You probably don't need a supercomputer for this one: the classic Kermack-McKendrick epidemic model, which is a just a simple system of nonlinear differential equations -- http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Kermack-McKendrickModel.html -- is probably sufficient.
(Yeah, like anybody studies differential equations anymore...lazy young whippersnappers with your supercomputers...I just hope the mortality curve on this pandemic follows the 1918 model, har, har, har...and get off my lawn...)
There is a whole lot of recent psychological research that shows that humans (though not chimpanzees) have a strongly developed sense of fairness. In particular, if they see someone trying to get more than they deserve, they will extract revenge (Google "ultimatum game" for details).
Now, consider the situation of the RIAA and MPAA
The marginal cost of distributing the content -- that is, the cost of one additional unit -- is very close to zero, so any gains from that may be seen as unfair.
There is no violence involved in the "theft"
The victim of the "theft" is not an individual but a corporation, an abstract entity that exists only as a legal convenience. These folks aren't mugging grandmothers.
There is a long and elaborately developed popular wisdom -- which may well have considerable basis in reality -- that most of the money in the entertainment industry goes to assorted corporate sleazeballs who spend their lives ripping off artists, so the individuals truly responsible for the creative content get ripped off either way. Notice that we have a writers' strike? And happy campers who just love industry contracts such as Prince?
None of which favors the industry in the "fairness" category. Add the fact that unlike the Ultimatum Game, the individuals inflicting the "punishment" actually derive some small benefit from their actions, and the likelihood that the RIAA and MPAA will succeed in the long run is pretty close to nil, though like any wounded monster they will do plenty of damage in the process of going out of existance. But similarly, the idea that the demise of IP -- or more specifically, IP as it has been defined in just the past ten years or so -- means the collapse of civilization as we know it is equally misguided.
hmm, most player pianos I'm familiar with aren't full of pulsating liquids and big squishy things -- some of which are rather important -- that move around when you touch them. Not clear the analogy works that well unless there are plans to freeze the patient solid before proceeding.
we used cuneiform on clay tablets. And the sexagesimal numbering system (base-60, but meanwhile cue puns...). Decimal is for wimps. You insensitive clods.
Anyone who thinks that the U.S. media back down from anything offensive to Moslems has clearly never listened to talk radio or read conservative political commentators. These folks would have a great deal of dead air and missing prose if they couldn't offend Moslems in ever more creative ways (suggesting nuking Mecca is a popular one, for example...)
But meanwhile, I completely agree with much of the previous commentary: this strip is making fun on two individuals, and is not remotely comparable to the Danish cartoons. Most Moslems would find it funny and the rest, well, some people don't find anything funny. And the stereotyping is mild compared to what the strip has done, for example, with New Age hippies, Leisure Suit Larry lounge lizards, penguins, and so forth.
[Usually not relevant but despite the Slashdot moniker, I'm neither Arab nor Moslem, though I've lived for a while in the Middle East. I just happen to like the theories of the dude I've stolen the name from and he's like, sort of dead...]
Various research units of the Dept of Defense have been funding this sort of thing since the 1940s, with a lot of serious mathematical work on game theory and, a bit later, a lot of computer simulation work with systems dynamics. And those are just the big topics; there are plenty of little ones as well. They backed off a lot of this in the 1980s, partly because of a feeling that the methods had been pushed as far as they could go, partly in response to Reagan-era ideologues who wanted to remove anything remotely resembling a fact or falsifiable theory from policy making. In the last five years DARPA has gotten back into this with a wide variety of initiatives, though to date results have been decidedly mixed.
Bottom line is that people in the quantitative social sciences have been doing this sort of thing mathematically for more than a century, and with computers pretty much since computers became available. The guy may have a new angle -- though has likely, just hasn't done a good review of the literature.
