RumorHell

Lawgeek (who’s just quit his job to become a university prof) posts a roundup of students’ how-to-cheat YouTube videos. The best one is definitely the guy who scans the label off a Coke bottle, replaces the nutritional information with cheaty stuff, prints it, and glues it around a bottle (presumes that your teacher lets you bring Coke into class — I suppose this works best in schools where Coke has struck a deal requiring their products to be available at all times and in all places.)

When I was a kid, we were obsessed with figuring out methods for cheating — far more so than with actual cheating itself. We used binary encoding to sneak in long lists of numbers, stitching them up the outer seams of our jeans or cuffs — a stitch for 1, no stitch for 0 — that we could read by fingertip. After we learned the resistor color-coding scheme, we started to shave pencils and then decorate them with colored bands that actually contained the same lists of numbers. We tried — and failed — to produce a decent tapping code for interactive cheating, though this is certainly possible. One exciting failure was a light-based semaphore wherein the conspirators would flash reflected discs of light up on the wall over the teacher’s head using our watch-faces.

The kids in these videos are awfully sanguine about their teachers’ YouTube cluelessness. I’m relatively certain that the adorable little English moppet pictured here has never actually succeeded in using his cheat, as it relies on your teachers allowing you to keep playing cards on your desk during the exam. This is surely a purely theoretical cheat.

Link

The Rogue Columnist blog has a thought-provoking entry on reasons that the newspaper industry is reeling and teetering — it’s not just “the Internet exists,” but rather a set of things the industry did wrong, continues to do wrong, and should fix if the newspapers are to emerge from the net with still-beating hearts:

The biggest problem, of course, had nothing to do with the newsrooms. It was the collapse of an unsustainable business model. Simply put, the model involved sending miniskirted saleswomen out to sell ads at confiscatory rates to lecherous old car dealers and appliance-store owners. Protecting these profits, whether from national, local or classified ads, became the central focus of newspaper bosses. These areas were the most vulnerable to new competitors. But the condition of the industry by the 1990s – risk averse, promising unrealistic margins, losing its best talent, ignoring ideas outside its preconceived notions – left it unable to meet these threats.

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(via Making Light)

Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels over the years, this stroppy “no playing in the churchyard” sign from Seven Sisters in London.

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ARMSFLOW.org is a data visualization project that shows international arms transactions between 1950 and 2006. The site (a big ole Java applet) was created by Jeffrey Warren of Vestal Design, based on data from Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Link, via monochrom blog.

Authorities in Afghanistan have sentenced a 23-year-old journalism student to death for having downloaded and shared copies of a report criticizing the oppressive treatment of women in some Islamic societies. Snip from Wired News Threat Level blog:

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh (at right), who is a journalism student at Balkh University and a writer for Jahan-e Naw, was sentenced last October after downloading a report from a Farsi website that criticized Islamic fundamentalists who misrepresent statements in the Koran to justify the oppression of women. Kambaksh was arrested after someone filed a complaint against him. He is accused of blasphemy for distributing the report to other students and teachers at his school.

He was tried by a sharia court (which overseas Islamic religious law) and was not allowed legal representation, according to news reports. The Afghan Senate passed a motion this week supporting the sentence, according to the British newspaper The Independent.

Link.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF.org) has a statement on the case here, and a petition for Kambaksh’s release here.

Mark Boyle of Bristol is walking from Bristol, England to India without bringing or touching any money.

On his 9,000-mile trek to Gandhi’s birthplace, he will have to pick his way through war-ravaged Afghanistan.

Mr Boyle, 28, said: “I will be offering my skills to people. If I get food in return, it’s a bonus”

He says he is part of the freeconomy movement - a group which began in the US and aims to bring about a moneyless society.

He said: “My interest started five or six years ago when I was studying economics.

“The more we accumulate wealth, the more it leads to a breakdown of community.”

Mr Boyle aims to walk between 15 and 45 miles a day, with the goal of getting to Porbandar on India’s west coast.

The BBC plans to follow Mr. Boyle’s walk.

Link

The Guardian has a silly article about George Bush’s favorite painting, a 1916 cowboy scene by WHD Koerner. The painting hangs in his office, and he tells people that it’s a “beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us.”

The painting first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1916 “to illustrate a story about a horse thief, and captioned as a picture of his flight from the law. Only later did it illustrate a story about Methodism.”

The paper showed the painting to four people: a professor of gender studies, a psychoanalyst, a military historian, and a “psychotherapist and ex-Labour spin doctor,” and asked them to analyze the President based on the painting and his story about it.

Derek Draper, psychotherapist and ex-Labour spin doctor: “Most revealing, though, is the simple fact that a healthy mind would look at this image and not be certain what it depicted. Bush, though, as he once told Senator Joe Biden, doesn’t “do nuance”. Instead he invariably replaces “not-knowing” with prejudiced certainty. A foolish psychological mindset when it comes to art or life; a catastrophic one in politics.”

It’s interesting that these analysts are taking Bush to task for inventing a story about the painting, instead of having ambiguous feelings about it. As the article states, it has been used at least twice to illustrate two very different stories. What’s wrong with coming up with your own interpretation of what a painting means? This is probably the first time in my life that I’m on the President’s side. (Also, it’s a wonderful painting.) Go, Bush!
Link (Thanks, Jane!)

Michael sez, “According to this splendid article in the British Medical Journal, the recent redesign of two popular British chocolate snacks has disrupted a simple, affordable teaching method used to assess ‘testicular volume’ in pubescent boys.”

We previously reported that two chocolates — Teasers and Truffles — were strikingly similar to the 8 ml bead of the orchidometer used to assess testicular volume. We therefore suggested that they could be used to stage puberty in males and, because of their wide availability and low cost, commended their use.

We were recently dismayed to discover that the manufacturer has changed the shape of both these chocolates. Both are now flat bottomed, and even non-specialists will notice that they bear little resemblance to testes. More disturbingly, they are no longer much use for assessing testicular volume. Only one of six paediatric endocrine specialists (comprising trainees, consultants, and specialist nurses) felt confident that they could use the new Teasers or Truffles to gauge testicular volume relative to the 8 ml cut-off which indicates that puberty is proceeding satisfactorily.

Link

(Thanks, Michael!)

Today in my ongoing series of photos from my travels over the years, this shot of a statue depicting “filial piety” (a young mother allows her motherfather-in-law to nurse at her breast while her son cheers her on) from the awesomely weird Haw-Par Villa, a Tiger Balm-sponsored statue-garden/Confucianist theme-park in Singapore and Hong Kong. I’ve heard rumours that it’s now defunct, which is a crine shame.

Link, Link to more photos of Haw-Par Villa