Sun, 24 Oct 1999 found Andrew Lander writing:
my god, it's hilarious! this is the kind of thing that in a sane world
would be joke. unfortunately it's real.
my favorite is this item from their FAQ:
7.What if my paper was accidently flagged as being unoriginal?
If your work was flagged as unoriginal then,
depending on the originality score, it was probably not that original.
---this is just too much.
It sounds like whenever you upload something to check it, that thing itself gets added to their database. Furthermore, they offer a free trial where you can upload up to 5 items. That means that potentially their database could be polluted by some clever "originality hackers".
hmm....
interestingly enough, there is a company at plagiarism.COM which also offers a plagiarism detection service, but it is not internet-based. it relies on a different method - remove every 5th word of a text, then ask the writer to fill in the blanks. it relies on the idea that if they plagiarized it, they probably wont remember the words, but if they wrote it themselves, the probably would. Seems like a much better method than relying on a computer and a web database.
this displays the 2 different ways that people often try to solve problems of human behavior: one, with technology, another, with human interaction.
smh
Steev Hise, Would-be World-Wide Web Wizard (WWWWW) steevAThise.org http://www.cyborganic.com/people/steev recycled art site: http://www.detritus.net ----------------------------------------------------------------- "UNIX is like a rubic's cube ... you feel so smart for figuring it out, but you still aren't getting any work done. " -Mykle Hansen -----------------------------------------------------------------
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