Thanks -- very useful information. Okay, so they can track in the dorms now; that's an improvement. About five years ago there was a notorious incident where a machine(s) somewhere on the dorm network got hijacked and started generating massive quantities of spam. Their response: shut down the entire network (acutally, I think via routers they actually isolated it to one or two of those huge dorms on Daisy Hill (hey, this is an internal Jayhawk conversation right, even if this is Slashdot?) and just shut down those). This was the last week of classes when people were working on term papers, and NTS couldn't understand why people were upset. The system you describe is probably a response to that.
Someone earlier in this thread mentioned labs: in the very early days of P2P, machines in one of our labs were being used to download huge amounts of music before this was finally noticed (and stopped) due to the load on the internal networks. Guilty party was a grad student, I should add. I'd be curious as to whether any of that is still going on.
Truly scary. But they passed out ranges of IP numbers like candy, so for a while (even today) there were lots of vacant ones, so it worked, sort of. Apparently there was some sort of animosity almost to the level of a blood feud between network services, who put in the wires, and the folks that managed (if that's the right word...) the software side, plus some really weird pricing situations. We still don't have wireless on most of the campus, for example, because the network guys don't want multiple machines accessing a single port, as they get paid by the port. But people go ahead and install wireless nodes anyway, sometimes intelligently, sometimes not...anarchy.
We've suggested various things over the years [we being assorted folks, faculty, programmers, lab directors, etc], had some excellent outside assessments that confirm everything is as messed up as we think, etc, and basically nothing ever happened. Never clear why, though it is widely suggested that the fact that authority our IT is split between librarians and wire-jockeys, with no one who has any formal training and experience in modern (post-1990) networking anywhere in a position where they can enforce decisions. Leads to quite a bit of turnover by technically-competent people as well, particularly with plenty of good IT jobs an hour or less away in Kansas City. But we've got a new Provost who eats glass bottles for breakfast and is said to find the current IT situation here appalling, so I think things will improve.
This supposes that KU can associate a specific IP number with a known machine. Unless practice has improved a lot, they can't -- the allocation of IP numbers was a total, decentralized mess for a number of years, with nothing even remotely resembling a central registry. In my department, the "IP registry" consisted of a piece of notebook paper taped to a file cabinet in a supply closet. The situation may have improved over the last six months -- I vaguely recall someone wandering around systematically recording these for faculty machines -- but I don't know how it is for student machines.
For years (again, I haven't tried this lately), the standard technique for people who needed to get things done was a take an existing IP, and then just keep changing the last three digits until something worked. Yes, I know this is appalling practice; gives you some sense of the level of sophistication we've been working with. As Molly Ivins used to say, proof-positive that humans descended from monkeys, and damn recently at that, the former Board of Education notwithstanding.
Leaving open the possibility that KU's brave and principled stand is in fact merely an acknowledgment that they couldn't deliver the letters even if they had to, short of breaking down every door on campus.
Again, as a previous poster has noted, things have begun to improve over the last year, but the place was an IT zoo for the better part of a decade.
The IT "services" at KU are clueless in general, not just with this, and they consistently appear to have mistaken their windowless cubicles for Olympus/Valhalla. Over the last ten years they have periodically gone through phases of issuing draconian policies, only to find them unenforceable. My favorite (though by no means only) example was a policy that anyone caught writing down a password (passwords, of course, were required to be changed every 42 minutes, contain Mayan glyphs, etc) could be fired. Never enforced, much to the disappointment of local lawyers. They went through another phase of barging into faculty offices and imaging disks, except they would get the office numbers incorrect and leave the faculty member with an inoperable machine. And sometimes really picked the wrong office... The individuals involved are no longer in our employ, as the saying goes (and were last seen staked to the ground near an anthill, I believe...)
Two or three mistaken enforcements of this -- yes, that will happen with near certainty given past experience -- and the effect of this will be simply to drive students out of the dorms. Someone with an ounce of clue (necessarily, outside of ITS) will figure that it is a whole lot cheaper to stonewall the RIAA on most cases than to deal with the cost of empty rooms, the policy will be quietly dropped, and IT will go in search of something else they can screw up.
