The cut and paste generation

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Teachers voice plagiarism fears
More than half of teachers believe internet plagiarism is a serious problem among sixth-form students, a teaching union survey suggests. The 58% of 278 teachers who identified it as a problem said they thought 25% of work returned by pupils included material copied from internet sites. One teacher said a piece of work they saw still contained website adverts.
When you get a cut and paste education you can hardly complain about a cut and paste response from students. Leaving the ads in is a bit worrying though. Frankly, at this level, most of education involves plagiarism of sorts. Rewriting guff from Brodie's Notes isn't that much better than just downloading a complete essay. And, to be honest, that student is never going to actually read Paradise Lost, is he?


Not quite comments

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ShoutMix - Free shoutbox/tagboard chat widget!
Shoutbox a.k.a tagboard/chatbox, is an easy to use messaging system that allows you to interact with others instantly. How it works? A shoutbox can be placed on your blog or website. Your visitors can then easily post comments in it. They can also use the shoutbox to chat with you and other visitors at the same time.
I've been toying with the idea of placing a shoutbox widget in the side bar to make it easier for visitors to send abusive messages to me. After an email from Justin earlier today I decided to pull my finger out and get on with it and, after checking out a few options, I went for what to me seemed the best designed and best featured which was Shoutmix.

At the moment it's in the sidebar way down in the 'about' section. It will stay there while I tweak some settings and make sure it's not interfering with the site in any way. If everything works out I'll move it up to the top of the sidebar and see what happens. I don't want to enable individual post comments for lots of reasons which I've made clear in the past and won't rehash here so this is a sort of compromise. If it gets some use I'll keep it but if it just sits there gathering dust and reminding me daily that nobody gives a fuck, I'll just have to remove it :)

UPDATE: It's now 'tweaked' and sitting in it's rightful spot. I quite like it. It's nothing like 'comments' at all and it has the decided benefit of being limited to 300 characters. The free version is limited to 150 characters, which might be a bit restrictive for any hardcore slaggers out there.



Sounds familiar

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3quarksdaily

Judah Folkman: "The father of antiangiogenesis*" dies.

He was shunned by his scientific peers and denied research funding for going against the 'consensus' and the received wisdom of the time (that tumours did not eventually need a fresh blood supply) and he had to turn to nasty old 'Big Pharma' to fund his research.

For much of the next two decades Folkman was treated as a pariah by his peers, who dismissed his theory outright. He was criticized whenever he announced a finding. To continue his unpopular research after all other funding sources dried up, he was forced to take a hefty sum—$23 million—from chemical company Monsanto. Convinced he was on the right track, he persevered in the face of adversity. By the mid-1990s the tide turned in his favor when researchers in his lab discovered that two natural proteins, angiostatin and endostatin, could effectively block angiogenesis.
*Antiangiogenesis - Prevention of the growth of new blood vessels

Well it worked in Viet...erm...oh, hang on

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U.S. Boosts Its Use of Airstrikes In Iraq
The U.S. military conducted more than five times as many airstrikes in Iraq last year as it did in 2006...The U.S.-led coalition dropped 1,447 bombs on Iraq last year, an average of nearly four a day, compared with 229 bombs, or about four each week, in 2006...The greater reliance on air power has raised concerns from human rights groups, which say that 500-pound and 2,000-pound munitions threaten civilians, especially when dropped in residential neighborhoods where insurgents mix with the population.


Don't try and stop me...

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Scientists Discover Suicide Palm Plant In Madagascar
A 70ft-tall plant that commits suicide when it blooms has been discovered in a remote region of Madagascar...The palm sprouts a 70ft-long spire of tiny flowers once in its lifetime, dripping with nectar to beckon a host of pollinating insects.After blooming and fruiting, the plant's nutrient resources are completely exhausted, causing it to collapse and die. Although the palm flowers fatally just once, no one knows how long it lives.
That's not suicide. That's like a man saving himself until he's old and infirm, marrying an 18 year old lap-dancer and dying from a heart attack on his wedding night at the point of ejaculation. Whatever you call it, it ain't suicide.


I's the flippin' interne' innit?

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Smith targets internet extremism
The home secretary is to outline plans to target websites promoting extremism, as part of efforts to stop people being drawn towards radical groups.
Smith is useless, but that seems to have been a prerequisite for this post over the years. Notice how she sheds the glottal stop pretty quickly as the interview proceeds. I bet it sounds like Eastenders in her home first thing in the morning.


Today Programme - Listen again



Ooo, let's stay in, watch TV and eat the rest of that leftover cabbage

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A wistful Neil Clark:

Ah, the good old days before 'the fall'.


In an article in the New Statesman, my wife Zsuzsanna, who grew up under socialism in Hungary in the 1970s and 80s, compared cultural life then and now. Saturday night prime time when Zsuzsanna was growing up invariably meant a Jules Verne adventure, a variety show and a live theatre performance. Foreign imports included the BBC‘s classic serial The Forsyte Saga and David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries whilst one of the most popular and talked about programmes of the entire period was ‘Poetry for Everyone’, in which a famous actor or actress would each night recite a different poem.

Today, nineteen years on from ‘regime change‘, the position could not be more different. TV schedules abound with soap operas, sensationalist-style news programmes, and of course ‘reality’ tv. Prime time terrestrial television in Hungary in the 21st century no longer means poetry recitals, but a choice between ‘Big Brother’ or the equally vapid Hungarian version- ‘Real World’.
Where ARE those tanks?