When asked for comment, she responded, "Der Vorwurf, meine Doktorarbeit sei ein Plagiat, ist abstrus." ("The accusation that my doctoral work was plagiarism is abstruse!")
Read what the decision actually says. The source code and object code which implement a system are covered by copyright, but the interfaces and algorithms implemented by that source code are not.
It's a fine distinction, but it essentially says that if you can reverse engineer the requirements of an API by observing it's behaviour, you are free to re-implement that functionality. i.e. You have to use so-called "clean-room" techniques, where the team that did the functional analysis of the APIs to write the specs have absolutely nothing else to do with the team that writes the implementation.
... unless such functionality violates patents... this decision of course made no comment about such behavior and patents, only copyrights. This is generally already the case in the US, except that US law allows for wide software patents, which are usually used to quash competitors, and reimplementations. "You can't reimplement FAT, because we hold patents that are necessary to the process." and "You cannot generate compressed GIF files, because we hold patents that are necessary to implement the compression."
Indeed... reading the summary, it came across as the reason embezzlement was created in common law. A bank teller took money that was willfully given to him in trust, and pocketed it rather than deposit it in their account. He was charged with theft, but successfully argued that since he was given the money willfully, there was no theft involved. Embezzlement was then invented to close the loophole, and defined as misuse of funds given willfully in trust.
In the same way, the defendants in this case had authorized access to the data that they stole... and that's what the CFAA turns upon. It is necessary that they exceed their authorization to obtain the data in order to be covered by the CFAA, but they did not exceed their authorization... they just abused their authorization. Which is not explicitly covered by the CFAA, and thus not covered.
In linguistics, a homonym is, in the strict sense, one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings.
No, coloring outside the lines would not be penalized. the training corpus is actually most college reading. That is the initial training, then you specialize the training to the field. Heck, if you train it on two languages, then it wouldn't even penalize code-switching...
As for "abusing terminology" American English, and most English dialects in general are extremely conservative about new words, and novel original meanings of words. So, yes, American professors would grade someone down for that.
I was ignoring any question of self-defense. In fact, the circumstances you describe would qualify for self-defense without any Stand Your Ground Law, as there was no option to retreat, even if there were a duty to retreat.
Let's see if I read the LSA correctly and extrapolate how it is supposed to work for automated grading. Gross simplification: the method involves feeding the engine with the "corpus" - a set of "reference texts" - to form the term-document matrix - then the essays are presented in input and the grade is interpreted as how much the essay's matrix matches the corpus one: too close a match and it may be a plagiarism case, but if matching too little the essay is irrelevant (noise).
No. Your gross simplification is wrong, even as a simplification.
the method involves feeding the engine with the "corpus" - a set of "reference texts" - to form the term-document matrix - then the essays are presented in input
This is all fine. But at this point, the essay is presented as input, and each individual word is examined as to how it compares semantically in the reference material as how it appears in the essay input. This is order and grammar independent. One is free to construct any sentence form that they want, as the LSA simply compares the semantic "meaning" based on usage behind each word. If the words don't line up, then the words are being used wrong. Such as: "My father picked up the eigenvector and began using it to measure the beam." If there is a gross variation between the semantic vector of the words in the essay, and the reference material, then the student is using the words wrong, and therefore deserves a bad grade.
The plagiarism detection works differently. It is a separate pass. What this does, is it compares the order of the words and the reference text. The fact that it can compare words based on semantic variation, means that it can pick up rephrased statements. If someone writes an identical essay in order, but with all different words, but with the same meaning, then that is clearly paraphrasing plagiarism.
Now, imagine a brilliant student that decides to ignore the assignment borders - say: "discovery of America by Columbus, historical facts" - and go on a tangent in discussing how daring to act on greed when coupled with the ignorance of long forgotten science [wikipedia.org] may result in discovery on short terms; but long time persistence in ignorance is likely lead to economical crises (google for: "Everything is dear in Spain except silver") and litigation [wikipedia.org].
As long as the student used the words the student chose to use correctly, then an LSA essay grader would grade it positively. Even if it were trained on "simple text books".
LSA does not normally compare text to text, it compares word meaning to word meaning. It doesn't care about how closely the essay conforms to another sample text, it only cares about HOW THE WORDS ARE USED. If the student starts abusing terminology, then the LSA will grade him poorly, and so would any professor. If the student uses words appropriately, and in proper context, the the LSA will grade him positively, and generally so would any professor.