First, this sort of exercise is done all of the time in quantitative political science; the main difference is that most universities don't issue press releases on it. Check out http://polmeth.wustl.edu/ to get a sense of what is currently being done.
Second, the zillion comments that an in-sample test is not a forecast are correct but the field has been aware of this for, oh, maybe a century or two. Sorry guys, prior art. That said, what an in-sample tests does provide is a lower bound on the possible accuracy: no statistical model is going to provide 80% accuracy predicting a table of random numbers, for example. As a rule-of-thumb in these things, the out-of-sample forecast will be about 10% to 20% less accurate than the in-sample -- no theoretical reason this should be true, but I've seen it a lot.
War does change and yes, we have noticed that there has been a shift to fourth generation warfare, asymmetrical warfare, whatever you want to call it, and much of the current professional literature reflects this. However, this has to be balanced by institutional inertia, which is huge, particularly among major powers (witness the very slow rate of adaptation by the US in Iraq versus the very rapid rate of innovation by the insurgency). That still gives you predictability.
Finally, $age Publications are friggin' parasites; you can be darn sure that the author is not making a penny off of this, and the sooner we shift to open-access models for government-financed publications, the better
If my memory serves me correctly, William Burrough's is actually *buried* in St. Louis. But he lived quietly, and well protected by the community, for many years in Lawrence. We had Langston Hughes as well, though he got out of here as quickly as he could.
Yeah, Phelps, BOE creationists, Kline (who is also abusing his *current* office as an appointed DA in Johnson County) -- I'm not saying Kansas (or some percentage of Kansans) aren't asking for some of this. But the extent to which Kansas has become *the* symbol of yahooism gets a bit wearing at times and, for example, one could argue that in many ways, Colorado is as bad or worse (their politicians are much crazier than ours in general but they don't have Phelps, and they do have mountains and ski resorts...)
Well, keeps the place from getting too crowded, and the housing prices down, and one can get direct flights to SFO for $300 or so round-trip, and at this moment I'm writing from Monterey...
Thanks. That link was on the Middle East Studies Association web site for a while, and I would have posted it, but couldn't find it at the time. Actually sent them 400 kilos of political science textbooks myself about two months ago. My grad students helped me pack them, and were particularly interested in getting them a nice collection on dissent, collective action, revolution, etc.
There are a whole lot of libraries (or what's left of them) in Iraq that got burned involunarily in the "stuff happens" period following the U.S. invasion that would probably love to have a bunch of material in English -- "I for one welcome our new English-speaking overlords" -- and if this guy wants to make a statement, why not just load all of the stuff in a cargo container and ship it over there?
I've actually been to this place. Unlike most/.-ers, I live in the benighted state of Kansas and this place is just two blocks from the University of Kansas Medical Center, where I've spent more time than I would have liked... It's quite a groovy little bookstore -- reminds me a lot of City Lights in San Francisco. Yes, even in Kansas we know about things like City Lights. We also walk on two legs, but only because the Chinese invented the wheelborrow. About 4,000 years after Creation.
In principle, it is a bookstore well worth supporting. But in light of all of the folks in the world who would love to use these books to improve their English, this book-burning gesture seems misguided. To say nothing of reinforcing the view of Kansans as more or less like Neanderthals, but with less intellectual sophistication. Though truth be told, this bookstore is a full 50 meters on the Missouri side of the state line, so don't blame Kansas. Please. Now excuse me while I go club something for dinner.
I wonder if this ability to empathize with non-human entities carried significant survival advantages. See poor starving little wild paleo-kitty, give paleo-kitty a bit of food, paleo-kitty sooner or later (ten minutes, max) starts hanging around, pretending affection, but also eating mice (an exceedingly useful function for cats if one happens to live in a rural environment) who otherwise would be eating into my carefully gathered grain supply.
I understand dogs also have some utility, but my cat couldn't come up with any.
