This is a depressing story about the inability to enforce rules against plagiarism, and the comments more so. I don’t think it was this way when I was in school.
And of course, it’s of a piece with a general decline of ethics among the young. And why should they care? The system doesn’t. I’m starting to think that Glenn Reynolds is right — academia is the next overfunded speculative, empty bubble about to burst.
As one can surmise from the previous test posts, I’ve been trying (after three quarters of a year) to fix the problems with my Movable Type installation.
I went to one of the providers listed at MT as consultants, to try to get some help (unnamed, to protect the guilty). They have been somewhat helpful, in that they have eliminated possibilities of what the problem might be, but they haven’t actually determined what the problem is ($150 later, and asking for more).
But that’s not the point. The point is the (to me) user hostility of their system.
When I get an email from them, it comes in the following form:
====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======
[message from unnamed service…]
In my first response, I ignored it, and just replied below (as I always do, since as a long-time emailer, I bottom post to response).
The response was:
====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======
Hi
Your reply was blank. I’m assuming this is because you were trying to quote
me instead of deleting everything and then replying. Please give it a try
again by deleting all the original text.
Oh. OK.
They were serious.
They were determined to allow nothing that they emailed me to be quoted in my response. And moreover, even if I top posted, they didn’t want to see their response in my response.
Is it just me, or are they nuts?
Here was my second email in response to this absurd and deliberate policy (the first was minimal, and unreplied to):
One other point. Do you realize how annoying it is to:
1) not include my response in your response and
2) make me jump through hoops to include your response in mine?
Not to mention top posting (though in this case, it’s almost meaningless to distinguish between top and bottom posting).
WHY DO YOU DO THIS?
Do you think that it enhances the customer relationship?
This alone is almost enough to make me want to write off my current investment in you as a bad one, and find someone who can help me without being such an email PITA.
The response?
Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.
We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.
Here is my response:
Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.
==========================================================Yes, because bandwidth for a few lines of text is so expensive…
It is important because I would like to have some context for what I’m responding to, and you should have some context for what you’re responding to, in the email to which you’re responding. If I want to find out what we’re talking about, I have to go back and dig into my outbox, to figure out WTF we’re talking about. If you don’t find this annoying, I don’t frankly understand why. If you don’t want excessive repetition, just delete the older stuff. That’s how it worked on Usenet for years.
===========================================================
We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.
===========================================================Then you must have worked with thousands of top-posting morons raised on Outlook and AOL, and who only know how to upload to blogs with FTP, thus opening themselves to attack. It drives old-timers like me, familiar with old-school email and Usenet, NUTS.
I have never before run into a system that MADE IT DIFFICULT (AND ATTEMPTED TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE, EVEN WARNED RESPONDENTS NOT TO DO IT) TO QUOTE AN EMAIL IN RESPONSE. This is a new, and infuriating system to me.Can you point me to anyone else who has deliberately and maliciously set up their email responses this way, because it is a novel and off-putting approach, that has been making me angry with each exchange? I’ve been sort of happy with you, in that you seem to be attempting to help, even though you have made no progress whatsoever in solving my problem, other than telling me what it isn’t, but you can’t imagine how frustrating this is. Deliberately attempting (in futility, obviously) to make it impossible to include context of email responses is, to me, insane.
That’s where it stands at this point. Who is nuts?
Remember that civics test? Well, this should inspire confidence in our political “leadership”:
US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday.
Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).
But they did fare better. What does this say about our so-called “elites”? Forget about a literacy test for voters. How about one for candidates?
I scored 32 out of 33 on this test (I missed the last one–Doh!). Unfortunately, most people don’t do that well.
I really think that we should bring back literacy tests for voting. They shouldn’t have gotten rid of them because they were being used to racially discriminate–they should have just ended the racial discrimination.
[Friday evening update]
I have to say that readers of my blog, even the non-USians (or at least the ones commenting), are way ahead of the curve. Nice to know.
…to the charlatans like Jim Hansen. Here are two useful books. First, Cool It
Yup. As many reviewers note, “climate change” isn’t really about science–it’s just the latest ideology to come along for the collectivists to use in their latest attempt to bend us to their will.
I have thoughts on “Change!” and free markets this morning, over at PJM.
Never before have so many been so proud of so little:
The findings, published in the November issue of Psychological Science, support the idea that the “self-esteem” movement popular among today’s parents and teachers may have gone too far, the study’s co-author said.
“What this shows is that confidence has crossed over into overconfidence,” said Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University.
She believes that decades of relentless, uncritical boosterism by parents and school systems may be producing a generation of kids with expectations that are out of sync with the challenges of the real world.
“High school students’ responses have crossed over into a really unrealistic realm, with three-fourths of them expecting performance that’s effectively in the top 20 percent,” Twenge said.
Don’t they realize that half of them are below median intelligence? Probably not, because they got an “A” in math, even though they didn’t understand it.
One of the perverse and tragic problems with incompetence is that it generally includes an inability to recognize it.
I don’t generally think much of Chris Hedges, and the comments are nutty, but I largely agree with this piece:
The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world.
Can democracy survive for long, with such an electorate? Of course, he doesn’t finger the primary culprit–our fascist public school system which manufactures exactly the sort of people who will keep it in power.
[Late afternoon update]
Are individualists losing the IQ war with the left?
The Obama campaign has been lying about its donor base:
If, as Obama says, most donations are grassroots and in small amounts, the numbers do not match up. If this many people donated to his campaign he would be polling at well over 50%.
In a grassroots movement, you smell the green. He’s raised $600 million, as you say, in small donations. So divide it by ten bucks apiece and there’s 60 million donors. If 120 million people vote on Tuesday, and he gets 50% that equals …60 million voters! Honestly, you cynical rightwing losers, what’s so suspicious about that math?
On Fox Newswatch on Saturday, Jane Hall said that many of her (journalism) students couldn’t even calculate a percent. Of course, in this case, they’re not motivated to figure it out, even if they know how.
Sarah Palin is righteously demanding that the LA Times release the tape, but look at this transcript:
…she saved her hardest criticism for the newspaper that currently holds the tape, saying they was refusing to release it to aid Obama.
“It must be nice for a candidate to have major news organizations looking after his best interests like that,” Palin said. “In this case, we have a newspaper willing to throw aside even the public’s right to know in order to protect a candidate that its own editorial board has endorsed. And if there’s a Pulitzer Prize category for excelling in cow-towing, then the L.A. Times, you’re winning.”
I’m pretty sure that the paper has never towed a cow. And she didn’t say that it did. She said that they kowtowed. But I guess neither the writer or editor (if there was one) knew what that word meant or at least how it was spelled.