A writer of “custom essays” tells all:
You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.One way to defend against it: occasional short in-class writing.
The Shadow Scholar (Chronicle of Higher Education)
The New York Times reports this morning that reusable grocery bags (the ones made from recycled plastic) may contain “potentially unsafe levels of lead”:
“Bummer! We’re still not doing the right thing,” said Shelley Kempner of Queens, who was looking over the produce at Fairway on Broadway at West 74th Street. She prefers a reusable bag, she said, because she “likes the idea of not putting more plastic into the environment.”String bags are terrific. They’re inexpensive, durable, and fit easily into a pocket or bag. And because they stretch, they hold a lot. How much is a “lot”? A lot! Elaine and I bought our bags from a natural-foods store. As you might expect, Amazon has them too.
Told of the recent lead findings, Ms. Kempner sighed — “It’s still not good enough” — and wondered if she would have to switch to something else. “Are we going to have to start using string?” she asked.
And suddenly I’m back typing on my Apple //c.[InfoWorld, January 20, 1986.]
While watching five minutes of Jeopardy:
“Who would name their kid Jove?”
“Saturn?”
Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts
Jove Graham Wins on Jeopardy! (Swarthmore News)
Boing Boing considers the lobster, or the most humane way to kill one:
According to Jennifer Basil, associate professor of Biology at City University of New York, Brooklyn College, it’s boiling. That’s because lobsters, like most invertebrates, don’t have the same kind of brain we do. Instead of having one, big central mass of neurons — i.e., the brain — lobsters spread their thinking around their bodies in several smaller masses, called ganglia.But consider David Foster Wallace’s essay “Consider the Lobster”, which begins its examination of these matters (in the pages of Gourmet) by quoting a statement of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council: “‘The nervous system of a lobster is very simple, and is in fact most similar to the nervous system of the grasshopper. It is decentralized with no brain. There is no cerebral cortex, which in humans is the area of the brain that gives the experience of pain.’” Says Wallace,
“Every segment has its own little brain doing its own thing,” says Basil. Which is why, she says, it’s better to boil the lobster and kill all those mini-brains at once. “Cutting it up just creates two uncomfortable lobsters.”
Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot of the neurology in this latter claim is still either false or fuzzy. The human cerebral cortex is the brain-part that deals with higher faculties like reason, metaphysical self-awareness, language, etc. Pain reception is known to be part of a much older and more primitive system of nociceptors and prostaglandins that are managed by the brain stem and thalamus.[12] On the other hand, it is true that the cerebral cortex is involved in what’s variously called suffering, distress, or the emotional experience of pain — i.e., experiencing painful stimuli as unpleasant, very unpleasant, unbearable, and so on.Endnote [12] adds:
To elaborate by way of example: The common experience of accidentally touching a hot stove and yanking your hand back before you’re even aware that anything’s going on is explained by the fact that many of the processes by which we detect and avoid painful stimuli do not involve the cortex. In the case of the hand and stove, the brain is bypassed altogether; all the important neurochemical action takes place in the spine.I’m in no position to decide who’s right here. I only invite you to consider what Jennifer Basil has to say, what David Foster Wallace has to say, and what the lobster might have to say.
A leader of tomorrow:
“This is college. Everyone cheats. Everyone cheats in life in general. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in this testing lab who hasn’t cheated on an exam. They’re making a witch hunt out of absolutely nothing, as if it were to teach us some kind of moral lesson.”That’s Konstantin Ravvin, a student at the University of Central Florida, commenting on a cheating scandal in professor Richard Quinn’s senior-level business-management course. Yes, the students involved — perhaps 200 of 600 — are seniors.
What is clear is that some students gained access to a bank of tests that was maintained by the publisher of the textbook that Quinn used. They distributed the test to hundreds of their fellow students, some of whom say they thought they were receiving a study guide like any other — not a copy of the actual test. . . .It turns out that Professor Quinn is on tape stating at the start of the semester that he creates the midterm and final examinations for the class. Thus the defense offered above — which seems a pretty feeble one.
[M]any have noted that the students’ initial intent was less troubling than their conduct once they realized they had an advance copy of the test. No one raised his or her hand during the test to acknowledge having had a copy of it, and the incident came to light only after Quinn statically analyzed the scores and saw that they ran a grade-and-a-half higher than in the past.
“No garlic”: thus begins Marilyn Monroe’s recipe for stuffing, now appearing in the New York Times.
