I was taking the dogs out last night and saw a periodical cicada emerging from it’s nymph stage. Kind of cool – definitely an interesting picture: Now I wonder if I have to worry about my fruit trees :-/

The Chronicle of Higher Education (and others) are reporting the largest cheating incident ever at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke. 34 students were caught having very similar answers on a take home exam. 33 were convicted of cheating, one of lying to the judicial board and four were exonerated. Cheating by students always amazes me. Back when I started college, an old engineering professor explained to the class that the most benefit you were likely to receive from cheating was, maybe, an increase of one letter grade. However, if he caught you, and he was likely to catch you, you would receive an F and be suspended from school. He encouraged us to “do the math and understand that it wasn’t worth it. I think this may be the right approach. Rather than trying to drill an honor code into students, we need to do two things: 1) encourage them to think about it as a risk management exercise; and 2) have all students grade a set of 30 papers. ...

Not a whole lot going on this weekend. A little shopping, a little work around the house, etc. Saturday, Bryn’s husband, Adam, came by and took a look at some trees that were worrying me. Having a master arborist tell you that, while they are dying, they won’t come down immediately was reassuring. I had this fear that they were going to come down any minute. We’ll probably still want to take them down this fall, but at least we get to pick the times 🙂 ...

After migrating two other sites off of my desktop, it was time to move the main site. I’ve now got fenris.org running on the LinkSky ISP. So far I’ve been very happy with them. I still need to turn on ssh access, but I am thrilled that they offer it. If anyone runs into any problems on fenris.org, please let me know.

etselec has her dreams to help her figure out what’s going on in her subconscious. I don’t dream. Okay, for all of you pedants, I do dream – I just never remember my dreams. Instead I have music. I find that almost any time I ear worm myself with a song that I haven’t heard recently, it’s my subconscious trying to tell me something. So what does it mean when you start thinking about a song where the protagonist is singing about her country turning into a war zone and being accidentally nuked by it’s ally, the U.S.? It probably means that I have reservations about forming a business relationship with a company that gets most a good chunk of its business from the DoD, DARPA and the Air Force. ...

As I’ve been working on the web front end for the PWC database, we ran into an interesting problem. Our patient records are implemented w/ a “tab style for the display of different parts of the record. Unfortunately, the folks using the database kept tabbing over to a different part of the record which wound up not saving any of the changes they made. My original quick fix for this was to have the tab buttons also save. But that made me nervous. I worried that if someone accidentally changed things or if I was giving a demo, a change to a new tab would save bad data. ...

I never planned to comment on the Duke Lacrosse rape case, but one observation keeps running through my head and it’s probably best to get it out. Back when I was in high school, I remember being told that, in a Shakespearean sense, tragedies were uplifting and comedies were depressing. That struck me as backwards for a while until I had watched/read more plays and understood that the tragedies, where the protagonist dies, often display the best elements of human character. There is nobility or love or honor in the characters as they face a universe that is, not hostile, but merely indifferent to the concerns of mankind. On the other hand, a comedy, where the main characters survive the play, often shows the pettiness of people: the bitterness, the backstabbing, the prejudice, the lying, etc. ...

I haven’t been so much with the blogging lately. For me, that is generally a sign that things are busy enough that I’m living life rather than blogging it [ed note: For all of you young readers, this is what is known as irony. When I have the most to say, I have the least time to say it in; conversely, when I write the most, I have the least to say]. ...

Okay, this is too cool. Icon has put together an audio clip of the old Sesame Street Martians listening/responding to the telephone. For the first time ever, I’ve actually put a ringtone on my phone instead of using the boring default! Thanks Icon!

I can’t turn around anymore without hearing something new about how colleges and universities are public enemy number 1 with the copyright industry. In early February, the Recording Industry Association of America released a top 25 list of the schools to which they have sent notices of alleged copyright infringement. Right after that, they started announced that they would start suing students and that they were going to send “pre-subpoena and “settlement notices to campuses. ...