Correct... but not to the media who labeled him as a white man from day one because it played into a narrative of "gun weilding white man gun downs young and unarmed black boy"... and only later backed away slightly as they realized their mistake.
As a white Hispanic in New Mexico, I will assure you, that you can be both white and Hispanic. In fact, New Mexico's population is a majority white, and a majority Hispanic. Surprised? Shouldn't be. "Hispanic" is an ethnic origin, not a race.
Very well said... and the reason I spoke of intent is that in order to be able to get a conviction, a prosecutor would have to prove that intent... which based on the evidence here would be a very tall order.
Proving the intent is easy when a gun is fired. Firing a gun at someone is automatically intent to cause harm, and fatal injury.
In order to reduce the charge to a manslaughter, it would require that Zimmerman's actions were not intended to cause death, and that death was unexpected. Firing a gun at someone intentionally is most certainly not followed by surprise at the death of the victim.
enraged Zimmerman enough for Zimmerman to pull out his gun and shoot Martin in cold blood just after Martin uttered the insult.
No, he could not have. The reason why, is that "cold blood" means without anger, passion or being enraged.
There is little chance that Zimmerman could be tried for first degree murder, or said another way, acting in "cold blood". He could however be charged with 2nd degree murder, or said another way, acting in "hot blood" as you accounted.
Actually, it's highly unlikely that a firearm death will ever be tried as manslaughter, unless the death was accidental. Manslaughter requires that the action result in death unexpectedly, or without intent to kill. For instance, pushing a person with an eggshell skull over, and spilling their brains on the pavement would be manslaughter. One has no intent to kill, and the death was unexpected.
Zimmerman however used a gun, which is a lethal weapon, whose purpose is to kill people, and thus had intent to cause lethal injury to Trayvon, and an expectation that shooting him would enact this intent. There is little doubt that if Zimmerman's actions were not justified, then his actions would qualify as murder. There is no chance of manslaughter, except unless he chooses to plead guilty for a lesser sentence.
An automatic essay scoring will punish the creative minds, without even addressing the real problem, which is not enough educators.
I think you're confused about how the automated essay graders work. You can write a creative essay all you want, the LSA semantics checker doesn't care about grammar or form. It just looks at how words are used relative to each other.
Unless the creative person is using words wrongly, then the automatic essay grader should not grade them poorly. And if they are using the words wrongly, then they deserve a poor grade.
I agree that the automated essay grader is not solving the fundamental problem with American education, but it is still far better than bubble sheets.
To be clear: the automated essay grader does NOT work like a "paint by numbers". It evaluates free-form content, that in fact, cannot match another essay in specific form, else it detects it as plagiarism, even if the essay were paraphrased.
Long enough to be a real pain to change the system nowadays. Pity... I used the Berkeley's Physics text books in my uni time... the problems at the end of each chapter were a beauty: about 20-30 or them, the first ones you could answer immediately, the last ones needed some good days of work to solve properly.
I'm personally of the belief that some of it happened because it turned into kind of a business thing... nowadays people view college as a necessary step to get a good job, rather than a place to get an education. The college I went to had a Computer Science program based more around the science of computing, rather than computing. Seemed like every year there was a new set of freshman/sophomores complaining that we're not learning the newest language, and the senior commenting about how that's not what we're supposed to be learning.
Also, I distinctly remember being in a calculus class as the students were arguing about how they shouldn't have to take calculus, because they will never use it in their major or whatever.
Honestly, I view the whole system as rather poor in general. Perhaps this will allow you a better insight into why I say that automated essay grading is a good thing for the American system... it certainly can't make it any worse...
Basically, the American education system has become dependent upon automated grading, due to the extensive use of bubble sheets, so that now we cannot get rid of automated grading without reworking the whole system.
Sheesh... that's truly bad! When did it start?
Not really sure. Likely before I was in school. I'm pretty sure I was tested mostly on bubble sheet once I got past elementary school. So, I'm guessing sometime in the early 80's or more likely sooner...
Actually, they will say "bottle" much closer to a west country accent than to any American one. Both RP and Standard American has had many changes in phonology compared to early modern English (which is about the time when colonization of America started).
They tend to say "bottle" with a glottal stop rather than a unvoiced alveolar stop. But then Americans did mostly pick up the transition from alveolar stop to alveolar trill regardless of voiced quality that nearly all English dialects now use.
