I took a few years off from school during the dot com craze. I made a decent living and now I'm back doing what I actually like, writing. You would be surprised but the majority of my grammar is passable. As an author we're allowed a great deal of flexibility in the interest of "style." Grammar itself isn't the strict set of rules people often think. There's a lot involved, including slang, accent and an array of other things. Plus it's a forum post, a degree of laziness is acceptable.
Prove it. My Uni kicked 4 people out last semester for plagiarism, that's 4 out of almost 30 thousand. If it was 80% as you state I think the statistics would be higher. I don't believe you.
This is already the case. My 17th century British Literature Professor stopped using Turnitin.com because it became obvious, every idea relating to Milton had already been expressed in a million different ways. Just because an idea was original to a student, didn't mean that same idea hadn't been expressed previously by another. He told us every single paper he received had gotten negative hits from Turnitin.com because Milton had just been discussed to death.
So because you knew a guy that knows a guy that cheated one time we should all force every student to subject themselves to Turnitin.com? I'm sorry but even if I believed what you said (which by the way had nothing to do with the topic as you were talking about tests and not papers) I still wouldn't be able to take the leap into believing we need a big brother babysitting students, especially one as horribly flawed as Turnitin.com.
Between my 5 English courses this semester I've written 16 papers in 10 weeks. Thats a little lower than last semester and my experience isn't unique. If you think English majors aren't tempted to cheat with a load like that you're kidding yourself, and by sheer odds, even if they were less likely too, the increased volume of work would still bring some out of the wood work. Fact of the matter is, far fewer people cheat than these people claim. Which still doesn't address my point to the OP, if the OP knew there was cheating, why wasn't the professor informed?
If you knew they were cheating why didn't you turn them in? Most school have an honor code and if it bothered you so much you should have talked to the professors. Personally I don't know anyone that cheats on papers, I'm an English major and that's pretty much all we do in my classes. If people were cheating I'd have encountered it at least once by now, and I haven't.
As an English major (I type poorly so excuse typos) I can tell you first hand that Turnitin is horrid. Previous posts have talked about how submitting a draft and then your final shows your final as being plagiarized. But it's worse than that. It hits on common word usage, simple three word statements, hell even cliche statements that may be 2 words long, it marks them.
To make matters worse a large number of professors are starting to use this and treat it like the gospel. I know several students accused now of plagiarism, falsely, because of this system.
I am lucky this semester and have 2 professors who realize this and in a move to stop plagiarism have taken other actions, such as asking us to turn in all of our rough drafts and print/copy out our sources and attach it all to our final work, something you can still cheat on but are much less likely too.
Personally I don't know anyone who has ever cheated on a paper. I suppose with some of the fluff classes and electives some may have because those classes are a low priority, but by and large plagiarism is no where near as big a problem as these people make it out to be. High school maybe, but not in higher education.
Well, I may be corrected on this but I'll say it anyway since it's what I was taught in college. The median world temp around the peek of the dinosaurs was very high, somewhere around 130 to 140 degrees and there was a much larger amount of CO2 in the air. I would have assumed that as this changed mammals were given their chance at the top of the food chain.
I always interpreted mammalian evolution to be parallel with climate change. I suspect however many people would disagree.
Scholarly work isn't limited to term papers. I'm sorry but your point isn't relevant. It's narrow and limited solely to the role of a student. They are perfectly acceptable in a wide array of things outside of simple papers.
You've obviously never done any real scholarly work. Whether or not you cite from it or just use it to point yourself in a direction, you still need to take note of it. Scholarly work isn't limited to term papers, which seems to be the extent to what you've done by your response. It also implies lesson plans and teaching materials, many other things as well.
Nice work copy and pasting my response and twisting it to your own needs, I'm assuming you did that a lot on term papers too since you seem to be very good at it.
Why go through the trouble when you can use an established and "credible" encyclopedia from your Universities library? Or hell, from their website. Why use Wikipedia at all in these cases? You don't need to take those extra steps if you just use a credible source in the first place.