So, it gets hard-wired -- pay attention to the feelings of those critters who might help you out -- and it is simple to see that extended to machines. Works the other way as well with machines -- is there any \.-er out there (programmers, at least) who hasn't smacked a machine at least once?
TFA seems remarkably unconcerned about the fact that dense concentrations of algae require a continuous supply of water, which is not required for soybeans, canola, etc. Add to this the proposal that these algae farms are going to be in the desert -- an environment not noted for concentrations of water -- and one wonders how all of this is going to work on a large scale. Perhaps we could scumify [technical term...] a few of the more notorious human-engineered desert lakes -- Mead, Powell, Nasser, Chad, and there are probably others -- but one isn't going to immediately make Death Valley or the Gobi into the Saudi Arabia of scum-fed biofuels.
Moses would have happily run the service on Sunday; it was Saturday he would have skipped. Hmmm, except he didn't even have those laws yet, and when he did, Version 1.0 crashed (literally) and only Version 2.0 was widely marketed. Success of the product is still debated.
Is there any other business on the planet—other than loan-sharking perhaps—where a 40% margin would be considered a failure? Your local grocer is probably surviving on about one-tenth that margin.
Most of the comments here are from folks who obviously have never used the system (UTFS: use the friendly software). I have, and in fact I'm currently in the process of getting on the black list of our Provost who is trying to stop using it at our school, presumably at the request of some wealthy alum whose coke-snorting little darling was caught plagiarizing by TurnItIn.
The most salient points are:
1. TurnItIn's overall score is the least interesting aspect: in fact a well-done paper with lots of [cited] sources will usually have a high score. TurnItIn identifies the exact text, and it is that pattern of useage (notably, is it properly attributed?) that is key. One of the most common plagiarism methods, in fact, is to quote a page or more of material, attribute some fraction of it, but then claim the rest was your own work. One has to look at the specific text to pick up this.
2. References to previously turned-in papers provide a link to the professor whose class that original paper was submitted from, not just some anonymous "we have this somewhere in our data base." Most of the various scenarios presented in these comments probably wouldn't happen at all, or at best are very, very unlikely.
3. At the college level at least much of the plagiarism comes from material that is on the web for perfectly legitimate reasons rather than from term paper mills. [To be sure, that's probably more the case in my field, international studies, than it would be for someone writing a paper on Moby Dick: "Like, there's this whale, see, and a guy named Ishmail..."] To take an actual case, a student was writing a paper on the expansion of the European Union, and about a third of the paper was taken (without attribution) from a report by some think-tank in Belgium (in English...).
4. TurnItIn has been challenged ever since its beginning on IP grounds, and it has won those cases. Keep in mind that copyright law has exceptions for educational use -- you can't just take your common sense notions of copyright as it applies to, say, Bob Dylan's lyrics and assume that translates directly into the educational domain. IANAL and don't know the details, but the fact that TurnItIn has won the challenges suggests (or rather, establishes) that the law is on it's side.
The group of individuals that TurnItIn really protects are the honest students, who in my experience are 90 - 95% in any given class (I rarely catch more than one or two students in a class of 50, and by the way, the proportion has been going down as use of TurnItIn has gone up). (The figures one sees about 60% - 80% of students cheating are self-reports of ever cheating, not the percentage who cheat all the time.) The web's advantages to students far, far out-weigh its disadvantages, but TurnItIn goes a long way in compensating for one of those major disadvantages
Yes, they are total morons (actually, the board is also fairly corrupt in the now-standard Republican cronyism mode) and this is doing a huge amount of damage to the state. All I can say is that these idiots were elected via stealth campaigns run out of fundamentalist churches with bumper-sticker theology and in off-year elections with low turnouts.
