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From Cheating to Suing

When you break rules, you pay the price for breaking those rules. When you first sign a pledge that you are not going to break the rules and then you break the rules anyhow, and the pledge stipulates the exact punishment that rule breakers will receive, you quite well should not be the least bit surprised when you find yourself on the receiving end of a punishment. This is even more the case in a scholastic environment, where children and even young adults (college) need to learn how to harmoniously live in a society that tells you that rules are there for your good and that you need to follow the rules in order to get along and do well in said society.

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Confessions of a Married Man

Loud Talkers, beware: We can hear you even if we want to tune you out!  I know many Loud Talkers want to be heard beyond the ears of those they are speaking with and that’s why I have no problem relating this overheard conversation between two middle-aged men sitting in a coffee shop.

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The Sperminator Love Child

News of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Love Child” is terminating his reputation faster than a California budget earthquake.  In a single revelation, Arnold destroyed his wife, his children, his fans, his housekeeper mistress and his hidden child.

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Lust in the Age of Facebook: Where Have All the Moral People Gone?

In our ongoing, national, economic convalescence, I wonder if the result of such monetary heartsickness is a de-evolution of our moral presence into unsacred totems.  I ask this in the recovering wake of the tepid immorality of Rev. Cedric Miller — who urged his flock to give up Facebook because it was a “portal to infidelity” — only to be proven to be a sinner himself.

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Robert Louis Stevenson on the Moral Bargain

In my recent article on William James, he taught us How to Know a Good Man, and part of his argument referenced a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson:

Stevenson says somewhere to his reader: “You think you are just making this bargain, but you are really laying down a link in the policy of mankind.”

I was intrigued by that quotation, and I decided to return to the source material to read the entire quotation in context.  Here’s what I found on page 20 of Stevenson’s fine book, Lay Morals:

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AT&T Text Thuggery Beats Adam Lambert

The great Adam Lambert — seen below exchanging glee with another man in a previous moment of ecstasy — was the real winner of American Idol and AT&T have confessed their text thuggery in giving the win to Kris, Adam’s fundamentalist Christian, competitor.

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TurnItIn.com Will Still Rat You Out

We love the whole idea behind TurnItIn.com as a necessary intellectual watchdog against student plagiarism and intellectual falsity and the news this week that, despite student protest, TurnItIn.com does not violate a student’s Copyright.

A federal appeals court granted a boost to fair use advocates Friday when it ruled that an online cheating-detection service storing thousands of student essays did not violate the intellectual property rights of the essayists. Students who claimed TurnItIn.com breached their copyrights because it placed their works in its database brought the lawsuit. The site compares new essays submitted by teachers with a database of other essays to determine whether plagiarism was at work.

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The Expected Incorruptible and the Silver Star

I overheard a conversation on the street the other day.  One woman said to another woman, “She’s so lucky.  Married 40 years and he never cheated on her.”  The other woman sighed as if she’d been passionately kissed.  I wondered why never cheating was something to celebrate instead of something to expect.  When we begin to admire expected, ordinary, behavior and label it “extraordinary” by inference or by honor — we’re on the short path to the dissolution of civilization where every act and deed is heroic and deserving.  The “expected incorruptible” reminded of the story of Monica Brown I recently watched on 60 Minutes.  Pvt. Brown was the second woman in USA history to be awarded the Silver Star. 

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Baylor University Time Machine: SAT Mulligans

Baylor University is playing with a time machine.  The
university doesn’t like the lower SAT scores of their students so,
after they are admitted, Baylor pays students to retake the SAT so the
school won’t look so “stupid” in its SAT student rankings:

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Cheating to Get Ahead

There is no greater harm to intellect or the education process than plagiarizing.
When you steal or purchase the thoughts of others and claim them as your own — the entire salvation of the world crumbles to ash.

We were thrilled to learn this week that Google have refused to accept advertising from Paper Mills as reported by Chronicle.com:

Term-paper and essay-writing services join prostitutes, firearms dealers, and hacking sites in Google’s forbidden-advertising zone, the company announced yesterday. Academic paper-writing services, or “paper mills,” will no longer be able to buy search terms in the Google AdWords program, and thus their ads will no longer pop up in the
“sponsored links” sections of a Google search-results page. (Links to those sites could still be found among the results on the main part of the page, however.)

The paper mills, which offer buyers papers written to order for a fee, have been the subject of sharp complaints from universities, which view them as sources of plagiarism. But the companies themselves have a different view.

It is only in the free discussion of ideas that thought gains purpose over emotion and instinct.

We are humanized by our minds and the facts of our shared human memory.