I'm not meaning to degrade Wikipedia, I surf it often just for fun and ideas, but I would never consider using it as a scholarly source for the simple fact it ends up being MORE work in the end than just using Brittanica from the start.
So you accuse me of being testy and tell me to grow up then reverse my own statement to do the exact same thing? Doesn't that in turn make you testy, emotional and in need of "growing up"?
Simply put the OP was trying to discredit academics who dedicate their lives to the sole purpose of knowledge and education. I find that indefensible and ignorant, almost as ignorant as your defense of him.
Every professor I've had has warned us vehemently not to use Wikipedia. It's useless for scholarly work as you have no idea if the material is plagerized or just down right incorrect. I've come across multiple errors myself, especially concerning some of the more subjective material. To use Wikipedia for scholarly work you would have to double check virtually every word, defeating the purpose in the first place.
I view Wikipedia as a fun tool and nothing more. You may or may not be getting the right info but regardless, it's still better than word of mouth. So long as people understand its place I don't have a problem with it, but when people start linking Wikipedia articles like a Christian would link the bible I have to call them out on it. It is NOT a scholarly source, even if a scholar submitted something to it. I in fact met someone in a class who thought it was funny to screw with Wikipedia articles, simply knowing human nature as I do, I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it.
If you think "academic schlubs," especially ones teaching auto mechanics don' know their field, you are sadly mistaken. I've always found it funny how blue collar folks like to deride educators precisely because they are educated. Grow up, maybe you'll learn something from them.
I played WoW a lot. 14 characters over level 60, 2 at 70. I've been all through MC/BWL/Naxx and later most of Kara in TBC. I just recently quit because I had the epiphany that it was all exactly the same. WoW was my first MMO and from what I've gathered most others follow a lot of the same development ideas and the ones that vary from it were plagued with a multitude of other issues.
I liked playing the game but as you can see from my number of high level characters and my experiences in game, it was really just a huge time sink. In the real world, time invested = reward. This translates very well into an MMO, but the problem arises when people have real lives + MMO life. This creates a horrible duality in peoples lives where they end up sacrificing things either way. The developer that can work around this will be my hero.
WoW would be great if I could set my character to begin farming materials or working on professions while I'm logged out, allowing me to actually play when I have time to play and all the mats I need for consumables and other such things will be there. Additional things such as gold farming would be greatly enhanced with an investment system. In WoW the "bank" serves as nothing more than an extra few bag slots. You earn no interest in gold and have none of the "bank" features you would expect.
Something I've found in MMO's is how the devs are constantly trying to force the community into certain behavior. For example, not being able to sell enchants on the auction house (the devs have said this was to encourage player to player contact) or the recent removal of the global looking for group channel (to force people into using the horrid LFG tool they have). The devs always fall into a power craze trying to control everything. I never understood how or why they would want this to happen. The fun is in the freedom, the less freedom the less fun.
I could go on and on about other issues but these are the ones I care most about. MMO's right now have lost me. I no longer wish to sacrifice my grades and personal life to play them. I've actually found myself missing the old school RPG's like Diablo II where if I logged out I wouldn't fall behind. I suppose my issues with the genre wont be solved until someone has the foresight to higher devs who aren't completely arrogant (Do some googling on the developers of WoW and the all out wars they fought on usenet with Everquest developers). I just want to play a fun game.....
Any anthropologist will tell you that the direction of evolution has always been and will continue to be, larger brained and more intelligent. There is no reason or need for us to get "dimwitted" as this guy suggests. It's not beneficial to us in any way.
This is just another stab at the old Platonic philosophy of the elites ruling over the commons. The only difference here is the guy is basing his claims on a genetic level rather than a philosophic level. He's doing it poorly at that.
There isn't a University in this country that doesn't also take government fund in one way or another, be it research grants or federal funding. Private schools are not private in that sense.
A case can be made that this is censorship and I will guess that at some point someone will press the matter.