So, yes, SAE has gone through a number of phonological changes from early modern English, but it has still generally undergone less than RP has.
Just from curiosity: was it that one? If it was, the translation would be "in the very context above and just now, did you exclusively used LSA to parse my post?"
That was one of them, but there were a few other ones. The problem wasn't that I can't come up with a meaning, it's that I cannot be sure that the meaning I derive is the one that you intended to make.
And just about everything else you said is right on. Except I don't think it is that America doesn't think that anything less than a bubble sheet can be reasonably objective... rather our education system overloads teachers with students, so that for instance, one class I had in college was held in an auditorium with literally hundreds of students. If we had done an essay test rather than a multiple choice test, then it would require tons of time for the teachers to read through all of them, and if the TAs graded them, then they would be inconsistent among each other, etc.
Basically, the American education system has become dependent upon automated grading, due to the extensive use of bubble sheets, so that now we cannot get rid of automated grading without reworking the whole system.
Let me rehighlight your quote for more clarification:
776.041âfUse of force by aggressor.â"The justification [of self defense] described in the preceding sections of this chapter is not available to a person who: (1) Is attempting to commit, committing, or escaping after the commission of, a forcible felony; or (2) Initially provokes the use of force against himself or herself, unless: (a) Such force is so great that the person reasonably believes that he or she is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm and that he or she has exhausted every reasonable means to escape such danger other than the use of force which is likely to cause death or great bodily harm to the assailant; or (b) In good faith, the person withdraws from physical contact with the assailant and indicates clearly to the assailant that he or she desires to withdraw and terminate the use of force, but the assailant continues or resumes the use of force.
Of course, the text following the highlight text suggests that if one initiated or provoked the use of force, that they then have a duty to retreat, even though generally the Stand Your Ground law removes that duty to retreat, apparently if you start or provoke the conflict, then you have a duty to retreat if it gets out of hand.
Perhaps the fact that I was not educated in US also helps.
I suspect that this is the major difference. Coming from the American education system, I would see an automated essay grading engine as a boon to education, because we're so multiple-choice oriented right now.
Basically, you're looking from up high down at automated essay graders going "wtf? why would we go downhill?" while I'm sitting near the bottom looking up saying "hey, we could get kids to write actual essays, rather than fill in a bubble sheet!"
Yeah, no shit! I bet you can demonstrate it with numbers.
I don't need numbers. Essays are a more synthetic exercise than multiple-choice tests.... this is undeniable. Basically, I'm saying that no matter how low you think automatic essay graders might drag an education system down... the USA is already below that.
Most cheddar cheese is orange? Most cheddar I have seen is a shade of yellow.
Eh... getting the colors accurate is difficult. Cheddar cheese is naturally "white cheddar". The yellow/orange cheddar that you get is adulterated.
Not any sort of simplified accent from the New World or any other distant colony like Australia, South Africa, or New Zealand.
I think you'll find that you're backwards. The American accent is less simplified than any British accent.
The fact is that British English is the only authentic English still spoken. The various UK accents (Irish and Scottish can be included) are certainly more directly descended from Old English than any form of colonial English.
Actually, you're incorrect. They're all equally as descended from medieval English. Just because the UK accents have remained in the same place the whole time does not mean that they failed to change, and in fact, it's common that dialects and accents from a colonizing land show far more variation and change than in their colonies. The reason why is that the selection of accents in the population was diminished, and thus there was a reinforcement to a narrow pronunciation range. (Just like an island population typically has less genetic diversity than a mainland population of the same species.) As a result, American English accents actually show less variation than UK accents, and is typically regarded as closer to older forms of English...
Most readily apparent, is that a medieval person speaking English would not say "bottle" like in Received Pronunciation, but rather more like an Standard American English speaker.
as well as an enormous number of other interesting uses that would not qualify as "making humanity stupider".
Without any intention to be offensive, but... did you just used LSA only to parse my post?
Because it is not the use of LSA that I'm calling stupid, it is the use of the automatic grading engine (and also thanked you for pointing that LSA can be used to game the grading engine as an example of why grading engine is a stupid idea).
Without any intention to be offensive, but... do you speak English as a native language?
Because I'm having difficulty understanding you due to a few odd grammatical errors (real grammatical errors, not style errors) that make it difficult to be certain of what you're trying to say.
So, to be clear. LSA is a useful tool, and you agree. But then why are essay grading engines a bad idea?
