In an interesting incident at UVA, 48 students were accused, convicted and expelled for plagiarism. I was always reluctant to embrace a similar "honor code" at my school for several reasons, the first being a desire not to simply copy UVA. Admissions officers at both schools describe freshman as "first-years", although only the school founded by Jefferson has an actual explanation behind it: namely, that students will continue to learn even after their college experience is over. There is no explanation at my alma mater, which leads me to believe they simply copied the other tradition, although poorly, because no one refers to sophomores as "second-years".

The second reason was, like the first, mainly an issue of implementation. At my school, students were required to sign a document saying that they wouldn't cheat each time they registered for courses at the beginning of a year. By signing, I mean that they had to press F8 or some such button at the appropriate moment after being confronted with a large page of text. Obviously, few students read the entire passage, as it merely served as an impediment to signing up for classes. This is akin to software licensing: no one normally reads the End User License Agreement (EULA) shipped with every copy of almost every for-profit software package that attempts to indemnify the software makers against responsibility for almost anything. In fact, most EULA's tend to imply that should the software go beserk, kill hundreds and then destroy the world, they could not be held responsible. It's only luck that apparently holds these programs together. A guy at work fell victim to one of these EULA's that, in clear text, informed him that it would methodically scan his list of e-mail contacts and send a message to each of them. Like any good user, he didn't read the EULA, clicked okay, and found himself sending messages to hundreds of people. By the time I walked over, the program had already e-mailed 86 people, using a method most would describe as malicious, or viral at least. Yet he implicitly agreed to the proposition, by signing the EULA.

Because of this, the school decided to implement a new honor code system, with a giant piece of paper that students would sign each year to affirm their unwillingness to cheat along with their duty to narc on any student they found cheating. They also kept the old system in place, while making the new system mandatory for all students. This seemed idiotic to me for several reasons, the first being that at UVA, the honor system is a matter of pride. Students adhere to it out of tradition, not because it's necessary to sign up for classes. By continuing to keep the screen in the sign-up process, while adding another mandatory step, school officials drained the process of any sort of pride. Yet they added no greater security for the same reason: at UVA, students are encouraged to narc on one another because the honor system demands that students are able to police themselves without administrative intervention. I don't particularly like a system that encourages this sort of behavior, because I feel it should be the administration and the professors job to discourage cheating. What's interesting about the latest incident is that a student informed the professor, who used a computer program to detect instanes of plagiarism, who then reported back to the students who oversaw the honor system. This remarkeable occurence reflects two problems: one, that the student who knew others were cheating either didn't know specific students had cheated, and thus acted on a hunch, or did know specific names and chose not to go to the student honor system directly. (Perhaps a fellow student could've written the program or the student honor system taking responsibility.) Two, by using a computer program to identify cheaters, the professor revealed that the faculty were in a far easier position to detect cheaters than the student body.

Imagine if the police only asked witnesses outside of banks to identify thieves, instead of asking the clerks and tellers. Obviously, the bank has a responsibility to protect itself from theft, so training clerks and tellers to notice details about criminals might be a far better endeavor than relying on fairly subjective witnesses outside the bank. Likewise, professors who have seen thousands of papers before, and dealt with cheating on a regular basis, might be a better group to police plagiarism than a student body, even one as rigidly honest as UVA. (After all, 48 students out of the group who took his course were about 2 percent of the total, a far lower number than those who cheat in real life.)

If I were in charge of my school, I'd abandon the mandatory honor code signing, abolish the incentive to have students narc on each other, and instead require that all texts be submitted electronically. From month to month, year to year, there would be a record of everyone's papers. Papers could then be filtered so that texts that appeared to contain plagiarism could be measured against one another and judged accordingly. We have the technology. We can rebuild it.

Do you need expert lobbying services? Do you want to see the transformation of a non-standards-compliant website into one that can be viewed by anyone, on almost any platform, anywhere? If so, head over to the old site www.peyser.com and see if we can help you out. Through my own personal hubris, I did some stuff I shouldn't have, and have since been punished for my audacity. That aside, we really do great work, and after the first of next month, you'll be able to see the new website in all of its glory. What do we do, in a nutshell? Lobby for transportation interests. So if you own a small bus or train company, give us a call! I'll thank you, and the 'werkz will thank you by extension.

And no, I haven't sold out. I just want people to see the "before" site before they see the "after" site, to tell the difference.

I just discovered over $150 worth of phone charges to the phone in the 'werkz. One of the companies billed at over $50 a minute. Fifty dollars a minute? What kind of phone conversation could be worth that much money? Only some sort of weird money-laundering organization might be able to make use of a scheme like that. I'm going to dig to the bottom of this even if it means going up against the giant that is Verizon. I'm already paying through the nose for DSL service, and to add additional charges would be sheer madness. It's getting to the point that my cell-phone services, through AT&T are cheaper than my land line.

Howard Kurtz in yesterday's Washington Post said Daschle had gone crazy because of his criticism of Rush Limbaugh. Howie even quotes Rush in this excerpt:

Here's a sample of some of Limbaugh's "harsh" rhetoric:

"Guess who John F. Kerry is getting presidential candidacy advice from, ladies and gentlemen? None other than The Loser, Michael S. Dukakis. I don't think God is generous enough to give us another liberal Massachusetts Democrat to run against."

