Random links
- Spanish mayor robs supermarkets
- "A Spanish mayor who became a cult hero for staging robberies at supermarkets and giving stolen groceries to the poor sets off this week on a three-week march that could embarrass the government and energise anti-austerity campaigners."
- Dozens of Plagiarism Incidents Are Reported in Coursera's Free Online Courses
- "Students taking free online courses offered by the startup company Coursera have reported dozens of incidents of plagiarism... This week a professor leading one of the so-called Massive Open Online Courses posted a plea to his 39,000 students to stop plagiarizing, and Coursera's leaders say they will review the issue and consider adding plagiarism-detection software in the future." - humanities seems to be where this is most commonly being detected. I'm guessing part of the issue is that an unaccredited certificate is still a certificate, particularly if the place issuing it is somewhat well-known.
- Conscientious consumption and culture war
- The author on the Chick-Fil-A situation: "It's my view that this sort of skirmish in the culture wars is an inevitable consequence of trends in 'ethical consumption' and 'corporate social responsibility'. Conservatives sceptical of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement have often charged that CSR is a stalking horse for liberal causes that have failed to get traction through ordinary political channels. ... Ian Reifowitz, writing in the Huffington Post, finds it 'troubling' that Chick-fil-A prefers Christians as franchise owners, but rightly sees that the source of his unease when generalised may complicate CSR-like corporate policies"
- Students guilty of disrupting speech in 'Irvine 11' case
- "Ten Muslim students get three years of probation for disrupting a speech by the Israeli ambassador at UC Irvine." Am I the only one who finds cases such as these (which as far as I've heard are more or less par for the course for Israelis in Canada) really only hurt the protester's cause?