scottsdad

Been reading about plastic waste, and Covid's place in that. Dead penguin with full size face mask in its stomach

Is this £400 new money, or does it include the money already being knocked off council tax bills (at a huge saving of a bit over a tenner a month)?

My youngest (aged 12) agrees with you. She liked Jar Jar the best.

Many years ago I worked for the council. In the skiving stakes, we came second to nobody.

Yes - the source was a paper submitted by another student. I can still access it. This is the strangest case I have seen.

The big secret about the Royals that nobody is willing to say - they are thick as pig shit. Every one of them.

A woman on the BBC news at the site, crying her eyes out at the deaths of these kids but still managing to shout "Guns don't kill people. People kill people"

I can only add my best wishes to @Hoose Rice, and the mods. There are times (and threads) when this place is a community.

Revenge of the Sith. By some margin the best of the prequel movies. Better action, better pace. The last hour or so dragged a bit as it felt like a bit of a tick box exercise in getting everything in place for A New Hope.

6 for Thursday

This is where the Prof is doing his stuff. He is saving word files as PDFs and testing different Macros to see the impact. Online there is guidance for students on how to use macros to beat Turnitin. He is trying to reproduce what the student did. If we work it out I will let you know. I have a case last week where a student submitted work where everything was plagiarised, including the original student name on the submission.

This is the main issue for me. The main source dropped dramatically from one submission to the next, but the others stayed the same. So the student must have been able to select the text they wanted removed from the report and do something about. The old text as a picture ploy is easy to spot, and this wasn't that. None of the usual stuff (extra spaces, white text, white punctuation, etc). And it was literally 2 minutes between submissions so it must be some sort of file manipulation.

Absolutely. The best chance to be rid of the scum is if they keep him in place, disgraced.

Will do, but heard nothing about this so far.

This is quite a technical issue. One student submitted a PDF that showed high Turnitin similarity. 2 minutes later they submitted a seemingly identical PDF with a far lower Turnitin similarity. First file was 100 kb, the second 125 kb. The text was identical. Trying to work out how this second PDF had a lower score - been on to Turnitin themselves with this one.

Cheers - still bugs me though.

I wouldn't mess with him. He's a Sith Lord. He uses the Force.

Broadband services offering speeds in "Megabits per second". When I was at school I understood memory better. 8 bits made a byte, and then you moved you through the ranges (kilobyte, megabyte, etc). So...is a megabit per second one eighth of a megabyte pre second? Or have they renamed megabytes? If it is 1/8 of a megabyte then this is like offering salaries in pence rather than pounds.

Tonight: Revenge of the Sith. Then I can finally be done with the prequels. I know they have their defenders, but re-watching these has made me realise how utterly dreadful a film maker Lucas had become. The dialogue is just woeful ("Younglings" ffs). The characters have no depth. The stories are convoluted and boring. The effects are good enough but man, I am looking forward to having this latest re-watch done. After this, my youngest will have seen all movies.

I literally cannot remember the last time a scene from a TV show made me jump and shout "Fucking Hell!"

Ian Brown in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

This is my favourite

8 for Wednesday

I have to give him credit. We're dealing with an extremely serious case of plagiarism which has involved the two of us on the phone to Turnitin amongst other things to work out technically how something was done. Like me, he is a zealot about cheating and is the only colleague I have that is willing to delve bloody deep info PDF macros to work stuff out (I was the only one before). He called me yesterday on Teams to discuss this case - from his timeshare.

Endless stuff at work this week, all of it extremely last minute. All urgent, all needs done now, all needs done by me.