Are grammar checkers and a spell checkers making humanity stupider? LSA is just another level on top of grammar checkers and spell checkers... it's a semantics checker. Does using LSA guarantee against cheating? No. (It is however a useful tool to catch paraphrased plagiarism!) But then no system ever is. As well, professors are not generally testing formal English composition skills in classes that are not English classes... they're testing to see if the person understands the concepts properly, and LSA provides an objective way to evaluate that. In fact, LSA and essay grading engines tend to produce more consistent grading results than humans, which can be easily influenced by personal opinions about the author.
So, no. Essay grading engines are not dumbing down at least America... In fact, considering that the essay writing requires more synthetic thought than multiple-choice tests that are spread all over the American education system, one could argue that it readily and easily is INCREASING the competence of the American education system. If ones particular country already has an essay-based education system, then obviously there is no need for an automatic essay grading engine. However, any essay grading engine that produces anywhere near meaningful results would readily outweigh any multiple-choice grading engine, which is the predominant grading system used in the USA right now.
That may or may not be the case, but it's irrelevant. We're talking about entertainment. People think an British accent is more appropriate for a medieval setting and so that makes it more appropriate.
Indeed... Americans presume that medieval people spoke with a British accent, and therefore our expectations are played to, so that it doesn't put us off.
Like how most cheddar cheese is orange, because we expect it to be orange, not because it should be orange. It appears that it was originally colored with annatto just because the consumers expected an "adulterated product" and wanted it to look orange.
Consumers influence the products that they buy greatly, and meeting expectations to avoid consumers rejecting a perfectly good product—because we don't think it looks right, due to our skewed and wrong expectations—happens a lot. I mean, key lime pie is hardly green at all (my mom eventually gave up on adding food coloring to make it look "right"), and the fruit in yogurt does not bleed the color very much at all, but consumers expect "it has strawberries, so it must be pink/red!", and blueberries blue, and mint ice cream green.
Slashdot Mirror
Wiktionary lists for abstruse: "remote from apprehension; difficult to comprehend or understand; recondite; as in abstruse learning."
Honestly, I had never heard of the word in English before...
So she doesn't deny it.
I know jokes lose their meaning once they're explained... but maybe a hint will help?
Aber die Informationen wollen frei sein!
I don't always use the right gender for singular things, but there really is only one plural gender...
When asked for comment, she responded, "Der Vorwurf, meine Doktorarbeit sei ein Plagiat, ist abstrus." ("The accusation that my doctoral work was plagiarism is abstruse!")
Read what the decision actually says. The source code and object code which implement a system are covered by copyright, but the interfaces and algorithms implemented by that source code are not.
It's a fine distinction, but it essentially says that if you can reverse engineer the requirements of an API by observing it's behaviour, you are free to re-implement that functionality. i.e. You have to use so-called "clean-room" techniques, where the team that did the functional analysis of the APIs to write the specs have absolutely nothing else to do with the team that writes the implementation.
... unless such functionality violates patents... this decision of course made no comment about such behavior and patents, only copyrights. This is generally already the case in the US, except that US law allows for wide software patents, which are usually used to quash competitors, and reimplementations. "You can't reimplement FAT, because we hold patents that are necessary to the process." and "You cannot generate compressed GIF files, because we hold patents that are necessary to implement the compression."
These two devices solve literarily every problem you are trying to solve.
TFTFY
Indeed... reading the summary, it came across as the reason embezzlement was created in common law. A bank teller took money that was willfully given to him in trust, and pocketed it rather than deposit it in their account. He was charged with theft, but successfully argued that since he was given the money willfully, there was no theft involved. Embezzlement was then invented to close the loophole, and defined as misuse of funds given willfully in trust.
In the same way, the defendants in this case had authorized access to the data that they stole... and that's what the CFAA turns upon. It is necessary that they exceed their authorization to obtain the data in order to be covered by the CFAA, but they did not exceed their authorization... they just abused their authorization. Which is not explicitly covered by the CFAA, and thus not covered.
In linguistics, a homonym is, in the strict sense, one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym
No, coloring outside the lines would not be penalized. the training corpus is actually most college reading. That is the initial training, then you specialize the training to the field. Heck, if you train it on two languages, then it wouldn't even penalize code-switching...
As for "abusing terminology" American English, and most English dialects in general are extremely conservative about new words, and novel original meanings of words. So, yes, American professors would grade someone down for that.
