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Education

Why Computer Science Students Cheat 694

Posted by Soulskill from the your-comments-will-be-analyzed-for-plagiarism dept.
alphadogg writes "Enrollment in undergraduate computer science courses is at an all-time high at colleges nationwide. But this trend that's been hailed by the US tech industry has a dark side: a disproportionate number of students taking these courses are caught cheating. More students are caught cheating in introductory computer science courses than in any other course on campus, thanks to automated tools that professors use to detect unauthorized code reuse, excessive collaboration, and other forbidden ways of completing homework assignments. Computer science professors say their students are not more dishonest than students in other fields; they're just more likely to get caught because software is available to check for plagiarism. 'The truth is that on every campus, a large proportion of the reported cases of academic dishonesty come from introductory computer science courses, and the reason is totally obvious: we use automated tools to detect plagiarism,' explains Professor Ed Lazowska, chair of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. 'We compare against other student submissions, and we compare against previous student submissions and against code that may be on the Web. These tools flag suspicious cases, which are then manually examined.'"

Comment Re:Yep that's why I avoid extensions (Score 3, Informative) 208

by gerardolm (#30175950) Attached to: Zero-Day Vulnerabilities In Firefox Extensions

Oh, advertising on /.'s comments?

Partnership Program

The Ad Muncher partnership program allows you to refer people to an address like:

            http://youraccountname.admuncher.com/

and receive 20% of all purchases later made by those people. For more information please visit the partnership program website.

"foropera" is just his partner alias. Sad.

Comment Re:Shouldn't exist anyway; that's what URNs are fo (Score 1) 224

by gerardolm (#30103068) Attached to: URL Shorteners Get Some Backup

What? There's no need to change any of the "means" of transmission. When a person reads an sms and a) copies the link to his/her PC browser or b) tells the phone to follow that link, does it matter that the TEXT in the link is "http://bit.ly/asdfasdf" or "short://0923abf84"? Nope, it doesn't. Any device connected to the internet can use any of the theoretical URN to URL mappers (there are tons and tons of research papers written on this and how DNS is crippling the web, etc.) I'm just way too tired to explain any further, but, please, next time you try to make a point, make sure you do have one.
Education

Best Introduction To Programming For Bright 11-14-Year-Olds? 962

Posted by timothy from the don't-forget-cty-and-other-nerd-camps dept.
firthisaword writes "I will be teaching an enrichment programming course to 11-14 year old gifted children in the Spring. It is meant as an introduction to very basic programming paradigms (conditions, variables, loops, etc.), but the kids will invariably have a mix of experience in dealing with computers and programming. The question: Which programming language would be best for starting these kids off on? I am tempted by QBasic which I remember from my early days — it is straightforward and fast, if antiquated and barely supported under XP. Others have suggested Pascal which was conceived as an instructional pseudocode language. Does anyone have experience in that age range? Anything you would recommend? And as a P.S: Out of the innumerable little puzzles/programs/tasks that novice programmers get introduced to such as Fibonacci numbers, primes or binary calculators, which was the most fun and which one taught you the most?" A few years ago, a reader asked a similar but more general question, and several questions have focused on how to introduce kids to programming. Would you do anything different in teaching kids identified as academically advanced?

Why Developers Are Switching To Macs 771

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-we-mostly-can-expense-them dept.
snydeq writes "Programmers are finding themselves increasingly drawn to the Mac as a development platform, in large part due to Apple's decision to move to Intel chips and to embrace virtualization of other OSes, which has turned Mac OS X into a flexible tool for development, InfoWorld reports. The explosion of interest in smartphone development is helping the trend, with iPhone development lock-in to the Mac environment the chief motivating factor for Apple as a platform of choice for mobile development. Yet for many, the Mac remains sluggish and poorly tuned for development, with developers citing its virtual memory system's poor performance in paging data in and out of memory and likening use of the default-network file system, AFS, to engaging oneself with 'some kind of passive-aggressive torture.' What remains unclear is whether Apple will lend an ear to this new wave of Mac-based development or continue to develop products that lock out uses programmers expect."
Cellphones

(Useful) Stupid BlackBerry Tricks? 238

Posted by kdawson from the maze-of-twisty-stupid-tricks dept.
Wolfger writes "Continuing the recent (useful) stupid theme: I've recently become a BlackBerry user, and I'm in love with the obvious(?) tricks, such as installing MidpSSH to access my home box remotely. But I'd like to know what more experienced Crackberry addicts can share."
Programming

Which Phone To Develop For? 344

Posted by kdawson from the building-a-house-around-it dept.
Rob MacKenzie writes "I have to decide on a mobile phone to develop for. We're building a house with some automation built in, and we want the mobile phone to be able to control certain aspects of it, and retrieve information on what's going on in the house. Our choices are the usual suspects: Apple's IPhone, RIM's Blackberry, Nokia's line (Symbian), any Android phone we can get in Canada, J2ME generic app, or a Web-based UI we would interact with in the phone's browser. What would you choose if you had to go with one? Which exact model? We will be buying a few to develop for, so price is a bit of an issue."
Security

We Know Who's Behind Storm Worm 169

Posted by kdawson from the can-you-spell-rule-of-law dept.
jmason reminds us of a story from a few weeks back that got little attention, adding "This doesn't seem to be just bluster; as far as I can tell, everyone who knows the RBN now agrees that this seems likely." Brian Krebs's Security Fix blog at the Washington Post carried a story about the Storm worm containing some pretty staggering allegations. "Dmitri Alperovitch [of Secure Computing] said federal law enforcement officials who need to know have already learned the identities of those responsible for running the Storm worm network, but that US authorities have thus far been prevented from bringing those responsible to justice due to a lack of cooperation from officials in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the Storm worm authors are thought to reside. In a recent investigative series on cyber crime featured on washingtonpost.com, St. Petersburg was fingered as the host city for one of the Internet's most profligate and cyber-crime enabling operation — the Russian Business Network. Alperovitch blames the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the political influence of operatives within the Federal Security Service (the former Soviet KGB) for the protection he says is apparently afforded to cybercrime outfits such as RBN and the Storm worm gang. 'The right people now know who the Storm worm authors are,' Alperovitch said. 'It's incredibly hard because a lot of the FSB leadership and Putin himself originate from there, where there are a great deal of people with connections in high places.'"
Education

Monkeys and Humans Learn the Same Way 91

Posted by Zonk from the we're-all-ugly-bags-of-mostly-water dept.
Lucas123 writes "A new study from UCLA showed that monkeys, like humans, learn faster by being actively involved in the learning process rather than just having information placed before them, according to a story in ScienceDaily. In the study, two rhesus macaque monkeys learned to put up to 18 photos on an ATM-like touch screen in a row. 'The monkeys did much better on the first three days when they had the help than when they didn't, but on the test day, it completely reversed. When they studied with the hint, there is no evidence they learned anything about the list. They learned the lists when they didn't get the help.'"
User Journal

Journal SPAM: Will Bush Cancel The 2008 Election? 10

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius
Published on Tuesday, July 31, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

Will Bush Cancel The 2008 Election?

by Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis

It is time to think about the unthinkable.

The Bush Administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election.

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