I think there is one other problem as well. When you have a vaccine that isn't 100% effective, at least a subset of the population might treat it as if it was 100%. People might engage in more risky behaviors assuming that they're immune. If you take the full effect of a vaccine into account, it might even cause an *increase* in HIV.

Hopefully this is just a step to a better vaccine.

It's precisely this fact that makes me discourage students from online distance education whenever possible. Both in undergrad and grad school, I learned way more from random discussions, be they with other students or professors, than I ever did during the official class time. So much of an education is had by being around others who are also interested in the same things and eager to talk about it.

Thank you. I get really tired of hearing people claim that professors are teaching out of their textbooks to make money. VERY FEW textbook authors make any real money, and none of them make much from their own classes.

Some, I'm sure, do it for an ego boost, but most people I know that teach out of their own textbook do it for completely honest reasons. They really think they know the best way to teach material and want to teach it that way. Often there is lots of nuance that they want to teach that isn't captured in any particular book.

If a professor honestly thinks they have the best way to teach some subject, they have to write a book. And, if they want that book adopted by others, they have to get the book published. While we have gone a long way with free textbooks on the web, the fact is that you're very unlikely to get that book adopted by others unless you have the publishing industry sending out representatives pushing your book. So -- while it may seem silly that professors don't give away their books given how little they make on them -- many use publishers because they honestly want the material to be taught in a better way.

I don't think it did, primarily because the media wasn't as partisan then as it is now. There was no Fox News or MSNBC.

Not that I'm interested in defending Quayle, but I always found the spelling bit a red herring. Lots of *very* smart people can't spell. The ability to memorize a large list of words (or the unwillingness to do so) doesn't convey intelligence one way or the other. I always find it strange that people want to equate knowing lots of little bits of information with intelligence.

It's not so easy as you think. People can often modify the apparent plagiarism my changing words around, substituting synonyms, adding in extra words. Then you have to search for different parts of the sentence, considering different wordings. Sometimes people purchase papers from their friends or a service who never posted their paper online.

When you have a class of 100 students with 2-3 potential plagarism cases, it can take significant time to track down. All this is taking away from time the instructor could be giving helpful feedback to students who are interested in learning.

The services that exist now are already very good at saving time by focusing one's attention on particular cases that can be proven. If those tools get better it can reduce that time even more. Overall this will significantly improve the quality of education by both freeing up time and also preventing the incentive to cheat yourself out of an education by plagarizing.

I watched the video, and it provides a compelling argument assuming that you're interested in only one thing: not going to jail. And while that is a pretty big thing that we all care about, we often usually care about other things as well.

For instance, if I'm not a serial killer but the police think I am, I would certainly want to talk to the police even if doing so increased my risk of going to jail by a small percent chance because I have a larger interest in helping the police find the guilty party. And lets be clear, the lawyer on video provides some scenarios about how talking to the police could hurt you, but he provides no statistics or any evidence whatsoever about how likely those things are to occur.

Turnitin is not disciplinary action. If the turnitin report comes back indicating plagarism, then the instructor investigates using the turnitin report and then takes disciplinary action. Many papers come back flagged by turnitin, but they are often false positives (quotations, commonly used phrases, etc.) Any university that doesn't require some additional effort on the part of the instructor is a joke.

That's a bit of leap in logic. For the sake of argument, suppose that requiring turnitin.com submission signals a lack of trust. Why does a lack of trust on the part of an instructor signal a willingness to be unfair? It seems to be like being overly diligent to maintain honesty signals exactly the opposite, that the instructor cares about the legitimacy of her grade.

In a constitutional democracy, one should hope that the government (in particular the courts) work against the will of the people. That is the entire point of having a constitution which guarantees civil liberties to minorities. If the government never worked against the will of the people, then we wouldn't have any guarantees for groups which have been excluded from the political process.

Right, like the market worked out overpaid idiotic executives and badly designed operating systems. People put way to much faith in the markets ability to solve small inefficiencies like this.

Like natural selection, the market only acts on what's there and cannot make individual companies totally efficient. A company only needs to be resistant to being out-competed to survive. And this can be done in a variety of ways that have nothing to do with efficiency (intellectual property, anyone?).

Thank you! I'm a PhD working in academia and nothing makes me angrier than listening to doctors, lawyers, and (shudder) MBAs justify their outrageous salaries by saying "we have to work so hard." I entered a field where less than 50% of those who seek jobs in the field can find them, our pay stinks, and we have to spend 5-6 years after undergrad as basically indentured servants.

Universities that train doctors, lawyers, and MBAs survive because of us. We spent equally long or longer training, but we're perfectly happy to take lower salaries because we love what we do.