I was ignoring any question of self-defense. In fact, the circumstances you describe would qualify for self-defense without any Stand Your Ground Law, as there was no option to retreat, even if there were a duty to retreat.
Let's see if I read the LSA correctly and extrapolate how it is supposed to work for automated grading.
Gross simplification: the method involves feeding the engine with the "corpus" - a set of "reference texts" - to form the term-document matrix - then the essays are presented in input and the grade is interpreted as how much the essay's matrix matches the corpus one: too close a match and it may be a plagiarism case, but if matching too little the essay is irrelevant (noise).
No. Your gross simplification is wrong, even as a simplification.
the method involves feeding the engine with the "corpus" - a set of "reference texts" - to form the term-document matrix - then the essays are presented in input
This is all fine. But at this point, the essay is presented as input, and each individual word is examined as to how it compares semantically in the reference material as how it appears in the essay input. This is order and grammar independent. One is free to construct any sentence form that they want, as the LSA simply compares the semantic "meaning" based on usage behind each word. If the words don't line up, then the words are being used wrong. Such as: "My father picked up the eigenvector and began using it to measure the beam." If there is a gross variation between the semantic vector of the words in the essay, and the reference material, then the student is using the words wrong, and therefore deserves a bad grade.
The plagiarism detection works differently. It is a separate pass. What this does, is it compares the order of the words and the reference text. The fact that it can compare words based on semantic variation, means that it can pick up rephrased statements. If someone writes an identical essay in order, but with all different words, but with the same meaning, then that is clearly paraphrasing plagiarism.
Now, imagine a brilliant student that decides to ignore the assignment borders - say: "discovery of America by Columbus, historical facts" - and go on a tangent in discussing how daring to act on greed when coupled with the ignorance of long forgotten science [wikipedia.org] may result in discovery on short terms; but long time persistence in ignorance is likely lead to economical crises (google for: "Everything is dear in Spain except silver") and litigation [wikipedia.org].
As long as the student used the words the student chose to use correctly, then an LSA essay grader would grade it positively. Even if it were trained on "simple text books".
LSA does not normally compare text to text, it compares word meaning to word meaning. It doesn't care about how closely the essay conforms to another sample text, it only cares about HOW THE WORDS ARE USED. If the student starts abusing terminology, then the LSA will grade him poorly, and so would any professor. If the student uses words appropriately, and in proper context, the the LSA will grade him positively, and generally so would any professor.
Correct... but not to the media who labeled him as a white man from day one because it played into a narrative of "gun weilding white man gun downs young and unarmed black boy"... and only later backed away slightly as they realized their mistake.
As a white Hispanic in New Mexico, I will assure you, that you can be both white and Hispanic. In fact, New Mexico's population is a majority white, and a majority Hispanic. Surprised? Shouldn't be. "Hispanic" is an ethnic origin, not a race.
Very well said... and the reason I spoke of intent is that in order to be able to get a conviction, a prosecutor would have to prove that intent... which based on the evidence here would be a very tall order.
Proving the intent is easy when a gun is fired. Firing a gun at someone is automatically intent to cause harm, and fatal injury.
In order to reduce the charge to a manslaughter, it would require that Zimmerman's actions were not intended to cause death, and that death was unexpected. Firing a gun at someone intentionally is most certainly not followed by surprise at the death of the victim.
enraged Zimmerman enough for Zimmerman to pull out his gun and shoot Martin in cold blood just after Martin uttered the insult.
No, he could not have. The reason why, is that "cold blood" means without anger, passion or being enraged.
There is little chance that Zimmerman could be tried for first degree murder, or said another way, acting in "cold blood". He could however be charged with 2nd degree murder, or said another way, acting in "hot blood" as you accounted.
Actually, it's highly unlikely that a firearm death will ever be tried as manslaughter, unless the death was accidental. Manslaughter requires that the action result in death unexpectedly, or without intent to kill. For instance, pushing a person with an eggshell skull over, and spilling their brains on the pavement would be manslaughter. One has no intent to kill, and the death was unexpected.
Zimmerman however used a gun, which is a lethal weapon, whose purpose is to kill people, and thus had intent to cause lethal injury to Trayvon, and an expectation that shooting him would enact this intent. There is little doubt that if Zimmerman's actions were not justified, then his actions would qualify as murder. There is no chance of manslaughter, except unless he chooses to plead guilty for a lesser sentence.
inemptitude
ineptitude... (only mentioned because of the irony.)