I have to say that I stick with firefox simply because of adblock. There is no other reason. IE7 is a very refined browser but don't count on a good adblocking addon for it in the near future.
Firefox is a memory hog, both on my mac and my windows laptop. IE7 does suffer from some UI glitches and clutter, plus with IE7 I feel like the UI works against me. But the IE7 UI as I said is refined, once i've messed with it more and gotten used to it I may very well like it better.
Oh one more thing about IE7, the way it handles bookmarks is, to me anyway, stupid. It's a real pain importing, managing, it seems to place bookmarks where "it" wants too.
Generally speaking the state of browsers today seems poor from a user perspective. Even the paid for browsers are lacking, bug ridden and annoying.
I really wish developers, especialy open source developers, would do a better job listening to user feedback. Classic example of this is the new and annoying bar that pops up in Camino notifying you a popup was blocked. The entire point of blocking the popup is for seemless and transparent web browsing, yet now I have this bar informing me that a popup which I didnt want to see in the first place has been blocked. Why did I block it if I'm going to be notified so blatantly after the fact and with no options to disable it?
Annoying bugs, menus, UI's etc are killing web browsing for me. I don't do nearly as much as I used to (web browsing). Just my own perspective here, I'm sure others will disagree.
I don't think any reasonable person thinks LJ would suddenly close shop from lack of users. I believe the argument to be that the quality will go down reducing it to the quality level of MySpace. These are subjective criteria with which to judge and compare so drawing a line claiming they are either right or wrong would be foolish.
My personal opinion is that both sites are crap. While most people I know have a MySpace account, very few I know actually use it in any real manner.
Both sites could go swirling down the bowl and I doubt anyone would shed a tear. Someone will pick up right where they left off so that all the little goth and emo kids can slit their metaphorical wrists together on the internet day after day.
I'm still trying to figure out what in the heck 7.0 did to my system. Before the install my system hadn't crashed, bogged down, nothing in over a year. Now suddenly the firewire is dead on it, my iPod isn't recognized by the system at all, not even by the update app from their website.
Apple is deleting posts off their discussion forum by the hundreds, all from people just asking for help to get it working again. This update has done nothing to fix this problem for me so essentially the iPod I spent nearly 500$ on is worthless, Apple won't help me on the matter at all.
I'm glad some people aren't having issues. I've been using OSX since release, bought every update, never had an issue till now. I used to post here telling everyone how great my situation was while others complained. Now that I'm in their shoes, it's pretty shitty.
Apple is a gem of company when things go right, but when they go wrong, watch out. I've never felt so disrespected in my life when dealing with a corporation.
I am also a horrid typist (long story). That said I've seen a really sharp decline in the writing ability of kids over the last 5 years. My niece for example is now starting school at a JC in her area and can barely form a coherent sentence. My mother forwarded some of her emails to me to get my opinion on her writing and how she could have graduated high school. I was quite literally shocked. She spends all day IM'ing and text messaging her little heart out.
Writing is a lot like math. The more you do it the better you are at it. When the vast majority of kids do nothing but IM shorthand all day long their ability to communicate will be hindered. We don't need a study to tell us this. It's common sense.
Ask all the people who type all day long how their handwriting is. Same basic premise at work. If you don't use it you lose it.
Even a 1% pull back on the market would be drastic and a major setback to a great many people and nations as a whole. I'm done arguing the point with you. I'm afraid common sense and rationality went out the window when you put on the tin foil hat.
Removing oil or even reducing it's use will lead to massive unemployment in the oil industry, rising costs of energy meaning higher costs to consumers for ALL goods from clothes to food because shipping those goods will still mean trucking them across country and across oceans. When prices get higher, companies cut back on employees, consumers stop purchasing goods, companies go under etc etc etc.
This is basic economics, however being the typical narrow sighted eco-hippie, I can see how all this would go right over your head. Perhaps you would enjoy paying 20 dollars for a box of cereal. I think most people would rather pass on that.
