Thursday, November 16, 2006

George W. Bush is Secretly Grading Freshman Essays!

Well, OK, not really, but I found this article, wherein paranoid Canadian undergrads fear that the US will mine Turnitin.com's database for gems of terrorism intel ... which I came to from the comments of this article, in which US high school students share the same fear.

Let me assure all the high school students in North America -- no one believes there is intelligence of any kind in your papers. Your subject-verb disagreement, sentence fragments, poor diction, and vacuous "ideas" are safe from the nefarious US government.

4 comments:

  1. I don't know. That paper I wrote on "Sleeper Cell Management: Fear, Ignorance, and Coordination Difficulties" might just spawn some interest.

    Mind you, I wrote it in the pre-9/11 world and I was dealing with Old One Cults, but it still might raise some eyebrows. One might find the third chapter, "How to Keep Your Deep Ones in the Dark" of particular interest.

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  2. Anonymous5:24 PM

    Would my high school junior year research paper on Doonesbury qualify as terrorism intel? Some might argue . . .

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  3. Anonymous7:30 PM

    oh, trust me -- if data mining can be done of a particular database, it probably is being done. Take my word on it.

    Though, methinks this may just be an elaborate ploy by lazy students and the International Paper Farm Cabal to slander turnitin.com's effors, which I believe are just and true.

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  4. It's not just turnitin.com that people have concerns about. Faculty are insisting that their interlibrary loan requests not be funneled through the USA because they are subject to surveillance there.

    This is entirely reasonable.

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