An automatic essay scoring will punish the creative minds, without even addressing the real problem, which is not enough educators.
I think you're confused about how the automated essay graders work. You can write a creative essay all you want, the LSA semantics checker doesn't care about grammar or form. It just looks at how words are used relative to each other.
Unless the creative person is using words wrongly, then the automatic essay grader should not grade them poorly. And if they are using the words wrongly, then they deserve a poor grade.
I agree that the automated essay grader is not solving the fundamental problem with American education, but it is still far better than bubble sheets.
To be clear: the automated essay grader does NOT work like a "paint by numbers". It evaluates free-form content, that in fact, cannot match another essay in specific form, else it detects it as plagiarism, even if the essay were paraphrased.
Long enough to be a real pain to change the system nowadays. Pity... I used the Berkeley's Physics text books in my uni time... the problems at the end of each chapter were a beauty: about 20-30 or them, the first ones you could answer immediately, the last ones needed some good days of work to solve properly.
I'm personally of the belief that some of it happened because it turned into kind of a business thing... nowadays people view college as a necessary step to get a good job, rather than a place to get an education. The college I went to had a Computer Science program based more around the science of computing, rather than computing. Seemed like every year there was a new set of freshman/sophomores complaining that we're not learning the newest language, and the senior commenting about how that's not what we're supposed to be learning.
Also, I distinctly remember being in a calculus class as the students were arguing about how they shouldn't have to take calculus, because they will never use it in their major or whatever.
Honestly, I view the whole system as rather poor in general. Perhaps this will allow you a better insight into why I say that automated essay grading is a good thing for the American system... it certainly can't make it any worse...
Basically, the American education system has become dependent upon automated grading, due to the extensive use of bubble sheets, so that now we cannot get rid of automated grading without reworking the whole system.
Sheesh... that's truly bad! When did it start?
Not really sure. Likely before I was in school. I'm pretty sure I was tested mostly on bubble sheet once I got past elementary school. So, I'm guessing sometime in the early 80's or more likely sooner...
Actually, they will say "bottle" much closer to a west country accent than to any American one. Both RP and Standard American has had many changes in phonology compared to early modern English (which is about the time when colonization of America started).
They tend to say "bottle" with a glottal stop rather than a unvoiced alveolar stop. But then Americans did mostly pick up the transition from alveolar stop to alveolar trill regardless of voiced quality that nearly all English dialects now use.
So, yes, SAE has gone through a number of phonological changes from early modern English, but it has still generally undergone less than RP has.
Just from curiosity: was it that one? If it was, the translation would be "in the very context above and just now, did you exclusively used LSA to parse my post?"
That was one of them, but there were a few other ones. The problem wasn't that I can't come up with a meaning, it's that I cannot be sure that the meaning I derive is the one that you intended to make.
And just about everything else you said is right on. Except I don't think it is that America doesn't think that anything less than a bubble sheet can be reasonably objective... rather our education system overloads teachers with students, so that for instance, one class I had in college was held in an auditorium with literally hundreds of students. If we had done an essay test rather than a multiple choice test, then it would require tons of time for the teachers to read through all of them, and if the TAs graded them, then they would be inconsistent among each other, etc.
Basically, the American education system has become dependent upon automated grading, due to the extensive use of bubble sheets, so that now we cannot get rid of automated grading without reworking the whole system.
Let me rehighlight your quote for more clarification:
776.041âfUse of force by aggressor.â"The justification [of self defense] described in the preceding sections of this chapter is not available to a person who:
(1) Is attempting to commit, committing, or escaping after the commission of, a forcible felony; or
(2) Initially provokes the use of force against himself or herself, unless:
(a) Such force is so great that the person reasonably believes that he or she is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm and that he or she has exhausted every reasonable means to escape such danger other than the use of force which is likely to cause death or great bodily harm to the assailant; or
(b) In good faith, the person withdraws from physical contact with the assailant and indicates clearly to the assailant that he or she desires to withdraw and terminate the use of force, but the assailant continues or resumes the use of force.
Of course, the text following the highlight text suggests that if one initiated or provoked the use of force, that they then have a duty to retreat, even though generally the Stand Your Ground law removes that duty to retreat, apparently if you start or provoke the conflict, then you have a duty to retreat if it gets out of hand.
Perhaps the fact that I was not educated in US also helps.
I suspect that this is the major difference. Coming from the American education system, I would see an automated essay grading engine as a boon to education, because we're so multiple-choice oriented right now.
