I've also read, though, that children quite often use verb forms that adults just don't - e.g. "runned"; and that this often comes after they've used "run" correctly - and the theory that I read was that children start to work out that to create the past tense you put "ed" on the end. Which, as we know, generally works. It's just they haven't worked out when it doesn't.
I'm not sure if that's all children, or just some of them. I've not got any, but do have a lot of nephews / nieces - and it seems that some do use "runned" and some don't seem to.
As I understand it, it doesn't compare email addresses, it uses a Facebook cookie. So, if you're logged into Facebook at the time, or you don't clear your cookies once you no longer need them, then it can tell. The site has to install a small bit of code which creates the cookie. I'm not entirely sure if Firefox etc. sees them as 3rd party cookies or not.
The suggestion that others have made of blocking/facebook.com/beacon/* would seem a good way to go as far as I can tell. There are also programmes (e.g. Spyblocker) that would let you do that if you're an IE user, rather than a Firefox one. (And, I think that Opera lets you do it in the browser.
So, there are ways around it.
What annoys me, and from what I've seen, a lot of Facebook users, is that it's opt out on a site by site basis, unless you happen to know a lot about how it works. Which the average Facebook user doesn't, and while there are arguments that all internet users should be aware of all these tricks, I, personally, think that it's not really very fair of Facebook to work on the assumption that many don't know how to avoid it.
You seem to have much cheaper electricity in the US than in the UK!
I've just checked with a site (uswitch) that helps you find the cheapest supplier... the prices they are quoting (for the cheapest) are:
Units 17.85p per kWh (about 34 c)
Units above 728 kWh p.a 8.07p per kWh
(That's with no standing charge - some companies charge a bit less, but then have a standing charge)
(We also have very few areas with things like the Housing Associations you are talking about. Amazing how the two countries differ)
My University has the same policy... work automatically becomes property of the Uni (UK).
We use Mydropbox - and I've had a look at the FAQ and for staff it states:
"Are papers that I/my students submit added to some common database?
No. The papers are added to your institution's database which cannot be accessed by anyone except for other faculty members from your institution and only in case their students plagiarize from your students' papers or vice versa. If you do not want the papers to be added even to your institution's database, you can mark all your Assignments as "Drafts" (see manual) - Drafts are added to your private database only."http://www.mydropbox.com/faq.htm
Looking at the Turnitin webpages, it does seem that all essays are added to the same database, but there may be settings I can't see without having an account.
So, it's only internally that papers can be compared (and, if staff want, they can delete some/ all submissions). I'm not sure about the way that the Universities that you're all involved with, but at my uni it's standard for copies of work to be retained. If staff are teaching the same unit the following year, it's entirely possible that they'd recognise an essay... this just makes checking easier. There is then the issue of the same essay in a single cohort... did the first knowingly allow the second to copy - did they work co-operatively throughout the whole process? Did the second bully the first into handing over the essay. Clearly there are different issues to be tackled in all of this.
There are some issues re. checking all submissions - as others have said, perhaps it's better to assume innocence and submit material - which is more akin to the UK method of only doing breath tests if your driving is erratic. There are other countries where they breath test everyone driving down a particular route (I've seen that in Australia).
Allowing students to submit copies I think is essential - students can then hopefully realise when they have inadvertently copied work - and then cite it accurately.
At a guess, your user was starting in the forum (e.g. a websearch took them right there). They mayn't have noticed that the home page of the forum isn't the home page of the site, and so wondered where to download the apps from.
There's a forum that I use regularly (IT support), as the contents are regularly updated - it's forum pages that come up when you google, rather than the home page. A lot of people don't even know that the home page exists.
So, rather than the users being dense, or you having designed your site badly, perhaps it's just that search engines do a really good job of the forum, so users arrive there & don't realise that there's more.
I can't find your forum - so don't know if you've got a link on the forum pages to "Downloads" - but, have you seen the way that Spyblocker forums work (http://www.spyblocker-software.com) - they're off line at present, but basically, if you've ended up on the home page then there's a link to the forums. If you end up directly on a forum page, then they've got forums that are called "Downloads" - which redirect you back to the home page in case you didn't get to the home page first. At least, that's what they're doing now, not sure about what they'll be doing when they've redone them!
I don't see why the size of the country needs to make a difference... like others, I was surprised that there aren't as many home shopping services in the US as there are in the UK.
