Soapbox Moment

On Friday morning I parking in the Institute parking lot at UNT and found various empty beer bottles and cans strewn all over our parking lot.  The Institute is surrounded by a bunch of old crappy town-homes that are filled with guys, so it isn't really a surprise. 

Of course I cleaned them all up, after all, you never outgrow your Aaronic Priesthood responsibilities.  I just have to ask whatever happened to teaching people respect.  We teach that we're supposed to be tolerant and open-minded, but somewhere along the way we missed the lesson on not dumping your trash into the church parking lot next door?

Daily Comic Strips

I've added a series of links to my favorite comic strips over on the side of the blog. These are all the ones that I check daily. They are, for the most part, in a rank order starting with the one I like the most first (FoxTrot is the exception since it is only published on Sundays, otherwise it would be #3).

If you're a comic fan feel free to stop by and take advantage of my links so that you don't have to waste time typing in web pages. (I'm desperate to get my pathetic hit counter going.)

If there are any over there that I failed to include that I should have please leave a comment.

One good economic indicator

I know that there is a lot of gloom and doom out there about the economy, but something has finally happened to me to improve my economic situation:  I CAN BUY GENERIC OTC ZYRTEC!!!

In order for me to survive, I require a daily antihistamine plus an intranasal spray.  Claritin has been OTC for a couple of years now, but doesn't work during my worst times of the year.  Allegra is still prescription, but did have a generic that only cost $10/month after my insurance made me jump through major hoops, but it still didn't work as good as Zyrtec.  In order for me to use Zyrtec, I would have had to pay full price, which up until January was about $2.33 a pill.  Then Zyrtec went OTC which dropped the price (at Sam's Club) to about $0.40 a pill.  Now it is available as a generic from Sam's Club in a 350 pill box for $17.14 which is less than $0.05 a pill!  Totaling an annual savings of $832.20 vs. the prescription price.

If you're an allergy sufferer like me, I'm sure you appreciate just how good this news is.

Shame Shame

Read this in the Dallas Morning News Yesterday:

Associated Press

SAN ANTONIO – University of Texas at San Antonio students wanted to draft an honor code that discouraged cheating and plagiarizing.

Unfortunately, it appears they copied another school's code without proper attribution.

The student in charge of drafting the code said it was an oversight, but cheating experts say it shows a sloppiness among Internet-era students who don't know how to cite sources properly and think of their computers as cut-and-paste machines.

"That's the consequence of the Internet and the availability of things," said Daniel Wueste, director of the Rutland Institute for Ethics at Clemson University. "It doesn't feel like what would be in a book. You Google it and here it comes."

Akshay Thusu said he took over the project a month ago and inherited a draft from students who came before him. He said he discovered that a group of students attended a conference five years ago put on by Clemson's Center for Academic Integrity.

Materials from the conference, which are used by many universities, were probably the main source of UTSA's code, Mr. Thusu said. That's why parts of the UTSA draft match word-for-word the online version of Brigham Young University's code.

BYU credited the Center for Academic Integrity, but UTSA didn't. That will change, Mr. Thusu said, who plans to submit a draft with proper citation to the faculty senate.

"We don't want to have an honor code that is stolen," Mr. Thusu said.

John Barrie co-founded a company that checks student papers for plagiarism. He said Turnitin.com screens about 125,000 student papers per day against Internet sources, library journals and a database of student term papers.

About 30 percent of papers are "less than original," Mr. Barrie said. About half of the cheating hits come from the Internet, and the other half from student papers. A fraction comes from library sources, he said.

Mr. Barrie said Wikipedia.org, where any user can write and edit entries, is the biggest source.

"You tell me: Is that a scary trend?" Mr. Barrie said.

It is so nice to know that my alma mater's code of conduct is so respected that other schools are gladly copying it word for word.