Higher Education

Cheating roomates

October 17, 2004

In a post about Google copying MSNBC Jeremy Zawodny comments that he turned in a roomate who tired to pass off Jeremy's program as his own in college. The comments are amazing, and the number of people who are "astonished" that one would turn in their own roomate. I too had a roomate who was a cheat for a while. I should have turned in him. His racket was a little different, as an underage engineering student from a privileged family he'd provide the beer for "study sessions" at the condo his mommy and daddy bought for him, and then every single time he'd talk one of his "friends" into leaving a paper behind and would spend the rest of the night copying the answers. Don't think I want to travel on any bridges he designs.

And you're surprised

October 13, 2004

The stepfather of a University of Colorado freshman who was found dead on September 17th in the Chi Psi frat house said of CU it is "one of the highest-risk environments" for new college students.

What amazes me is not this assessment. It amazes me that there are people who continue to deny this. Most importantly those who run the institution continue to foster this environment by not taking appropriate actions against coaches who do not recognize that rape is inappropriate. Further when there is strong evidence these same coaches wanted "plausible deniability" they knew that things were going wrong. Seriously wrong. It's time for the administration of CU to step aside and make way for a new team with real concern for the students and the community.

Turnitin.com

May 10, 2003

Should sites like turnitin.com have to follow licensing provisions? For example a site can have a license that says you may catalog and index the site as long as the index is made freely available to the public. However sites like turnitin.com are using my copyrighted material to make a profit. I wonder if their robot will listen to robots.txt.

How are they making certain that their archiving of my information published on the web does not violate the copyright I have on it? Turnitin has a legal document explaining how their service does not infringe. However as far as I can tell it only applies to works submitted to their service and does not cover their robot crawling my website.

A similar note came from reading a comment on Dave Winer's Scripting News the other day. In this piece he suggests they are handling referrer spam by using robots.txt so that indexes such as Google won't crawl these pages and the spammers won't benefit from seeing the links listed. I prefer to use my reporting software to have these references not show up. In this way the integrity of the reporting pages still works for sites like Google.

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