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I took a few years off from school during the dot com craze. I made a decent living and now I'm back doing what I actually like, writing. You would be surprised but the majority of my grammar is passable. As an author we're allowed a great deal of flexibility in the interest of "style." Grammar itself isn't the strict set of rules people often think. There's a lot involved, including slang, accent and an array of other things. Plus it's a forum post, a degree of laziness is acceptable.
Prove it. My Uni kicked 4 people out last semester for plagiarism, that's 4 out of almost 30 thousand. If it was 80% as you state I think the statistics would be higher. I don't believe you.
Yet you posted here saying exactly the opposite in the original post. I call shenanigans.
This is already the case. My 17th century British Literature Professor stopped using Turnitin.com because it became obvious, every idea relating to Milton had already been expressed in a million different ways. Just because an idea was original to a student, didn't mean that same idea hadn't been expressed previously by another. He told us every single paper he received had gotten negative hits from Turnitin.com because Milton had just been discussed to death.
So because you knew a guy that knows a guy that cheated one time we should all force every student to subject themselves to Turnitin.com? I'm sorry but even if I believed what you said (which by the way had nothing to do with the topic as you were talking about tests and not papers) I still wouldn't be able to take the leap into believing we need a big brother babysitting students, especially one as horribly flawed as Turnitin.com.
Between my 5 English courses this semester I've written 16 papers in 10 weeks. Thats a little lower than last semester and my experience isn't unique. If you think English majors aren't tempted to cheat with a load like that you're kidding yourself, and by sheer odds, even if they were less likely too, the increased volume of work would still bring some out of the wood work. Fact of the matter is, far fewer people cheat than these people claim. Which still doesn't address my point to the OP, if the OP knew there was cheating, why wasn't the professor informed?
If you knew they were cheating why didn't you turn them in? Most school have an honor code and if it bothered you so much you should have talked to the professors. Personally I don't know anyone that cheats on papers, I'm an English major and that's pretty much all we do in my classes. If people were cheating I'd have encountered it at least once by now, and I haven't.
As an English major (I type poorly so excuse typos) I can tell you first hand that Turnitin is horrid. Previous posts have talked about how submitting a draft and then your final shows your final as being plagiarized. But it's worse than that. It hits on common word usage, simple three word statements, hell even cliche statements that may be 2 words long, it marks them.
To make matters worse a large number of professors are starting to use this and treat it like the gospel. I know several students accused now of plagiarism, falsely, because of this system.
I am lucky this semester and have 2 professors who realize this and in a move to stop plagiarism have taken other actions, such as asking us to turn in all of our rough drafts and print/copy out our sources and attach it all to our final work, something you can still cheat on but are much less likely too.
Personally I don't know anyone who has ever cheated on a paper. I suppose with some of the fluff classes and electives some may have because those classes are a low priority, but by and large plagiarism is no where near as big a problem as these people make it out to be. High school maybe, but not in higher education.
Well, I may be corrected on this but I'll say it anyway since it's what I was taught in college. The median world temp around the peek of the dinosaurs was very high, somewhere around 130 to 140 degrees and there was a much larger amount of CO2 in the air. I would have assumed that as this changed mammals were given their chance at the top of the food chain.
I always interpreted mammalian evolution to be parallel with climate change. I suspect however many people would disagree.
Scholarly work isn't limited to term papers. I'm sorry but your point isn't relevant. It's narrow and limited solely to the role of a student. They are perfectly acceptable in a wide array of things outside of simple papers.
You've obviously never done any real scholarly work. Whether or not you cite from it or just use it to point yourself in a direction, you still need to take note of it. Scholarly work isn't limited to term papers, which seems to be the extent to what you've done by your response. It also implies lesson plans and teaching materials, many other things as well.
Nice work copy and pasting my response and twisting it to your own needs, I'm assuming you did that a lot on term papers too since you seem to be very good at it.
Why go through the trouble when you can use an established and "credible" encyclopedia from your Universities library? Or hell, from their website. Why use Wikipedia at all in these cases? You don't need to take those extra steps if you just use a credible source in the first place.
