised content within a matter of minutes. The systems speed makes it suited to the kinds of largescale plagiarism detection that would be needed, for example, to detect the leakage of Intellectual Property (IP) onto the internet or into other organisations. IP theft has been characterised as a 9.2billion problem in the UK alone and is greatly assisted by an insider according to a recent report by specialist security firm Detica, which is part of BAE Systems. The systems approach, explored in part in a Surrey PhD thesis by Neil Cooke, is being kept under wraps while a patent application is progressed. The software could also be used to detect plagiarism that might occur when students cheat in assessments or when authors reuse their own content or that of others. The software was recently tested as part of an international plagiarism detection task, where it came fourth. The task took place for a third year as part of the fifth International Workshop on Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Social Software Misuse. It involves identifying the precise extent of passages plagiarised from source documents and inserted into other documents, either as they are or with some attempts made to modify the plagiarised text. This task, referred to as external detection, involves both source and suspicious documents being provided, with last years competition involving the search for some 68,558 plagiarism cases across 27,073 documents. Dr Lee Gillam, a lecturer at the Guildford university, said: Our aim was to show that the novel approach being employed by Surrey could cope quickly with the volume of competition data and still attain very competitive detection performance. In the previous contest, three of the top four competitors reported using between eight and 32 processor cores, with one still taking some 40 hours to process the data. There are some overheads in dealing with the competition data that we can reduce but the core plagiarism detection analysis takes just 12 minutes using one processor core on one machine and, using similar approaches, we could bring that time down a way further. The team hopes to attend a workshop in Amsterdam in September, to discuss the issue with competitors.