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Plagiarism & Excuses

Plagiarism is not a new problem but it is getting more serious with easy access to material and the ability to cut and paste. In part the problem also is with the student attitude to plagiarism which is not discussed enough.

Students tend to have either really bad excuses for why they plagiarise or they are simply in denial. One of the best excuses I have seen was posted on Bitch. Ph.D.

â??Itâ??s not my fault the guy I bought the paper from copied it!â??

!!!! Now tell me this is not an attitude problem.

Posted on by mklang

Blogging in the private/public divide

Part of blogging is attempting to figure out why we blog? Not all blogs pose this question but it appears often enough* to be recognised as being a common question. This question becomes even more relevant when the blogger takes active risks by blogging.

In an earlier post (blogging revisited 21/1105) I reported about an article concerned with the risks being taken by job-seeking academics who blog. The author of the article wrote that their blogs prevented the potential employer from hiring since they revealed a different side to the applicant than that presented at the formal interview.

A temporary prosecutor in San Francisco blogged about a case he was prosecuting:
Karnow didn’t find the postings prejudicial enough to throw out the entire case, as the defense wanted. But in turning down that motion to dismiss this week, the judge still came down hard on ex-prosecutor Jay Kuo, calling his conduct “juvenile, obnoxious and unprofessional.” … (via Lunda Wright)

Other bloggers take greater risks as whistleblowers or reporting on corrupt and/or repressive governments. While some bloggers and blogs are well protected using different means many are open and tracing the authors is a (relatively) easy task.

Organisations such as the EFF have created documents to help those who need to blog anonymously â??How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)â?? but these are either not widely known or widely used.
There seems to be something special about the blog and its place in the private/public divide. The blog is a private diary and yet it is open to the world.  The privacy promotes the sharing of secrets while the public the desire to communicate.

Why take the risks? Are they really risks or is blogging perceived to be a private act? Even though most bloggers are aware of their publicâ?¦

*Some examples from Google on the search â??why I blogâ??
Watermark – Jacobsen – Under the sun – Media Metamorphosis –

Posted on by mklang

Languages Online

The web began as an English place. To some the idea was that national, natural and cultural
boundaries were irrelevant. The web created a situation were everyone could communicate – if they did so in English. This is changing – fast.

The growth of alternative languages is not the story of esperanto but rather, as connectivity improves, the web begins to reflect something other than the countries who were first online in large numbers.

Measured by blogs – which are argumentatively the largest form of personal online mass communication and using one of the largests tracking services these results have been presented (Sifry’s Alerts – the state of the blogosphere with more data and also caveats about collection and validity).

English is no longer the largest language. Technorati now has more Japanese posts than English. In March 2006

37% of posts are Japanese
31% of posts are English
15% of posts are Chinese

And China is just beginning.
OK – so this is not about trying to find the first nail in the coffin of the English language but it is very interesting to see the changes which are taking place. The natural position of power held by the English language is no longer a given.

Posted on by mklang

Hi-Tech Trash

Are you old enough to remember asking why you would want or need a mobile phone? How many have you had so far? How many phones will the average person have in a lifetime? And what will the cumulative effect be?

The picture above of discarded mobile phones in a landfill, Orlando, Florida, USA, 2004. (photo by Chris Jordan via I Txt, Therefore I am) click here for a larger image.

This is scary stuff and requires more examination so I am sure that I will get back to this subject soon. In the meantime check out some of these reading tips.

Check out:

Giles Slade “Made to Break – Technology and Obsolescence in America” Harvard UP.

Elizabeth Grossman “High Tech Trash – Digital Devices, Hidden Toxins, and Human Health” Island Press (forthcoming)

Elizabeth Grossman “Where computers go to die — and kill“, Salon.com
Elizabeth Grossman “How to recycle your computer“, Salon.com

(Litterature tips via Question Technology)

Posted on by mklang

PhD, competition & publicity

This blog lives a quite, laid back existence. But when I wrote a post asking for help to design the cover of my Phd thesis things exploded (original post here). Since I wanted to spread the information and since I thought it might be a fun idea I asked for the information to be posted on BoingBoing â?? it was posted there. It has also been posted on some of my favourite blogs: Lessig Blog, Karl Jonsson, Det perfekta tomrummet, Foreward & Patrik’s Sprawl.