Those that work in the UK are based on national supermarket chains, which I'm sure that you have - you just enter your post code & they tell you if they deliver to your area. Then you can join. I'd have thought that there are chains with a big enough coverage area to make it worth while...
What is this bizarre compulsion to brand a random selection of software development activities as if they were all key elements of some elaborate Master Plan?
Not really wanting to pick on your comment in particular, Starfish, as many others have said similar things; however, I'm wondering how many who are commenting on this article have read it?
Alexander starts out by saying that Web 2.0 isn't really that new... the term is often applied to a heterogeneous mix of relatively familiar and also very emergent technologies. The former may appear as very much "Web 1.0" and the latter may be seen as too evanescent to be relied on for serious informatics work
He goes on to add:
The idea [of social software] dates as far back as the 1960s...
What his article does, from my reading, is to look at the applications of this in education - a very different field from business. In education, we want users to see as many different view points as possible, so that they can base their own decisions on many view points; as happens here on slashdot, those that read, think & add to the debate far out number the flamers. Given that not all educators will be familiar with services such as Flikr, MySpace, Tag Clouds (Other than maybe something that the education authorities aren't that keen on students using), then it's important to have the educational uses of them pointed out.
I think it's a useful article & one worth reading, though probably less by Slashdotters, than by your friends who are educators.
I think that's because it was launched in the UK this morning; it's certainly only the UK Amnesty site; the launch article was in today's Observer (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/amnesty/story/0,,1 784721,00.html and other articles). I didn't know this before reading that article, but Amnesty was originally founded after an article in the Observer in 1961, discussing some Portuguese students that had been arrested for raising a toast to freedom.
Given the international nature of the Internet, you'd have thought that the US based site for Amnesty would have at least had a link to the UK site & its campaign, but they probably didn't think about it!
While I see that others have commented that online campaigns don't always have much of an impact, I suspect that they are using the online as a start; and hoping that people will get more involved locally, with letter campaigns etc.
As to the "why info", I was going to guess that irrepressible.org was already taken, but it doesn't seem to be. So, not sure why they've gone for info - unless it's because they really just want to have info there & then get people to their local Amnesty.org sites to do something other than provide information to them. Dunno!
I find myself more often than not browsing the internet, playing with my computer settings, etc, rather than taking notes. And it's the same on all the other computers in the room; people are instant messaging, checking penny arcade, but rarely just taking notes.
Does that mean that you think you shouldn't really, or that you only do it when you already know the subject matter (and if you had pen/paper you'd be play noughts & crosses with your neighbour/ doing the crossword?
The main drawback that I can see is that for many students they can type faster than they can handwrite (& often without looking at the page). They can also read it afterwards. I'd have thought that those who aren't able to summarise what she's saying when they are typing are just as likely to be unable to summarise what she's saying when they're handwriting.
The sound of typing and the distraction caused by students dashing round in the middle of a class looking for a power plug would be more of a reason to ban them to me.
Spoonkfork said: Books can sit on a bookshelf for everyone including myself to see.
Books smell like books.
Books can give you paper cuts.
Books can be borrowed and shared.
Books can be marked up (albeit with poor handwriting recognition;)
Books can be thrown across the room.
Books can be burned.
and... books can be dried out on the radiator after you've dropped them in the bath!
Yes, I think that the statistic that I read (in the UK) is that a profoundly deaf adult (who's never had hearing), is about age 8-9 - which is I guess about the same.
Having said that, the average reading age of the average adult isn't that great - for example http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/3166967.s tm cites a study that say "millions of adults do not have the skills of the average 11 year old" (implying that it's because their skill set is lower, not higher!).
So, certainly in the UK, though profoundly deaf adults aren't always proficient readers, there's a significant proportion of adults who aren't deaf, who also aren't great at reading.
Hence, speech or signing benefits is likely to benefit more people than text.
I suspect that the numbers of ASL users who can't read is small. However, as sign languages are linguistically very different from written languages, many profoundly deaf signers aren't good readers. (To start with, we have a lot of pretty meaningless words in text... a... the... etc)
So, signing makes it much easier to get the richness of speech. When you textualise speech, you have to cut words out, and loose a lot of nuances. (Have a look at the closed captions on the news sometime).
