Freedom, anybody?

WTF is going on! Several blogging and messaging sites have been forced to close, by the US government. One of them had 70,000 users, who no longer have access to their blogs and never will. The blogsite is permanently closed. The webhost (who hosts the blogging site) says they had to close it because the blogsite violated the terms of service. CNET says that it was because al-Qaida materials were found on the blogsite's servers. And the CTO for the webhoster is saying the government didn't make them shut down the blogsite, it was the webhost's own decision. Which still makes me say "What the Fuck!

I understand shutting down terrorist information. No matter how much I believe in freedom, I don't believe in letting al-Qaida recruit people and build bombs. But shutting down the entire site! That's ridiculous! I'm fairly certain the blogsite wasn't intentionally hosting al-Qaida material. Hell, for all we know there are al-Qaida blogs on Blogger. I'm pretty sure that Google wouldn't shut down their entire blog service because of it. They'd just destroy the individual blogs.

I really feel badly for the bloggers who used that blogsite. They may have lost years of material and now have no recourse for getting it back. And this becomes yet another instance of a small company (the blogsite) being destroyed, whereas a larger company (Blogger) wouldn't be. So there goes your freedom of choice getting smaller. Just give in and choose the global corporation, forget the mom & pop shops! Screw them, they should have sold out when they had the chance.

Woohoo - Chupacabras!

I just love all the Chupacabra sightings. They have been doing DNA testing and so far they've turned out to be hairless/mangy coyotes. That seems likely. My first thought, after seeing photos, was that it was a coyote-dog mix of some kind. There are a few hairless dogs that look pretty weird (Chinese Crested, Xoloitzcuintli) and have that odd grey skin color too. Don't forget, most of the World's Ugliest Dog Contest winners have been part Chinese Crested. I actually thought that would be pretty neat, if some pet had gotten lost and bred with a coyote and had enough puppies to form a little band of goat-suckers down in Texas.

Googling

There's an interesting article about Google and their book project at Yahoo. Personally, I don't Google things, I Yahoo! them. Most search engines nowadays have a lack of privacy, but Google seems to want to database every single thing that you do, so I stay away from it. Supposedly, you can even search and find e-mails that people have written with their Google accounts.

Anyway, the article is interesting because it talks about how people look something up, but never go farther than usually the 1st page of the search results. That people are letting Google think for them, instead of thinking for themselves. I've seen things like this in my classroom too. The students don't want to do anything that takes effort. I know that sounds like all students throughout history, but it's worse now. If it takes a lot of effort, many of them don't seem to know how to do it.

They also can't follow simple instructions. I had my students write short little essays at one point (they read an article in a book, then answered the questions that followed it). I gave them a specific list of how I wanted the essay - 12 pt Times Roman font, double spaced, 1.25" margin, and it must be long enough that it runs onto a 2nd page; it couldn't be just one page of type. I put the instructions up on my website, and went over them all in class. Most of my students could not follow those instructions, or just chose to ignore them, thinking that it didn't matter and I would take their essay anyway (I took them, I just gave them a bad grade).

After the first essay, I discovered that I also had to post instructions on writing an essay in general - that you should have an introduction, your main points, and then a conclusion - because most of the students didn't seem to know how to do that. In fact, there were only a handful of students that I would deem ready for college after reading their essays. I was teaching a freshmen course, but that was still a shock to me, that so many people today simply cannot write at all. And some of them were upset about writing an essay because this was not for an English class! (Hell, I once had to write an essay on a math exam!)

I hate to harp back to the "good old days," but I'd swear that when I first started college, if you didn't learn the subject material, you would flunk the course. And if you cheated, you would flunk the course. And when you got to your upper-level classes, you had to study. I studied my ass off for my bachelor's degree, but now it seems like most colleges are turning into diploma mills. And at some colleges it's almost impossible to flunk someone for cheating (I won't name the college, but one professor I know was put through the wringer for trying to flunk a student who had outrageously plagiarized her final paper - it was so bad that he said he'd never do it again, he'd just give the student another chance). Since when did cheating become something that's allowable? Why have standards dropped so low? The same college where the cheating incident took place now offers 8-10 remedial math sections each semester. If you can't pass basic math, how did you get into college!!! Forget that, how did you graduate high school!!!