You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.
I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I’ve worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.
In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company’s staff of roughly 50 writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.
November 15, 2010
The Shadow Scholar
This just sounds Star Trek
Finding the Universe’s 500 Million Light Year Yardstick – Technology Review: “”
Using Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations. Awesome. The previous way of measuring distances larger than several parsecs was via Cepheid variable stars (if you know how bright a certain star is, you can measure its distance by measuring its relative brightness). This is a much more accurate way. Plus, it sounds cool.
And don’t miss pics of the incredible Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Inspired!
Google Graphic
Google had a beautiful graphic up yesterday commemorating the 160th birthday of Robert Louis Stevenson. In case you missed it, here it is:
Hackers
NPR’s Sci Fri special on emerging Hacker Spaces.
Skip the first few minutes, though. It’s mostly old iPhone news.