Well, what can I say. This actually isn't a bad place to live -- wide open spaces, low cost of living, easy access to the East and West Coasts (if you live near the KC airport), and left to their own devices (i.e. when not under the influence of utterly whacked-out self-proclaimed Christians who have a remarkably selective reading of scripture), Kansans tend to be quite nice and tolerant. So you'all are welcome to move out here, though if you have kids, I can certainly imagine why you might want to stay away.
I'm not sure how reassuring this is, but keep in mind that most reports indicate that the FBI is fabulously inept at analyzing the information that they have already, and this is merely going to further overwhelm them. To be sure, there are genuine civil liberties issues here, but I'd be far more concerned if they were investing the same resources doing things the old-fashioned way (infiltrating groups, hanging out taking notes, reading mail, tapping phones, etc)
Slashdot Mirror
(Yeah, like anybody studies differential equations anymore...lazy young whippersnappers with your supercomputers...I just hope the mortality curve on this pandemic follows the 1918 model, har, har, har...and get off my lawn...)
Now, consider the situation of the RIAA and MPAA
- The marginal cost of distributing the content -- that is, the cost of one additional unit -- is very close to zero, so any gains from that may be seen as unfair.
- There is no violence involved in the "theft"
- The victim of the "theft" is not an individual but a corporation, an abstract entity that exists only as a legal convenience. These folks aren't mugging grandmothers.
- There is a long and elaborately developed popular wisdom -- which may well have considerable basis in reality -- that most of the money in the entertainment industry goes to assorted corporate sleazeballs who spend their lives ripping off artists, so the individuals truly responsible for the creative content get ripped off either way. Notice that we have a writers' strike? And happy campers who just love industry contracts such as Prince?
None of which favors the industry in the "fairness" category. Add the fact that unlike the Ultimatum Game, the individuals inflicting the "punishment" actually derive some small benefit from their actions, and the likelihood that the RIAA and MPAA will succeed in the long run is pretty close to nil, though like any wounded monster they will do plenty of damage in the process of going out of existance. But similarly, the idea that the demise of IP -- or more specifically, IP as it has been defined in just the past ten years or so -- means the collapse of civilization as we know it is equally misguided.hmm, most player pianos I'm familiar with aren't full of pulsating liquids and big squishy things -- some of which are rather important -- that move around when you touch them. Not clear the analogy works that well unless there are plans to freeze the patient solid before proceeding.
we used cuneiform on clay tablets. And the sexagesimal numbering system (base-60, but meanwhile cue puns...). Decimal is for wimps. You insensitive clods.
Anyone who thinks that the U.S. media back down from anything offensive to Moslems has clearly never listened to talk radio or read conservative political commentators. These folks would have a great deal of dead air and missing prose if they couldn't offend Moslems in ever more creative ways (suggesting nuking Mecca is a popular one, for example...)
But meanwhile, I completely agree with much of the previous commentary: this strip is making fun on two individuals, and is not remotely comparable to the Danish cartoons. Most Moslems would find it funny and the rest, well, some people don't find anything funny. And the stereotyping is mild compared to what the strip has done, for example, with New Age hippies, Leisure Suit Larry lounge lizards, penguins, and so forth.
[Usually not relevant but despite the Slashdot moniker, I'm neither Arab nor Moslem, though I've lived for a while in the Middle East. I just happen to like the theories of the dude I've stolen the name from and he's like, sort of dead...]
Details on the above referenced theory are here
For those of us who already put up with endless Dorothy and Toto jokes, be afraid, be very afraid...
Various research units of the Dept of Defense have been funding this sort of thing since the 1940s, with a lot of serious mathematical work on game theory and, a bit later, a lot of computer simulation work with systems dynamics. And those are just the big topics; there are plenty of little ones as well. They backed off a lot of this in the 1980s, partly because of a feeling that the methods had been pushed as far as they could go, partly in response to Reagan-era ideologues who wanted to remove anything remotely resembling a fact or falsifiable theory from policy making. In the last five years DARPA has gotten back into this with a wide variety of initiatives, though to date results have been decidedly mixed.
