The ecigarette movement would actually do better without evangelists dressed like Jesus actually.
Nima Sanandaji argues that Scandinavia’s success as a social democracy is exaggerated, and it’s success was despite rather than because of its welfare state.
As oil prices tumble, drillers are finding ways to cut costs. The refrain, though, never changes.
From a consumer standpoint, I’m glad that they’re making breakthroughs in storage space… but memory is the bigger hold-up lately and given the industry trends towards streaming that’s likely to remain the case. On the other hand, presumably cheaper storage will allow for better cloud usage and the like, maybe?
Julia Belluz looks at the evidence we do and do not have surrounding ecigarettes, and the different approaches between the US and UK.
The “Gig Economy” thing may be more myth than fact, as there has been no increase in self-employment among Millenials.
Will Boisvert makes the case for California keeping its last nuclear plant.
One of the arguments that confounds me is “Who cares if the threshold of proof is low and the standards of evidence are stacked against you when the only consequence you face is getting kicked out of a college?” The logical next step, though, is that it not be just one college.
Amy Tuteur argues that obstetricians may have gone too far in trying to prevent elective early deliveries.
How can those left behind rebound?
Maybe the solution for Puerto Rico is to ditch the US and rejoin Spain.
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“The logical next step, though, is that it not be just one college.”
Because sex offender lists have been such a shining success, let’s make a new one based upon much looser evidentiary and due process standards!
WTF is wrong with these people?
This really is one of those cases where each individual step has a rationale, but taken together create quite a problem.
Even before reading about this, I’ve thought that the problem with “it’s just a single college” was flawed because most good colleges don’t accept students who are not welcome back at their previous college. But of course the next step in the evolution is going to be sharing this information because who wants a rapist on their campus?
Indeed, Baylor is in a lot of hot water on that subject right now.
I’m not surprised that the “gig economy” is more fiction than fact. The (relatively few) people caught up in it are naturally going to be more vocal than the (far more) people who work at ordinary jobs.
I confess, at first I thought the college sex-offender thing was going to be about plagiarists.
I would actually be kind of OK with serial plagiarists getting a “scarlet letter” – there was one Canadian uni that wanted to institute a “FD” – F because of dishonesty – for someone who cheated, went through the campus judicial system, and was found guilty.
though I don’t know if there’s a low threshhold of proof for going after plagiarism, every time I’ve caught it it’s been pretty freaking obvious the student plagiarized.
In my own experience (going on 7 years ago, so very rusty), there are degrees of plagiarism and other than the blatant and egregious examples, it’s really, really hard to know what punishment to mete out or how to address it. Or at least it’s hard for me. It’s one thing when they download a whole paper from the ‘net or steal several paragraphs from wikipedia. It’s another when they, say, rewrite a paragraph from the assigned textbook without putting it in quotes (or rewrite it and change one or two words0 but otherwise are giving their own work. Or maybe they stole a couple of lines from elsewhere (usually wikipedia, ca. 2007), but the rest is their own.
The policies at the universities I’ve taught at seemed to be (if I interpreted them right) that each of those cases deserved an F for the course (even if the offense occurs in a small, weekly one-page assignment) and reporting to the “provost” or “dean” of student affairs. To me, there are shades of gray.
Most of the ones I’ve caught in recent years are entire chunks of the paper cut-and-pasted from a website (in some cases, the perp *didn’t even bother to change the font* and you’d think an abrupt transition in font style and size would be a HUGE tip-off, but I guess they don’t). Pretty blatant.
And when I confront them, I get some combo platter of:
1. “You never TOLD us we couldn’t do it that way” (B.S. So much B.S. What was my first day’s lecture about, in large part?)
2. “Aww, I didn’t think you’d check.” This is probably the most honest of the responses.
3. “I ran short on time! You didn’t give us enough time!” (Again: B.S. They had this assignment for OVER A MONTH and they just waited until the last minute).
I guess I am excessively grumpy about this sort of thing but it irks me to spend more time grading something than the student put into writing it.
Neither you nor Gabriel (or Hanley) are going to like this story, but…
When I was in college and my girlfriend was in college, we tried to take classes together when we could. I thought it would be cool to spend more time together, but another dynamic quickly took hold.
Namely, I’d do her work. I’d write a paper and then, at the last minute, I could get a call from her (or something) about how lost she was and had no idea what to write. And I would end up re-doing the paper. Different enough that it wouldn’t be obvious (self-)plaigerism, but it would basically be the same paper of inferior quality (purposefully, because if she wanted a good grade she would go to class with me).
At least, I always believed that the second paper was of inferior quality, but it always always got the same grade or (usually) a higher one. And it wasn’t even a case of “I was better the second time than the first” because I’d get dinged on things that would apply to both papers. Like I didn’t address some particular point, but neither did “she” and “she” got an A while I got a B.
Of course, the last thing I wanted to do was draw attention to this. So I quietly seethed.
This happened in three different classes. In two of the three I did get a pretty good grade, and a better grade than she did because I could take the tests. But man.
Will: Shame 🙂
fillyjonk:
Those cases, in a sense, are the easiest, at least in my experience. The plagiarism is so obvious that the student knows he/she is wrong, even if they don’t admit it or plead ignorance, which merits whatever punishment the instructor/university prescribes for plagiarism. In fact, it’s what those policies have in mind. (Of course, it’s not so easy when they threaten you, or act so angry and start pounding on the desk that they might as well be threatening you, which happened to me once.)
Re college offenders: I think it was Trumwill who said a while ago that women are (more or less) only subject to rape and men to false accusations, so it’s hard to see the other side’s point of view. (Or am I misstating what you said?)
That’s more or less correct.
Good to see you again, man!
Re the shale oil thing… For the publicly traded companies, the Q2 reports were uniformly bad. None of them were cash flow positive. Rig productivity has improved, but they’re being forced to cut costs beyond that in order to meet interest/debt payments. In the long run, the per-well decline problem is unsolvable: at some point, you can’t drill new wells fast enough to offset the decline in production from existing wells, and total field production begins to decline.