Slashdot Mirror
I've also read, though, that children quite often use verb forms that adults just don't - e.g. "runned"; and that this often comes after they've used "run" correctly - and the theory that I read was that children start to work out that to create the past tense you put "ed" on the end. Which, as we know, generally works. It's just they haven't worked out when it doesn't.
I'm not sure if that's all children, or just some of them. I've not got any, but do have a lot of nephews / nieces - and it seems that some do use "runned" and some don't seem to.
As I understand it, it doesn't compare email addresses, it uses a Facebook cookie. So, if you're logged into Facebook at the time, or you don't clear your cookies once you no longer need them, then it can tell.
/facebook.com/beacon/* would seem a good way to go as far as I can tell. There are also programmes (e.g. Spyblocker) that would let you do that if you're an IE user, rather than a Firefox one. (And, I think that Opera lets you do it in the browser.
The site has to install a small bit of code which creates the cookie.
I'm not entirely sure if Firefox etc. sees them as 3rd party cookies or not.
The suggestion that others have made of blocking
So, there are ways around it.
What annoys me, and from what I've seen, a lot of Facebook users, is that it's opt out on a site by site basis, unless you happen to know a lot about how it works. Which the average Facebook user doesn't, and while there are arguments that all internet users should be aware of all these tricks, I, personally, think that it's not really very fair of Facebook to work on the assumption that many don't know how to avoid it.
You seem to have much cheaper electricity in the US than in the UK! I've just checked with a site (uswitch) that helps you find the cheapest supplier ... the prices they are quoting (for the cheapest) are:
Units 17.85p per kWh (about 34 c)
Units above 728 kWh p.a 8.07p per kWh
(That's with no standing charge - some companies charge a bit less, but then have a standing charge)
(We also have very few areas with things like the Housing Associations you are talking about. Amazing how the two countries differ)
My University has the same policy ... work automatically becomes property of the Uni (UK).
We use Mydropbox - and I've had a look at the FAQ and for staff it states:
"Are papers that I/my students submit added to some common database?
No. The papers are added to your institution's database which cannot be accessed by anyone except for other faculty members from your institution and only in case their students plagiarize from your students' papers or vice versa. If you do not want the papers to be added even to your institution's database, you can mark all your Assignments as "Drafts" (see manual) - Drafts are added to your private database only."
http://www.mydropbox.com/faq.htm
Looking at the Turnitin webpages, it does seem that all essays are added to the same database, but there may be settings I can't see without having an account.
So, it's only internally that papers can be compared (and, if staff want, they can delete some/ all submissions). I'm not sure about the way that the Universities that you're all involved with, but at my uni it's standard for copies of work to be retained. If staff are teaching the same unit the following year, it's entirely possible that they'd recognise an essay ... this just makes checking easier. There is then the issue of the same essay in a single cohort ... did the first knowingly allow the second to copy - did they work co-operatively throughout the whole process? Did the second bully the first into handing over the essay. Clearly there are different issues to be tackled in all of this.
There are some issues re. checking all submissions - as others have said, perhaps it's better to assume innocence and submit material - which is more akin to the UK method of only doing breath tests if your driving is erratic. There are other countries where they breath test everyone driving down a particular route (I've seen that in Australia).
Allowing students to submit copies I think is essential - students can then hopefully realise when they have inadvertently copied work - and then cite it accurately.
At a guess, your user was starting in the forum (e.g. a websearch took them right there). They mayn't have noticed that the home page of the forum isn't the home page of the site, and so wondered where to download the apps from. There's a forum that I use regularly (IT support), as the contents are regularly updated - it's forum pages that come up when you google, rather than the home page. A lot of people don't even know that the home page exists. So, rather than the users being dense, or you having designed your site badly, perhaps it's just that search engines do a really good job of the forum, so users arrive there & don't realise that there's more. I can't find your forum - so don't know if you've got a link on the forum pages to "Downloads" - but, have you seen the way that Spyblocker forums work (http://www.spyblocker-software.com) - they're off line at present, but basically, if you've ended up on the home page then there's a link to the forums. If you end up directly on a forum page, then they've got forums that are called "Downloads" - which redirect you back to the home page in case you didn't get to the home page first. At least, that's what they're doing now, not sure about what they'll be doing when they've redone them!
I don't see why the size of the country needs to make a difference ... like others, I was surprised that there aren't as many home shopping services in the US as there are in the UK.