Bottom line is that people in the quantitative social sciences have been doing this sort of thing mathematically for more than a century, and with computers pretty much since computers became available. The guy may have a new angle -- though has likely, just hasn't done a good review of the literature.
Thanks -- very useful information. Okay, so they can track in the dorms now; that's an improvement. About five years ago there was a notorious incident where a machine(s) somewhere on the dorm network got hijacked and started generating massive quantities of spam. Their response: shut down the entire network (acutally, I think via routers they actually isolated it to one or two of those huge dorms on Daisy Hill (hey, this is an internal Jayhawk conversation right, even if this is Slashdot?) and just shut down those). This was the last week of classes when people were working on term papers, and NTS couldn't understand why people were upset. The system you describe is probably a response to that.
Someone earlier in this thread mentioned labs: in the very early days of P2P, machines in one of our labs were being used to download huge amounts of music before this was finally noticed (and stopped) due to the load on the internal networks. Guilty party was a grad student, I should add. I'd be curious as to whether any of that is still going on.
Truly scary. But they passed out ranges of IP numbers like candy, so for a while (even today) there were lots of vacant ones, so it worked, sort of. Apparently there was some sort of animosity almost to the level of a blood feud between network services, who put in the wires, and the folks that managed (if that's the right word...) the software side, plus some really weird pricing situations. We still don't have wireless on most of the campus, for example, because the network guys don't want multiple machines accessing a single port, as they get paid by the port. But people go ahead and install wireless nodes anyway, sometimes intelligently, sometimes not...anarchy.
We've suggested various things over the years [we being assorted folks, faculty, programmers, lab directors, etc], had some excellent outside assessments that confirm everything is as messed up as we think, etc, and basically nothing ever happened. Never clear why, though it is widely suggested that the fact that authority our IT is split between librarians and wire-jockeys, with no one who has any formal training and experience in modern (post-1990) networking anywhere in a position where they can enforce decisions. Leads to quite a bit of turnover by technically-competent people as well, particularly with plenty of good IT jobs an hour or less away in Kansas City. But we've got a new Provost who eats glass bottles for breakfast and is said to find the current IT situation here appalling, so I think things will improve.
This supposes that KU can associate a specific IP number with a known machine. Unless practice has improved a lot, they can't -- the allocation of IP numbers was a total, decentralized mess for a number of years, with nothing even remotely resembling a central registry. In my department, the "IP registry" consisted of a piece of notebook paper taped to a file cabinet in a supply closet. The situation may have improved over the last six months -- I vaguely recall someone wandering around systematically recording these for faculty machines -- but I don't know how it is for student machines.
For years (again, I haven't tried this lately), the standard technique for people who needed to get things done was a take an existing IP, and then just keep changing the last three digits until something worked. Yes, I know this is appalling practice; gives you some sense of the level of sophistication we've been working with. As Molly Ivins used to say, proof-positive that humans descended from monkeys, and damn recently at that, the former Board of Education notwithstanding.
Leaving open the possibility that KU's brave and principled stand is in fact merely an acknowledgment that they couldn't deliver the letters even if they had to, short of breaking down every door on campus.
Again, as a previous poster has noted, things have begun to improve over the last year, but the place was an IT zoo for the better part of a decade.
Two or three mistaken enforcements of this -- yes, that will happen with near certainty given past experience -- and the effect of this will be simply to drive students out of the dorms. Someone with an ounce of clue (necessarily, outside of ITS) will figure that it is a whole lot cheaper to stonewall the RIAA on most cases than to deal with the cost of empty rooms, the policy will be quietly dropped, and IT will go in search of something else they can screw up.
First, this sort of exercise is done all of the time in quantitative political science; the main difference is that most universities don't issue press releases on it. Check out http://polmeth.wustl.edu/ to get a sense of what is currently being done.
