Generations and Informational News transfer

I recently read an interesting commentary by Loyd Case over at ExtremeTech on the difference in information gathering and transmission between those who grew up in a connected world, and those who didn't. It used as a backdrop the way that information got out about the VA Tech shootings. Much of the population was glued to their TV sets and network news feeds waiting on the next bulletin. Even for those who were getting their news on line, most were getting it from standard old media news sites. Old media reporters were writing the standard sound bytes and updates based on what they could find out about what was going on.
The "connected generation" was busy updating and reading blogs, Myspace, and Facebook entries about the tragedy. A Wikipeida entry went up almost immediately, with live updates and new links showing up constantly. Text messages went out from the scene and were posted as fast as they could be. Breaking news and updates got out a lot quicker for the younger generation than it did for the older generation. Furthermore, the news was generated not by professionals sent there to "get the story", but by the people who happened to be on the scene. It wasn't as organized or even always as accurate, but it was fast. The article is a pretty good read and quite interesting when you compare the difference between the ways that news is disseminated amongst the two.
Check it out for your self: Generations

Voynich manuscript Images

The Voynich manuscript is a book that is thought to have been written sometime between 1450 and 1520. It is written in an unknown language using an unknown script. It was discovered in 1912 by a book dealer Wilfrid Voynich. No one has ever been able to decipher it. Some of the best cryptologists in the world have worked on it, and have not been able to come up with any meaning to the text in the book. Many believe the entire book to be an elaborate hoax. Several researchers have done statistical analysis on the word structures and have proposed that the text is likely gibberish. The entire book is filled with illustrations and what appear to be text descriptions of these illustrations. All of the illustrations are painted in a medieval style. The only thing that has been confirmed about the book is that it is very old.
Anyway, all of that was to give you a background for the Flickr photoset that I found. Someone has taken a lot of high resolution scans of the book and put them in a photo set on flickr for people to look at. The images are pretty cool.

Flickr Photoset: Voynich Manuscript
For a detailed history of the manuscript read the Wikipedia Article: Voynich manuscript

Students Suing anti Plagiarism service TurnItIn

Two students from McLean High School in Virginia are suing the Anti-plagiarism service Turnitin for copyright violations.
Turnitin is a company that provides teachers with an easy way to catch students who have plagiarized their papers. It actively crawls the internet archiving and categorizing material posted on websites. When a teacher or student submits a paper to the service, it will compare that paper to its archive and prepare a report for the teacher on possible plagiarism instances in the paper. The report is quite detailed and allows the teacher to compare side by side the suspect paragraph or sentence with the possibly plagiarized source. At that point, it is up to the teacher to decide if the passage was plagiarism, poor referencing, or simply coincidence.
Where the possible copyright violation comes in, is in the submitting of the student’s paper. All submitted papers are also archived and added to the Turnitin database for plagiarism comparison. So that means that you won't be able to turn in a paper written by students who took the class last year, or who took a similar class at another school that also uses the service.
Turnitin claims that the use of the student’s papers is fair use and does not violate any copyrights. They claim that they are not selling or publishing the student’s papers, and are in fact protecting the students copyright on the papers by preventing someone from stealing their work.
The students claim that because Turnitin is a commercial enterprise and does not get explicit permission to use the papers, they do not qualify for fair use on the copyright issue.
The purpose of this lawsuit doesn't seem to be about protecting copyright. It seems to be more about shutting down the service. One of the parents of the students suing was quoted as saying, "My son's major objection is that he does not cheat, and this assumes he does." In researching the service for this post, I found that the presumption of guilt seems to be one of the main objections to the use of this service. My question is, does requiring the use of this service presume guilt?


McLean Students Sue Anti-Cheating Service
Official website of TurnItIn
Wikipedia Article on use of TurnItIn service

Space junk just misses airliner

A Russian satellite came down in the pacific ocean near New Zealand Tuesday night and narrowly missed an airliner that was flying from Santiago, Chile to Auckland, New Zealand. The Russian space agency had warned New Zealand and surrounding areas that the satellite was coming down, but it wasn't supposed to be coming down quite as soon as it did, or in the location it came down in.
The story here.

Scientists are becoming increasingly worried about the sheer quantity of "junk" that is orbiting the earth. Both because it could come down anywhere, and because it jeopardizes existing and future spacecraft and satellites. NASA currently tracks over 10,000 distinct objects orbiting the earth. Most of which are literally junk. It is estimated that there are anywhere from 600,000 to 1,000,000 man made items currently orbiting the earth that could cause collisions and damage.
Check out the wikipedea article on space debris here
A National Geographic article on space cleanup here

The number seven

Came across this article "Seventy-seven things you need to know about 07" Some very interesting facts about the number seven.

I liked #11.

The seventh son of a seventh son has magic powers, according to Irish folklore, but is a vampire in Romanian legend.

Kind of ironic. Most of the facts in the news article can also be found in the Wikipedia article about the number seven.