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Is “Academic Integrity” a Significant Issue or Just Another Moral Panic?
This story showed up on TechDirt the other day and it dovetails nicely with another “hot button” topic in academia we’ve been discussing in class: Plagiarism. Over the past several years, the academic world has worked itself into a bit of a frenzy over these issues, turning to anti-plagiarism tools like Turnitin.com and, in my…
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First Test Down
My grad school class had its first test yesterday. I’d say that it went pretty well, and not just because the multiple-choice section was accidentally made from the answer key. The essay questions will likely carry a lot more weight now, but I’m as cautiously optimistic as I can be after a test I spent…
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Why Two Degrees?
Looking over the long road ahead of me, one might consider asking, incredulously, why somebody would want to do an MD/PhD program at all. It’s certainly a justified question, to which the short answer is that I think receiving training in both clinical medicine and research science will be especially valuable in my future career.…
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The Shambling Menace
Okay, I admit it. I have a deep-seated irrational fear of zombies. I know, I know, they’re fictional and scientifically improbable if not impossible—but if they were real, the situation is ghastly. There’s something about the zombie apocalypse that invokes a more holistic fear than your typical doomsday scenario: Even beyond the devouring horde’s exponential…
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Killing in the Name Of
This season I’ve started following the television show House again and I’ve taken advantage of the “bye” week to catch up. I doubt any avid followers of the show have as much lag time between air time and watch time as I do, but in the off chance you fail worse than me: Spoilers Ahead.…
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Who Really Has the Moral High Ground on Filesharing?
A number of people I have talked to claim that they do not engage in filesharing because “it’s wrong,” a sentiment that seems deeply rooted in the idea that sharing files involves taking something that doesn’t belong to you; that is, stealing. These people believe they are taking the “moral high ground” by refusing to…
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Why Cancelling Dollhouse Might Not Have Been Such a Bad Thing
Don’t get me wrong, I’m almost as happy Dollhouse got picked up for another season as are the acolytes of Joss Whedonism. It had some real downers (I’m not sure I could really accept the “blind girl with camera eyes infiltrating a cult for ATF and FBI” plotline), but I think all but the querulous…
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Bachelors of Science
Ars Technica recently ran a post on how the scientific method that is taught during early education differs vastly from the actual way science is practiced. This is something I’ve had personal experience with as I worked in a real lab over the past year. Rather than the rather linear progression of observation → hypothesis…
Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.