I'm not meaning to degrade Wikipedia, I surf it often just for fun and ideas, but I would never consider using it as a scholarly source for the simple fact it ends up being MORE work in the end than just using Brittanica from the start.
So you accuse me of being testy and tell me to grow up then reverse my own statement to do the exact same thing? Doesn't that in turn make you testy, emotional and in need of "growing up"?
Simply put the OP was trying to discredit academics who dedicate their lives to the sole purpose of knowledge and education. I find that indefensible and ignorant, almost as ignorant as your defense of him.
Every professor I've had has warned us vehemently not to use Wikipedia. It's useless for scholarly work as you have no idea if the material is plagerized or just down right incorrect. I've come across multiple errors myself, especially concerning some of the more subjective material. To use Wikipedia for scholarly work you would have to double check virtually every word, defeating the purpose in the first place.
I view Wikipedia as a fun tool and nothing more. You may or may not be getting the right info but regardless, it's still better than word of mouth. So long as people understand its place I don't have a problem with it, but when people start linking Wikipedia articles like a Christian would link the bible I have to call them out on it. It is NOT a scholarly source, even if a scholar submitted something to it. I in fact met someone in a class who thought it was funny to screw with Wikipedia articles, simply knowing human nature as I do, I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it.
If you think "academic schlubs," especially ones teaching auto mechanics don' know their field, you are sadly mistaken. I've always found it funny how blue collar folks like to deride educators precisely because they are educated. Grow up, maybe you'll learn something from them.
I played WoW a lot. 14 characters over level 60, 2 at 70. I've been all through MC/BWL/Naxx and later most of Kara in TBC. I just recently quit because I had the epiphany that it was all exactly the same. WoW was my first MMO and from what I've gathered most others follow a lot of the same development ideas and the ones that vary from it were plagued with a multitude of other issues.
I liked playing the game but as you can see from my number of high level characters and my experiences in game, it was really just a huge time sink. In the real world, time invested = reward. This translates very well into an MMO, but the problem arises when people have real lives + MMO life. This creates a horrible duality in peoples lives where they end up sacrificing things either way. The developer that can work around this will be my hero.
WoW would be great if I could set my character to begin farming materials or working on professions while I'm logged out, allowing me to actually play when I have time to play and all the mats I need for consumables and other such things will be there. Additional things such as gold farming would be greatly enhanced with an investment system. In WoW the "bank" serves as nothing more than an extra few bag slots. You earn no interest in gold and have none of the "bank" features you would expect.
Something I've found in MMO's is how the devs are constantly trying to force the community into certain behavior. For example, not being able to sell enchants on the auction house (the devs have said this was to encourage player to player contact) or the recent removal of the global looking for group channel (to force people into using the horrid LFG tool they have). The devs always fall into a power craze trying to control everything. I never understood how or why they would want this to happen. The fun is in the freedom, the less freedom the less fun.
I could go on and on about other issues but these are the ones I care most about. MMO's right now have lost me. I no longer wish to sacrifice my grades and personal life to play them. I've actually found myself missing the old school RPG's like Diablo II where if I logged out I wouldn't fall behind. I suppose my issues with the genre wont be solved until someone has the foresight to higher devs who aren't completely arrogant (Do some googling on the developers of WoW and the all out wars they fought on usenet with Everquest developers). I just want to play a fun game.....
The article, and my reply, are about human evolution. Microbes etc have nothing to do with this.
Any anthropologist will tell you that the direction of evolution has always been and will continue to be, larger brained and more intelligent. There is no reason or need for us to get "dimwitted" as this guy suggests. It's not beneficial to us in any way.
This is just another stab at the old Platonic philosophy of the elites ruling over the commons. The only difference here is the guy is basing his claims on a genetic level rather than a philosophic level. He's doing it poorly at that.
This really isn't news worthy.
There isn't a University in this country that doesn't also take government fund in one way or another, be it research grants or federal funding. Private schools are not private in that sense.