And: "Another interesting observation is a Sally Quinn piece from the Washington Post this past weekend titled, 'All Dough And No Mo'.' She's the only writer who called 'Bubba vs. Dubya' right. Before the election, the press billed it as a war between the two - but after the election, nobody reported how it went. Bubba just disappeared. Even though her column contains a whole lot of Barbra Streisand BS, she does mention that the ideas of Bush soundly defeated the non-ideas of Bill Clinton."

Golly gee. We've heard worse on "Crossfire."

As spinsanity points out in this piece, Limbaugh's rhetoric is anything but normal. To test out a theory I had, I went to his website and typed in "devil" into the search engine. What came up?

The first result that comes up is a page which implies not only that Tom Daschle should die, but includes this illustration which depicts him with devil horns, a bright pink tie(?) and holding a giant Soviet flag. The number three item on the search results page (again, using the word "devil") turned out to be some of Rush's favorite quotes. One of the more memorable? Try this on for size:

"Josef Stalin is an angel to liberals, while George W. Bush is the devil. The Chinese communists are angels, but in Wisconsin hunting deer is the devil. Any attempt to please or mollify these people is an exercise in futility."

Gee, I've never heard Begala or Carville on Crossfire say Josef Stalin was an angel. Or that the president or hunters in Wisconsin were devils. Or a love for Chinese communists. If it was that easy for me to find vitriol with a simple search, how hard could it have been for Mr. Kurtz?

From this article in the Post: some surprising stats.

The season finale of "The Bachelor" on ABC beat the underpants off CBS's "Victoria's Secret Fashion Show" show Wednesday night because women rule and CBS forgot.

The first hour of the finale -- the part that went head-to-head with CBS's one-hour skivvies show -- copped 27 million viewers.

In that same hour, the CBS special attracted only 10.5 million people. Millions more people were interested in Martin Sheen pondering the immense political ramifications of honoring a secret request from the hard-line faux Iranian ayatollah to allow his son into the United States for life-saving surgery than were interested in Naomi Campbell in a garter belt -- and what's up with that?

We know this because NBC's "The West Wing" flattened the lingerie show in the 9 p.m. time slot. Even stranger, more men were interested in the musings of Martin Sheen than in Naomi in a garter belt.

How 'bout them apples, eh? It just goes to show that if you have a good show, with a good following, that you'll do well in the ratings. Hell, 24 beat election night coverage two tuesdays ago. And it was way more uplifting, despite being about a nuclear bomb detonation in Los Angeles.

So I meet this lady from Texas last night, and somehow, on every single topic, she managed to take a position that seemed completely illogical. Well, except for liking Ann Richards. I agreed with her on that. But then again, I brought that up. Converting federal workers to contractors? She was all for it. (Being a contractor to the government, she said she was much more efficient than any lazy federal employee.) The homeless? According to something "she saw" some of them are making six figures and driving home to the burbs at night. Grr. I can never understand the whole welfare-queen alligators-in-the-sewers urban myth deal when it comes to the poor. For some reason people seem inclicned to believe that somehow, against all probability, the poor people on the street actually aren't doing that bad. It's some sort of denial, I guess. I pointed out that all the people begging and/or homeless near my workplace tend to sleep a few feet away in an alley behind a church. I thought it was ironic that across the street, at another church, there's a huge blue banner that says Faith Works Wonders! The Texan used this opportunity to say that she knew of an alley too, in Austin, where she used to see some homeless people. And that she was once playing golf and noticed a guy who had been in the alley, and she asked him about it and he claimed not to know what she was talking about.

For god's sake! Does anyone think that the homeless are merely drifting between absolute poverty and country-club shenanigans? Well, anyone else, at least? I tried to point out that if she'd made a mistake, that the guy on the golf course probably would've been a little upset that she thought he'd lived in an alley. She didn't seem to appreciate the dry wit. Okay, time to get back to work. My tasks continue to expand but the deadline's going nowhere.

So I'm flipping channels last night and after seeing the first episode ever of Daria (not a funny episode, at that) I saw the moment on the show the Bachelor (of course I'm not linking to it!) where he dumped the runner-up. She seemed pretty upset about it, and I recall thinking that, although fairly attractive, she didn't seem like a knockout. But the main bachelor didn't appear all that attractive either, so I thought, hopefully the winning woman was more attractive. Damn, was I wrong. She looked much much older and was even worse. Am I the only person in America who feels this way? Of course, the first girl breaking down in the limo didn't do anything to make her look better, so perhaps she looked better on the dates. But then, as I'm programming my vcr to record today's episode of dragonball z I notice that someone left the channel on good morning america, and sure enough, they're plugging the winner of the show. Not a great looking couple. For television, that is. Okay, back to my regular snobbish programming.

For some reason I've always been able to overheat quite rapidly in most environments, especially during winter. It's an annoying problem, to say the least, because although I enjoy the weather being cooler, fashion and common sense dictate an arsenal of heavy clothes, overcoats and gloves be worn at all times. Plus, unlike during the summer, when one can wear light clothing and expect that temperatures inside buildings will be much much cooler, during the winter building managers seem to take delight in cranking up the thermostats to much hotter than normal. And if you work in an office building, there's no way to open a window or adjust the temperature, unlike the summer when the level of the blinds can easy compensate for too much heat or too little warmth. And the most annoying aspect of all is that in all seasons, people with cold-blooded natures can simply wear more clothing to stay warm. Conversely, those of us furry mammals who are quite capable of generating our own heat can't remove all of our clothes unless we wish to be social ostracized, or fired. So it would only be natural that most places should keep the temperature at the lowest level anyone in the office desires. Well, maybe not natural, but definitely just. Okay, back to work in the old sweatshop...