Guilt and Innocence: A daily primer

A Modern Day Hitchhiker's Guide

A Slate article notes the paralells between Wikipedia and  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

It's too bad Douglas Adams wasn't able to see his vision brought to life. I don't mean the so-so movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'm talking about Wikipedia, the Web's own don't-panic guide to everything.

The parallels between The Hitchhiker's Guide (as found in Adams' original BBC radio series and novels) and Wikipedia are so striking, it's a wonder that the author's rabid fans don't think he invented time travel. Since its editor was perennially out to lunch, the Guide was amended "by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices on an afternoon and saw something worth doing." This anonymous group effort ends up outselling Encyclopedia Galactica even though "it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate."

The article goes on to offer some criticism on the Wiki form of things, most of which I think is fair. I'm not a huge user of Wikipedia, but I do think it's nice to have that ever-expanding, if somewhat unreliable knowledge base.

Things could be worse.

In usual fashion, I know multitudes about what is happening in the world around me and fail to know anything about my own University.

It turns out that a sociology teacher here is using a computer program to grade essays.

Ed Brent, professor of sociology at the Columbia, Mo., university, spent six years developing the program, which is called Qualrus, and has been testing it on his pupils for the past two. It works by scanning text for keywords, phrases and language patterns. Students load papers directly into the system via the Web and get nearly instant feedback.

How can a cold, mechanical computer comprehend the art and nuance of writing? The program is actually quite sophisticated, Brent said. It's not enough to just throw keywords into an essay willy-nilly. The program analyzes sentence and paragraph structure and can ascertain the flow of arguments and ideas. It gives each work a numeric score based on the weight instructors place on various elements of the assignment.

I almost wish Stephanie Craft would implement this instead of our scantron tests in J-1100. I'm so tired of trying to apply subjective ideas to an objective method, and this ar least seems like it might leave some hope.

Or, here's a revolutionary idea, the school could pay enough teacher's so that we could write papers in all our classes and have them individually graded. Of course, that may be way too revolutionary for Mizzou.

A cute note about Qualrus, though:

The name Qualrus is a play on the term "qualitative analysis" and is supposed to evoke the friendly image of a walrus. Brent said he plans to donate 1 percent of profits generated through the sale of the program to the World Wildlife Fund.

Well, at least someone is getting something out of this.

Why Apple sometimes sucks

This is an interesting Boing Boing post about the iTunes 4.7.1 Update:
Apple steals iTunes customers' paid-for rights to stream.

I'm an Apple fan, after all I'm typing this on my Powerbook, but the five users stream limit really irks me, so I've yet to upgrade my iTunes. I almost want to say that Apple is a little bit guilty of a bait and switch method here. As that post points out, Apple is changeing the way your products work after you've already purchased them.