A case can be made that this is censorship and I will guess that at some point someone will press the matter.
I have to say that I stick with firefox simply because of adblock. There is no other reason. IE7 is a very refined browser but don't count on a good adblocking addon for it in the near future.
Firefox is a memory hog, both on my mac and my windows laptop. IE7 does suffer from some UI glitches and clutter, plus with IE7 I feel like the UI works against me. But the IE7 UI as I said is refined, once i've messed with it more and gotten used to it I may very well like it better.
Oh one more thing about IE7, the way it handles bookmarks is, to me anyway, stupid. It's a real pain importing, managing, it seems to place bookmarks where "it" wants too.
Generally speaking the state of browsers today seems poor from a user perspective. Even the paid for browsers are lacking, bug ridden and annoying.
I really wish developers, especialy open source developers, would do a better job listening to user feedback. Classic example of this is the new and annoying bar that pops up in Camino notifying you a popup was blocked. The entire point of blocking the popup is for seemless and transparent web browsing, yet now I have this bar informing me that a popup which I didnt want to see in the first place has been blocked. Why did I block it if I'm going to be notified so blatantly after the fact and with no options to disable it?
Annoying bugs, menus, UI's etc are killing web browsing for me. I don't do nearly as much as I used to (web browsing). Just my own perspective here, I'm sure others will disagree.
I don't think any reasonable person thinks LJ would suddenly close shop from lack of users. I believe the argument to be that the quality will go down reducing it to the quality level of MySpace. These are subjective criteria with which to judge and compare so drawing a line claiming they are either right or wrong would be foolish.
My personal opinion is that both sites are crap. While most people I know have a MySpace account, very few I know actually use it in any real manner.
Both sites could go swirling down the bowl and I doubt anyone would shed a tear. Someone will pick up right where they left off so that all the little goth and emo kids can slit their metaphorical wrists together on the internet day after day.
I'm still trying to figure out what in the heck 7.0 did to my system. Before the install my system hadn't crashed, bogged down, nothing in over a year. Now suddenly the firewire is dead on it, my iPod isn't recognized by the system at all, not even by the update app from their website.
Apple is deleting posts off their discussion forum by the hundreds, all from people just asking for help to get it working again. This update has done nothing to fix this problem for me so essentially the iPod I spent nearly 500$ on is worthless, Apple won't help me on the matter at all.
I'm glad some people aren't having issues. I've been using OSX since release, bought every update, never had an issue till now. I used to post here telling everyone how great my situation was while others complained. Now that I'm in their shoes, it's pretty shitty.
Apple is a gem of company when things go right, but when they go wrong, watch out. I've never felt so disrespected in my life when dealing with a corporation.
I am also a horrid typist (long story). That said I've seen a really sharp decline in the writing ability of kids over the last 5 years. My niece for example is now starting school at a JC in her area and can barely form a coherent sentence. My mother forwarded some of her emails to me to get my opinion on her writing and how she could have graduated high school. I was quite literally shocked. She spends all day IM'ing and text messaging her little heart out.
Writing is a lot like math. The more you do it the better you are at it. When the vast majority of kids do nothing but IM shorthand all day long their ability to communicate will be hindered. We don't need a study to tell us this. It's common sense.
Ask all the people who type all day long how their handwriting is. Same basic premise at work. If you don't use it you lose it.
Even a 1% pull back on the market would be drastic and a major setback to a great many people and nations as a whole. I'm done arguing the point with you. I'm afraid common sense and rationality went out the window when you put on the tin foil hat.
Removing oil or even reducing it's use will lead to massive unemployment in the oil industry, rising costs of energy meaning higher costs to consumers for ALL goods from clothes to food because shipping those goods will still mean trucking them across country and across oceans. When prices get higher, companies cut back on employees, consumers stop purchasing goods, companies go under etc etc etc.
This is basic economics, however being the typical narrow sighted eco-hippie, I can see how all this would go right over your head. Perhaps you would enjoy paying 20 dollars for a box of cereal. I think most people would rather pass on that.