Basically, you're looking from up high down at automated essay graders going "wtf? why would we go downhill?" while I'm sitting near the bottom looking up saying "hey, we could get kids to write actual essays, rather than fill in a bubble sheet!"
Yeah, no shit! I bet you can demonstrate it with numbers.
I don't need numbers. Essays are a more synthetic exercise than multiple-choice tests.... this is undeniable. Basically, I'm saying that no matter how low you think automatic essay graders might drag an education system down... the USA is already below that.
Most cheddar cheese is orange? Most cheddar I have seen is a shade of yellow.
Eh... getting the colors accurate is difficult. Cheddar cheese is naturally "white cheddar". The yellow/orange cheddar that you get is adulterated.
Not any sort of simplified accent from the New World or any other distant colony like Australia, South Africa, or New Zealand.
I think you'll find that you're backwards. The American accent is less simplified than any British accent.
The fact is that British English is the only authentic English still spoken. The various UK accents (Irish and Scottish can be included) are certainly more directly descended from Old English than any form of colonial English.
Actually, you're incorrect. They're all equally as descended from medieval English. Just because the UK accents have remained in the same place the whole time does not mean that they failed to change, and in fact, it's common that dialects and accents from a colonizing land show far more variation and change than in their colonies. The reason why is that the selection of accents in the population was diminished, and thus there was a reinforcement to a narrow pronunciation range. (Just like an island population typically has less genetic diversity than a mainland population of the same species.) As a result, American English accents actually show less variation than UK accents, and is typically regarded as closer to older forms of English...
As a bonus, please enjoy a list of changes from the most-recent-common English that American English did not pick up that other accents did.
Most readily apparent, is that a medieval person speaking English would not say "bottle" like in Received Pronunciation, but rather more like an Standard American English speaker.
as well as an enormous number of other interesting uses that would not qualify as "making humanity stupider".
Without any intention to be offensive, but... did you just used LSA only to parse my post?
Because it is not the use of LSA that I'm calling stupid, it is the use of the automatic grading engine (and also thanked you for pointing that LSA can be used to game the grading engine as an example of why grading engine is a stupid idea).
Without any intention to be offensive, but... do you speak English as a native language?
Because I'm having difficulty understanding you due to a few odd grammatical errors (real grammatical errors, not style errors) that make it difficult to be certain of what you're trying to say.
So, to be clear. LSA is a useful tool, and you agree. But then why are essay grading engines a bad idea?
Are grammar checkers and a spell checkers making humanity stupider? LSA is just another level on top of grammar checkers and spell checkers... it's a semantics checker. Does using LSA guarantee against cheating? No. (It is however a useful tool to catch paraphrased plagiarism!) But then no system ever is. As well, professors are not generally testing formal English composition skills in classes that are not English classes... they're testing to see if the person understands the concepts properly, and LSA provides an objective way to evaluate that. In fact, LSA and essay grading engines tend to produce more consistent grading results than humans, which can be easily influenced by personal opinions about the author.
So, no. Essay grading engines are not dumbing down at least America... In fact, considering that the essay writing requires more synthetic thought than multiple-choice tests that are spread all over the American education system, one could argue that it readily and easily is INCREASING the competence of the American education system. If ones particular country already has an essay-based education system, then obviously there is no need for an automatic essay grading engine. However, any essay grading engine that produces anywhere near meaningful results would readily outweigh any multiple-choice grading engine, which is the predominant grading system used in the USA right now.
That may or may not be the case, but it's irrelevant. We're talking about entertainment. People think an British accent is more appropriate for a medieval setting and so that makes it more appropriate.
Indeed... Americans presume that medieval people spoke with a British accent, and therefore our expectations are played to, so that it doesn't put us off.
Like how most cheddar cheese is orange, because we expect it to be orange, not because it should be orange. It appears that it was originally colored with annatto just because the consumers expected an "adulterated product" and wanted it to look orange.
Consumers influence the products that they buy greatly, and meeting expectations to avoid consumers rejecting a perfectly good product—because we don't think it looks right, due to our skewed and wrong expectations—happens a lot. I mean, key lime pie is hardly green at all (my mom eventually gave up on adding food coloring to make it look "right"), and the fruit in yogurt does not bleed the color very much at all, but consumers expect "it has strawberries, so it must be pink/red!", and blueberries blue, and mint ice cream green.