Author Archives: ghw

give ’em all the slip

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One year ago today I wrote my first post for this blog. It hasn’t exactly turned out to be the kind of evolving document I originally intended.

And now for something completely different:

gee, who saw this coming?

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From the Washington Post (via /.):

Two McLean High School students have launched a court challenge against a California company [Turnitin.com] hired by their school to catch cheaters, claiming the anti-plagiarism service violates copyright laws.

Well, duh. If a company earns a tidy profit largely off the uncompensated labor of students, some of those students are bound to object. I’ll make three brief observations:

  1. Writing assignments that are easily fulfilled through plagiarism are not good assignments.
  2. The software that runs the for-profit Turnitin.com site can’t be that complicated. Surely a university (or a consortium of universities) could create a free, open-source program that does the same thing.
  3. Creators do not need to give up copyright in order to allow others to make use of their material. There are ways around our increasingly illogical copyright laws.

r.b.o.p.b.g*

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  1. Any recommendations for poems whose subject matter concerns poverty?
  2. I’m in the market for a new phone. I’d like it to be available for Verizon customers, sync via bluetooth with my Mac, have a decent camera, and be relatively small. Any suggestions?
  3. This NY Times article on multitasking and productivity would be more interesting if it were to interrogate the notion that the purpose of our lives and our access to information is productivity: produce, produce, produce!
  4. I spent Friday and Saturday in Asheville at this conference, where I attended two (!) panels on drag kings, featuring performers who were, for the most part, as theoretically savvy as they were sexy.
  5. In an age where people can be so uptight about who gets to marry whom, it warms my heart to know that I live in a community that celebrates diversity.
  6. Season two (via Netflix) of The L Word is, so far, better than season one, though the new theme song is stupid. Maybe I’m just more familiar with the characters, but it seems to me that there’s more depth to the storylines as well as a thematic unity among the storylines that wasn’t there before.

*random bullets of pure blogging gold