May 3-7, 2010 was Air Quality Awareness Week Here is a welcome tool that can provide you with an easily-accessible indicator of your local air quality. Go to the AIRNow Web Site to get national air quality information.
From its Earth and Climate section, ScienceDaily reports on research that indicates, ". . . people generally do not act on information about the effects fossil fuel-based products . . . Question: Given the prevalence of media reports and supposed attention given to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, what do you make of these findings published i […]
Climate Change Choices for the U.S. The National Research Council, on Wednesday, May 19, 2010, released three reports within its America's Climate Choices suite of studies. The reports were requested by the U.S. Congress—to inform responses to climate change. Question: How useful do you think these reports will be in addressing climate cha […]
President's Cancer Panel: Environmentally caused cancers are 'grossly underestimated' and 'needlessly devastate American lives. "The true burden of environmentally induced cancers has been grossly underestimated," says the President's Cancer Panel in a strongly reported report that urges action to reduce people's wi […]
Climate Change Indicatorsin the United States The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency notes that “Collecting and interpreting environmental indicators play a critical role in our understanding of climate change and its causes. An indicator represents the state of certain environmental conditions over a given area and a specified period of time. Example […]
A report from the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars defines the criteria for a new technology assessment function in the United States. Q: Do you believe that scientists (or other “experts”) are ready or able to entertain the opinions or concerns of laypersons?
The Interagency Working Group on Climate Change and Health (IWGCCH) has prepared a report outlining the range of research needs on the human health effects of climate change titled "A Human Health Perspective: On Climate Change". The IWGCCH states that:
ScienceDaily reports on research conducted at the University of Minnesota. The research acknowledges that “Environmentally friendly products are everywhere one looks. Energy efficient dishwashers, bamboo towels, the paperless Kindle and, of course, the ubiquitous Prius are all around.” But, . . . Q: How do you see the need for status as influencing […]
Humberto Blanco-Canqui of Kansas State University reports in Agronomy Journal that: "Crop residues, perennial warm season grasses, and short-rotation woody crops are potential biomass sources for cellulosic ethanol production. While most research is focused on the conversion of cellulosic feeedstocks into ethanol and increasing production of biomass, t […]
Jinglei Yu and co-authors report in Environmental Science and Technology on proposed regulations, now under debate in the U.S. Congress to ban the export of electronics waste. The authors say in their policy analysis that the regulations would likely make a growing global environmental problem even worse.
"I have -- maybe ill-placed -- a foreboding of an America in my children's generation, or my grandchildren's generation, when all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when we're a service and information-processing economy; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest even grasps the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas, or even to knowledgeably question those who do set the agendas; when there is no practice in questioning those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what's true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness." - Carl Sagan 1994
President Bush, looking confused and disoriented upon his return from the G-8 summit, responded to reporters questions about the stem cell research bill recently passed by the United States Senate. Mr. Bush said “I don’t know how else to put it. We support a culture of the living. “. When reporters reminded Mr. Bush that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s and American’s have been killed or wounded in his pre-emptive war in Iraq, he responded “When I say ‘culture’ I mean the kind of culture where you have a small clump of cells on a petri dish….That’s what I mean by culture… and on this I stand firm. I am for protecting the culture of these small clumps of cells living in petri dishes. They have rights too.”.
————————————— normanx posted the above fake news release on the web as a satire. But the irrationality fits so well
with the Bush Administration’s non fact-based thinking that a number of readers thought it true.
How telling of our current situation.
Posted under General by Stephen Nodvin on Wednesday 19 July 2006 at 3:55 pm
As the Los Angeles Times reported on June 17, plagiarism is a huge problem in American educational systems. In the Times article, John Barrie head of iParadigms, a company that tracks digital information and assesses plagiarism states, “Students are using the Internet like an 8-billion-page, cut-and-pastable encyclopedia.” Barrie’s plagiarism analysis service, turnitin.com, evaluates 60,000 submissions a day. Barrie says his services finds that 30% of student papers are plagiarized, either totally or in part.
To those of us working in education who have used the turnitin service, the numbers are, unfortunately, not surprising. My experience is that students have learned in grade school, high school and college, that the Internet is a great resource for creating class presentations in PowerPoint or for making posters. The idea of actually citing the source of the materials used in the students’ slide or poster presentations is rarely an issue either for the students or the teachers.
This practice of cutting-and-pasting images and ideas does not seem alarming in a slide or poster presentation. However, when 70-90% or more of the text of a term paper can be documented by the turnitin service to have been copied word-for-word and without attribution from others’ works, Houston, we have a problem.
Students who have committed academic dishonesty have insisted to me that they have NOT plagiarized. First, these techniques were always rewarded for them in the past and never identified as cheating or plagiarism and, second, by having entered some of their own words into the paper, they honesty believe that they have avoided the practice of plagiarism.
Many of us in academic and educational institutions that we are going to have to put much more effort into teaching students about plagiarism: what it is and how to avoid it through proper paraphrasing and citation techniques.
Our job is made harder when literary thieves like Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and now Anne Coulter ply their journalistic trade by stealing others’ words.
In the video below (from Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show COUNTDOWN), John Barrie documents that Coulter’s work is “textbook plagiarism.”
Posted under Education, The Media by Stephen Nodvin on Wednesday 5 July 2006 at 10:34 pm
