This seems like a detail very much worth knowing!

Who is comcast rolling the change out for and is it in all markets yet? I have a business class account at home, and I am not seeing any symptoms yet. So I'm wondering if there are more details if this only will effect residential customers or what and to what extent exactly?

Maybe its just someone randomly surfing finding it through the garbage files... ;)

See here:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1228259&cid=27897059

Bedford's law is used in fraud detection. Its generalization might allow for more abstractive detection tools to comb through more general data and find evidence of other fabricated results.

I wonder what turnitin's report would give if you submitted a bunch of journal articles in the same field. I mean those *HAVE* to be original don't they? I don't believe this tool to be nearly as useful as it pitches itself to be.

I already gave a word rant in a different part, but I truly agree with your analysis. Thank you for pointing it out!

Sort of like 10,000 monkeys at 10,000 typewriters writing Shakespeare. Except its millions of students at millions of keyboards. 17 million students in high school and 17 million college students in 2003. That may be some sort of maximum extrema, but clearly there are millions if not tens of millions of each.

Lest not also forget unlike our monkey case that it also isn't just random key slaps and large partitions are writing about similar subjects thus they are in similar frames of critical thought considering similar things. Not just mmmm yummy banana!

How many Lord of the Flies essays do you think have ever been written or an analysis of Hamlet and Laertes as foils? How many of them would have to be written before every possible word combination for phrasing has been exhausted?

I have to imagine if every high school or college student has to write an essay on a similar topic it is a statistical inevitability that some phrase or perhaps even a full sentence or multiples of combinations thereof some where (beyond the citations) ends up being identical or significantly similar. Even more likely and perhaps even frequent when years of compounding occur and yes in the real long term it becomes possible that even two papers are completely identical like the OP mentions.

There are likely to be nuance changes in the overall tone in these papers which makes them unique and original works, but if TurnItIn has its way anyone whose ever had an overlapping sentence in "a statistically significant way" MUST have cheated even when given they didn't. Its insane!

And I don't think its fair use. If I download every journal article I better have damn well paid for them or I've infringed on copyrights. Whether I do something with them to profit or not.

If these clowns want to keep student's hard earned works then those students deserve to be compensated, because these clowns are making a profit on their hard work. And their analysis is clearly a derivative work never mind the fact they store things verbatim in their databases. Its theft on the highest order and the students have no choice, but to submit, because their teacher told them to. Maybe the college students (I know for a fact this service has been used at in the University of Iowa's Biology Department) have some effective recourse, but high school students? Really? How can they enter a contract to release their works if they aren't even adults?!?! The court was wrong to down play this part since the website uses it it must be in their common interpretation of the applicable law that release is a necessary component to use.

How high is the incidence of plagiarism and should we care? There has to be a better method that enables whatever necessary enforcement there "needs to be" versus the fact that if I didn't cheat then my paper is an original work that I created and you don't have a right to profit off of my work.

It is apparently not okay to ripoff record labels and the "hard working" musicians, but millions of high school and college students yeah fuck those kids its easy and right to make money off of their hard work!

This article seems to be an English version: http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSSEO88417

So did the Satellite get into orbit? Has anyone seen it as it went up or got into space? I would think a comm satellite would be relatively easy to pick up with radio equipment. Just curious.

Rosalind Franklin is a prime example of the fact that the noble prize is not awarded posthumously.

Also if they have some basic matrix math you might try consider teaching them graph theory. Such as: Discrete Mathematical Models with Applications to Social, Biological, and Environmental Problems.

With graph theory you can motivate everything from network analysis to topology there are also very interesting modern biological applications (like fragment assembly).

Similarly another idea might be a book like: A First Course in Mathematical Modeling. You could get any of the older editions online for cheaper than the current one.

This book demonstrates the modeling process and considers a wide array of mathematics with a lot of primers on advanced topics without required previous experience in linear programming, summations, differential equations, and dimensional analysis among others.

There are a lot of historic texts you can access parts or whole online. Otherwise some other books to consider might be.

The Structure of Proof: With Logic and Set Theory
Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science

Or if you feel like constructing your own based on something else you could couple this book with the episodes from the TV show and perhaps fit some data as examples of the wide applicability of mathematics. The Numbers Behind NUMB3RS: Solving Crime with Mathematics

This is just a small sampling of what could be. It depends on how much you want to fit to their current interests and career aspirations versus your own interest versus what they may see in college or simply later in life. You could show them higher things in statistics, computing, math itself, physics, biology. I mean the sky is the limit so more information would always be helpful. Any of the books I have put forward or many of the ones others have suggested seem to fit your criteria of being rigorous, but approachable.