Those that work in the UK are based on national supermarket chains, which I'm sure that you have - you just enter your post code & they tell you if they deliver to your area. Then you can join. I'd have thought that there are chains with a big enough coverage area to make it worth while ...
Not really wanting to pick on your comment in particular, Starfish, as many others have said similar things; however, I'm wondering how many who are commenting on this article have read it? Alexander starts out by saying that Web 2.0 isn't really that new
the term is often applied to a heterogeneous mix of relatively familiar and also very emergent technologies. The former may appear as very much "Web 1.0" and the latter may be seen as too evanescent to be relied on for serious informatics work
He goes on to add: The idea [of social software] dates as far back as the 1960s
What his article does, from my reading, is to look at the applications of this in education - a very different field from business. In education, we want users to see as many different view points as possible, so that they can base their own decisions on many view points; as happens here on slashdot, those that read, think & add to the debate far out number the flamers. Given that not all educators will be familiar with services such as Flikr, MySpace, Tag Clouds (Other than maybe something that the education authorities aren't that keen on students using), then it's important to have the educational uses of them pointed out.
I think it's a useful article & one worth reading, though probably less by Slashdotters, than by your friends who are educators.
I think that's because it was launched in the UK this morning; it's certainly only the UK Amnesty site; the launch article was in today's Observer (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/amnesty/story/0,,1 784721,00.html and other articles). I didn't know this before reading that article, but Amnesty was originally founded after an article in the Observer in 1961, discussing some Portuguese students that had been arrested for raising a toast to freedom.
Given the international nature of the Internet, you'd have thought that the US based site for Amnesty would have at least had a link to the UK site & its campaign, but they probably didn't think about it!
While I see that others have commented that online campaigns don't always have much of an impact, I suspect that they are using the online as a start; and hoping that people will get more involved locally, with letter campaigns etc.
As to the "why info", I was going to guess that irrepressible.org was already taken, but it doesn't seem to be. So, not sure why they've gone for info - unless it's because they really just want to have info there & then get people to their local Amnesty.org sites to do something other than provide information to them. Dunno!
And, many (including me!) people who have an HTML enabled client, disable the HTML facilities.
I find myself more often than not browsing the internet, playing with my computer settings, etc, rather than taking notes. And it's the same on all the other computers in the room; people are instant messaging, checking penny arcade, but rarely just taking notes. Does that mean that you think you shouldn't really, or that you only do it when you already know the subject matter (and if you had pen/paper you'd be play noughts & crosses with your neighbour/ doing the crossword? The main drawback that I can see is that for many students they can type faster than they can handwrite (& often without looking at the page). They can also read it afterwards. I'd have thought that those who aren't able to summarise what she's saying when they are typing are just as likely to be unable to summarise what she's saying when they're handwriting. The sound of typing and the distraction caused by students dashing round in the middle of a class looking for a power plug would be more of a reason to ban them to me.
Spoonkfork said: ;) ... books can be dried out on the radiator after you've dropped them in the bath!
Books can sit on a bookshelf for everyone including myself to see.
Books smell like books.
Books can give you paper cuts.
Books can be borrowed and shared.
Books can be marked up (albeit with poor handwriting recognition
Books can be thrown across the room.
Books can be burned.
and
And, if you are just using a digitiser, rather than a touch screen, then you can put a coffee cup on it & it won't register.
Yes, I think that the statistic that I read (in the UK) is that a profoundly deaf adult (who's never had hearing), is about age 8-9 - which is I guess about the same.
s tm cites a study that say "millions of adults do not have the skills of the average 11 year old" (implying that it's because their skill set is lower, not higher!).
Having said that, the average reading age of the average adult isn't that great - for example http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/3166967.
So, certainly in the UK, though profoundly deaf adults aren't always proficient readers, there's a significant proportion of adults who aren't deaf, who also aren't great at reading.
Hence, speech or signing benefits is likely to benefit more people than text.
I suspect that the numbers of ASL users who can't read is small. However, as sign languages are linguistically very different from written languages, many profoundly deaf signers aren't good readers. (To start with, we have a lot of pretty meaningless words in text ... a ... the ... etc)
So, signing makes it much easier to get the richness of speech. When you textualise speech, you have to cut words out, and loose a lot of nuances. (Have a look at the closed captions on the news sometime).