Thankfully, not all schools:
Some educators have rejected [Turnitin] and other anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.
Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”
Trip Gabriel, “To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery, July 5, 2010″
Posted in Society
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Tagged Academia, Big Brother, Cheating, Dawn Watkins, education, Exams, Indoctrination, Surveillance, Testing, Trip Gabriel, Turnitin.com
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There isn’t yet a WordPress activate theme hook. In the last week, it’s come up twice where WordPress.com Hosting VIP partners wanted some code to run once on theme activation.
It’s not an unusual scenario for our customers to create a new version of a theme, install it separately, and then activate it. Often this also allows reverting to the old version of the theme if something unexpected happens at launch.
In this scenario, it’s often easy to check for the existence of a new option, migrated, or other seed data, but sometimes you want to do something like:
global $pagenow;
if ( is_admin() && 'themes.php' == $pagenow && isset( $_GET['activated'] ) ) {
// When theme is activated this code runs.
// Still be defensive if you need to be, and check if
// your baby is already born
}
Hat tip Frank Bültge.
Posted in WordPress, Work
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Tagged Activate Theme, Enable Theme, Frank Bültge, One time, pagenow, Run once, Theme Options, Theme Settings, WordPress, WordPress Actions, WordPress Hooks, WordPress.com VIP Hosting
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So, what is [Intellectual Ventures] actually doing? Buying up loads of patents and licensing them to companies who calculate it’s not worth the fight is patent trolling 101. Yet the scale they’re operating on puts them on new ground, and opens new opportunities. It seems obvious to get corporate investors on board by promising them immunity from patent claims. With enough patents you stop trying to license them one-by-one and just tax each industry at some non-negotiable rate. No doubt they have more tricks I haven’t even thought of, but these potential devices really do make them a new breed of Super Trolls.
…
Now, I don’t really care if one company leeches off the others. But if they want to tax software, they have to attack free software otherwise people will switch to avoid their patent licensing costs. And if you don’t believe some useful pieces of free software could be effectively banned due to patent violations, you don’t think on the same scale as these guys.
Rusty Russell, “Superfreakonomics; Superplug for Intellectual Ventures.“, July 7th, 2010
I’m also opposed to software patents.
Watching Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system is time well spent.
Related Posts:
Posted in Free Culture, Humanity, Open Source, Opinion
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Tagged Chilling Effects, Computing, Consuming, Fred Wilson, Free Culture, Innovations, intellectual property, IP, Open Source, patents, Rusty Russell, Taxes
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It was pointed out to me that the iPhone 4 isn’t living up to “iPhone with One Hand Comes Naturally” with it’s problems with dropped calls when held in the left hand — don’t worry, it was a lousy connection anyway.
Posted in Computing, Consuming
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Tagged Accessibility, Apple.com, Cell Phones, iPhone, iPhone 4, Mobile Computing, Mobile Phones, One-handed computing with the iPhone, Pervasive Computing, Ubiquitous Computing, Usability
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Our strategy with the ebookstore is ‘buy once, read everywhere.’ If you want to read on your iPhone, if you want to read on your BlackBerry. We want people to be able to read their books anywhere they want to read them. That’s the PC, that’s the Macintosh. It’s the iPad, it’s the iPhone. It’s the Kindle. So you have this whole multitude of devices and whatever’s most convenient for you at the moment.
JP Mangalindan, “Jeff Bezos’s mission: Compelling small publishers to think big“, CNNMoney Fortune, June 29, 2010
I also enjoyed Bezos update in the article on cloud computing and the utility model reality..
I love my Kindle 2, and what Amazon.com has done for publishing!
Here though, “read their books anywhere they want to read them”, there is a disconnect between vision and execution. The Amazon Kindle experience on the Mac has a strong unpleasant odor.
Posted in Consuming
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Tagged Amazon Kindle, Amazon.com, Cloud Computing, e-book readers, e-books, e-text, ebook readers, ebooks, Electronic Publishing, eReaders, etext, Jeff Bezos, Kindle on Mac, Mac OS X, Online Book Store, publishing, Technology, Utility Model, Web Hosting, Web Services
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Ritualistic behavior like you are now witnessing, is your toddler’s way of maintaining control while asserting his new found independence in a safe and worry-free manner. When your little one is faced with some type of change in his routine, he feels vulnerable, anxious and frustrated, so having control of even the smallest areas of his life right now means more than you’ll ever know. Being denied the fulfillment experienced through rituals can do a number on your little one’s self-esteem, so remember that what you may see as monotonous, your toddler sees as peace-of-mind, and who’s to argue with a content toddler? Certainly not me.
Shelley Feldman, “Your 22-month-old toddler (week 93)“, edHelperBaby
The above makes sense, what we suspected, and seems to be the consistent explanation.
“My do it”, regularly insists my toddler son.
The examples of this that stands out to me all relate to eating:
- He insists on putting the cap back on his milk bottle, so he can remove it himself, before he’ll consider drinking it.
- Food that he doesn’t want can’t stay on his plate. He puts it on my plate.
- If his fruit filled cereal bar breaks in two then he earnestly tries to put it back together, and ends up rejecting it in frustration.
Being part of my toddler’s world, witnessing what is instinctual and being part of his learning, gives me incredibly enjoyable and insights.
I feel that being a parent is already making me a better person. My son really is my greatest teacher.
Posted in Humanity, Learning, Personal
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Tagged anxious, Children, Comforts, Control, frustrated, independence, Parenting, rituals, self-esteem, Share on Facebook, Sons, vulnerable
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Every time I’m frustrated that Mac OS X doesn’t have focus-follows-mouse, I think of Stevey Yegge’s “Settling the OS X focus-follows-mouse debate“, and remember that I’ll likely be waiting till focus follows eyes.
Posted in Computing
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Tagged Background window focus, Click focus, Click to focus, Focus follows mouse, GUI, Linux, Mac OS X, Stevey Yegge, UNIX, Window Focus, X11
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“It turns out that Mobile Safari doesn’t support as many embeddable font formats as the desktop version, so Google sends an SVG font version to iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches, or anything pretending to be them. And it looks like Google’s SVG fonts contain only ASCII characters, while the other formats have full character sets.”
Derek Miller, “A weird Safari-Google bug”, June 21, 2010
I haven’t encountered anything like this, but I found it to be an interesting interplay of emerging technologies.
It reminds me of the headaches of different database encoding and WordPress.
Posted in Web Development
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Tagged Apple Mobile Safari, Apple Safari, ASCII characters, Derek Miller, Embeddable fonts, Google Font API, Google Font Directory, iOS, iPhone, SVG, Web Fonts
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