Second, the zillion comments that an in-sample test is not a forecast are correct but the field has been aware of this for, oh, maybe a century or two. Sorry guys, prior art. That said, what an in-sample tests does provide is a lower bound on the possible accuracy: no statistical model is going to provide 80% accuracy predicting a table of random numbers, for example. As a rule-of-thumb in these things, the out-of-sample forecast will be about 10% to 20% less accurate than the in-sample -- no theoretical reason this should be true, but I've seen it a lot.
War does change and yes, we have noticed that there has been a shift to fourth generation warfare, asymmetrical warfare, whatever you want to call it, and much of the current professional literature reflects this. However, this has to be balanced by institutional inertia, which is huge, particularly among major powers (witness the very slow rate of adaptation by the US in Iraq versus the very rapid rate of innovation by the insurgency). That still gives you predictability.
Finally, $age Publications are friggin' parasites; you can be darn sure that the author is not making a penny off of this, and the sooner we shift to open-access models for government-financed publications, the better
If my memory serves me correctly, William Burrough's is actually *buried* in St. Louis. But he lived quietly, and well protected by the community, for many years in Lawrence. We had Langston Hughes as well, though he got out of here as quickly as he could.
Yeah, Phelps, BOE creationists, Kline (who is also abusing his *current* office as an appointed DA in Johnson County) -- I'm not saying Kansas (or some percentage of Kansans) aren't asking for some of this. But the extent to which Kansas has become *the* symbol of yahooism gets a bit wearing at times and, for example, one could argue that in many ways, Colorado is as bad or worse (their politicians are much crazier than ours in general but they don't have Phelps, and they do have mountains and ski resorts...)
Well, keeps the place from getting too crowded, and the housing prices down, and one can get direct flights to SFO for $300 or so round-trip, and at this moment I'm writing from Monterey...
Thanks. That link was on the Middle East Studies Association web site for a while, and I would have posted it, but couldn't find it at the time. Actually sent them 400 kilos of political science textbooks myself about two months ago. My grad students helped me pack them, and were particularly interested in getting them a nice collection on dissent, collective action, revolution, etc.
There are a whole lot of libraries (or what's left of them) in Iraq that got burned involunarily in the "stuff happens" period following the U.S. invasion that would probably love to have a bunch of material in English -- "I for one welcome our new English-speaking overlords" -- and if this guy wants to make a statement, why not just load all of the stuff in a cargo container and ship it over there?
I've actually been to this place. Unlike most /.-ers, I live in the benighted state of Kansas and this place is just two blocks from the University of Kansas Medical Center, where I've spent more time than I would have liked... It's quite a groovy little bookstore -- reminds me a lot of City Lights in San Francisco. Yes, even in Kansas we know about things like City Lights. We also walk on two legs, but only because the Chinese invented the wheelborrow. About 4,000 years after Creation.
In principle, it is a bookstore well worth supporting. But in light of all of the folks in the world who would love to use these books to improve their English, this book-burning gesture seems misguided. To say nothing of reinforcing the view of Kansans as more or less like Neanderthals, but with less intellectual sophistication. Though truth be told, this bookstore is a full 50 meters on the Missouri side of the state line, so don't blame Kansas. Please. Now excuse me while I go club something for dinner.
I wonder if this ability to empathize with non-human entities carried significant survival advantages. See poor starving little wild paleo-kitty, give paleo-kitty a bit of food, paleo-kitty sooner or later (ten minutes, max) starts hanging around, pretending affection, but also eating mice (an exceedingly useful function for cats if one happens to live in a rural environment) who otherwise would be eating into my carefully gathered grain supply.
I understand dogs also have some utility, but my cat couldn't come up with any.
So, it gets hard-wired -- pay attention to the feelings of those critters who might help you out -- and it is simple to see that extended to machines. Works the other way as well with machines -- is there any \.-er out there (programmers, at least) who hasn't smacked a machine at least once?