The effect of this publicity? Take a look at my stats. I dont think that this picture needs any comments!

In addition to this I had no idea that I was going to annoy designers so much by asking what I asked. Take a look at the comments to my post and you will see that the one thing you do not ask a designer for is help. Definitely touched a raw nerve there.

Anyway I have received some contributions already and I will present them all on the 10 May so that they can all be seen and maybe arrange some sort of voting procedure.

Posted on by mklang

Standby Power

Question Technology posted this quote from the Economist

STRANGE though it seems, a typical microwave oven consumes more electricity powering its digital clock than it does heating food. For while heating food requires more than 100 times as much power as running the clock, most microwave ovens stand idleâ??in â??standbyâ?? modeâ??more than 99% of the time. And they are not alone: many other devices, such as televisions, DVD players, stereos and computers also spend much of their lives in standby mode, collectively consuming a huge amount of energy. Moves are being made around the world to reduce this unnecessary power consumption, called â??standby powerâ??. (The Economist)

The term standby power used to be called leaking electricity but the term standby is taken to be more correct. This might be a shame since the idea of a leak is something that needs to be fixed. The number of appliances which do not have “real” on/off switches is actually quite large. If you add to this the number of fixtures which need to draw power to ensure that they function when required then the amount of unneccesary power being eaten is very large. In particular when you think about the fact that these appliances are waiting 24/7 every day. (More information on this topic Standby Power Home Page)

Posted on by mklang

Copyright Europe

A proposed ammendment in German copyright will remove the small scale copying for private home consumption. If this proposal is accepted all copying of copyrighted material (in Germany) will be illegal. (via Suburbia)

The French Parliament supported a stricter implementation of copyright (nicknamed the Vivendi-Universal Amendment). The change sets the fine for each downloader/filesharer at 38 euro per download and 150 euro per upload. Spreading software “obviously” intended for illegal file sharing can be punishable by three years imprisonment and up to 300 000 euros in fines. (via Free the Mind)

Not a good week for the file sharers…

Posted on by mklang

23 days

Todays production was +1478 bringing the total up to 177 pages and 87 064 words. It was a good day.

And the countdown is still in the twenties. Today was lots of work on filters & censorship (Look at OpenNet iniative). On Yahoo! helping China chase cyberdissidents and Google creating a ideologically clean (Chinese style) search engine for China. Its obvious that the companies are bending over backwards to gain access to the Chinese market. Despite all the corporate retoric their actions speak louder than words.

censorship
Censorship by Eric Drooker

Reading tip for the weekend: Rosemary Coombe “Commodity Culture, Private Censorship, Branded Environments, and Global Trade Politics: Intellectual Property as a Topic of Law and Society Research“

Posted on by mklang

Search engine privacy

Search Engine Watch has written a howto on privacy in relation to search engines. As part of the conclusion they write:

As you can see, ensuring your search privacy is tricky. The information you send is leaving traces in multiple places. The solution to ensuring privacy isn’t going to be as easy as passing a law that targets Google, Yahoo and the others. Ideally, the entire lifecycle of a search beyond the computer desktop needs to be considered from ISP through to tracking services. Searchers themselves also need to consider what they do on their own computer desktops.

via Question Technology

Posted on by mklang

Bodström

Free the Mind has written a very good post (in Swedish) on the present day political political argumentation in Sweden.

Sammanfattningsvis: Var uppmärksam när den bodströmska retoriken används. Den är ett medvetet försök att genom överdrifter, underdrifter, (o)skickligt valda ord, lögner etc skrämma folket till att acceptera Bodströmsamhället.

Posted on by mklang