TFA seems remarkably unconcerned about the fact that dense concentrations of algae require a continuous supply of water, which is not required for soybeans, canola, etc. Add to this the proposal that these algae farms are going to be in the desert -- an environment not noted for concentrations of water -- and one wonders how all of this is going to work on a large scale. Perhaps we could scumify [technical term...] a few of the more notorious human-engineered desert lakes -- Mead, Powell, Nasser, Chad, and there are probably others -- but one isn't going to immediately make Death Valley or the Gobi into the Saudi Arabia of scum-fed biofuels.
Moses would have happily run the service on Sunday; it was Saturday he would have skipped. Hmmm, except he didn't even have those laws yet, and when he did, Version 1.0 crashed (literally) and only Version 2.0 was widely marketed. Success of the product is still debated.
Is there any other business on the planet—other than loan-sharking perhaps—where a 40% margin would be considered a failure? Your local grocer is probably surviving on about one-tenth that margin.
Most of the comments here are from folks who obviously have never used the system (UTFS: use the friendly software). I have, and in fact I'm currently in the process of getting on the black list of our Provost who is trying to stop using it at our school, presumably at the request of some wealthy alum whose coke-snorting little darling was caught plagiarizing by TurnItIn.
The most salient points are:
1. TurnItIn's overall score is the least interesting aspect: in fact a well-done paper with lots of [cited] sources will usually have a high score. TurnItIn identifies the exact text, and it is that pattern of useage (notably, is it properly attributed?) that is key. One of the most common plagiarism methods, in fact, is to quote a page or more of material, attribute some fraction of it, but then claim the rest was your own work. One has to look at the specific text to pick up this.
2. References to previously turned-in papers provide a link to the professor whose class that original paper was submitted from, not just some anonymous "we have this somewhere in our data base." Most of the various scenarios presented in these comments probably wouldn't happen at all, or at best are very, very unlikely.
3. At the college level at least much of the plagiarism comes from material that is on the web for perfectly legitimate reasons rather than from term paper mills. [To be sure, that's probably more the case in my field, international studies, than it would be for someone writing a paper on Moby Dick: "Like, there's this whale, see, and a guy named Ishmail..."] To take an actual case, a student was writing a paper on the expansion of the European Union, and about a third of the paper was taken (without attribution) from a report by some think-tank in Belgium (in English...).
4. TurnItIn has been challenged ever since its beginning on IP grounds, and it has won those cases. Keep in mind that copyright law has exceptions for educational use -- you can't just take your common sense notions of copyright as it applies to, say, Bob Dylan's lyrics and assume that translates directly into the educational domain. IANAL and don't know the details, but the fact that TurnItIn has won the challenges suggests (or rather, establishes) that the law is on it's side.
The group of individuals that TurnItIn really protects are the honest students, who in my experience are 90 - 95% in any given class (I rarely catch more than one or two students in a class of 50, and by the way, the proportion has been going down as use of TurnItIn has gone up). (The figures one sees about 60% - 80% of students cheating are self-reports of ever cheating, not the percentage who cheat all the time.) The web's advantages to students far, far out-weigh its disadvantages, but TurnItIn goes a long way in compensating for one of those major disadvantages
There are old mice, and there are bold mice, but there are no old, bold mice
Well, what can I say. This actually isn't a bad place to live -- wide open spaces, low cost of living, easy access to the East and West Coasts (if you live near the KC airport), and left to their own devices (i.e. when not under the influence of utterly whacked-out self-proclaimed Christians who have a remarkably selective reading of scripture), Kansans tend to be quite nice and tolerant. So you'all are welcome to move out here, though if you have kids, I can certainly imagine why you might want to stay away.
I'm not sure how reassuring this is, but keep in mind that most reports indicate that the FBI is fabulously inept at analyzing the information that they have already, and this is merely going to further overwhelm them. To be sure, there are genuine civil liberties issues here, but I'd be far more concerned if they were investing the same resources doing things the old-fashioned way (infiltrating groups, hanging out taking notes, reading mail, tapping phones, etc)