FACT: Nebraska is flat

My wife and I recently pulled up stakes and moved from Chicago to Denver. It was a move I have wanted to make for many years and now was an ideal time to take the leap and go. Since we're not rich by any means we decided to move ourselves across country. Trust me when I say that there is not a whole lot that compares to driving a 16' Budget truck 1000 miles through the American heartland. As someone who is an aggressive driver to begin with, the idea of driving about 70 mph the entire time was only made bearable by the rattling and shaking the truck made when surpassing 75mph.

We decided to pack up the truck and leave Chicago on Friday evening and drive to Davenport, IA. The original plan was to pack up on Saturday morning and drive to Kearney, NE. Suffice it to say that it was a good thing the original plan gave way to the final plan. We didn't get on the road in Chicago until 3pm... on a Friday... the same weekend as the Air and Water Show in Chicago. Needless to say traffic was terrible and I had been unable to adjust my passenger side mirror, making lane changes virtually impossible. What should have been a 3 hour drive to Davenport took 5 hours. Not only did it take us 2 hours to get out of Chicago, but we hit a nasty rain storm driving across Illinois. Couple that with the fact that I was not used to driving the truck yet, and the fact that we were traveling with a dog, it quickly dawned on us the trip would take longer than anticipated.

After a quiet evening in Davenport, we got up early, managed to adjust the mirrors on the truck (FINALLY!) and set off across the country. I had not driven across country since 1992 and I have to admit that Iowa is a nice state. Plenty of green, rolling hills makes for pleasant scenery. Our destination for the evening was North Platte, NE. Once we hit Nebraska the only elevation change seemed to be the actual curvature of the Earth. What should have taken about 8-8.5 hours took closer to 10-11. That's a long day in Nebraska.

Some random thoughts while driving through Nebraska:
1. If one were to pick an interstate and drive from end to end, stopping at every "Americana" site along the way, how long would it take to make the trip?
2. One such sign advertised a "Danish Museum" and "Danish Windmill." It's pretty obvious what the latter was, but I couldn't help but wonder if the former was a museum of all things Danish, or a collection of pastries.
3. I don't know what Taco John's is, but it looks disgusting.

Sunday we made the last leg of the journey in 4 hours on the dot. Not too bad, and once we got into Colorado at least there were a few hills to break up the monotony. The northeast corner of Colorado isn't much to write home about, but it's better than Nebraska. Seriously, it seems as though when people were drawing the state boundaries they said, "we can't include that hilly part of there. It would ruin the whole flat thing we're going for here..."

The moral of the story: Either hire movers and fly across country or drive a car that is capable of attaining speeds of 80-90mph for long stretches of time in order to get out of Nebraska as quickly as possible.

We don't need no stinkin' bandwagon...

As some who know me can testify, I have a real problem with bandwagon fans. This is particularly a problem with hockey because there is so much parity in the league and they have the best playoffs in professional sports. Being a die-hard Detroit Red Wings fan, it has always been obnoxious to hear fans of teams like the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Chicago Blackhawks jaw on-and-on about their teams, when the vast majority of these folks didn't even know the city had a team just a few season prior. No don't get me wrong, I'm all for the growth of the NHL, but bandwagon fans, in general, resemble Chicago Cubs fans. They are loud, usually drunk, obnoxious, and have no idea what they are talking about in terms of the actual team. Aside from yelling "Detroit Sucks" most Hawks fans couldn't name anyone on the team's 3rd or 4th line before May of this year. Hell, I've been to more Hawks games during my 6 years in Chicago than most people (and one of those years was the lockout). So while I may come off as an elitist, especially when talking hockey I am in some ways vindicated by a recent Forbes list of the best fans. Best in the NHL and 3rd best in the country as a whole is a pretty good endorsement of the Red Wing faithful.

Now if only something could be done about the other problem plaguing the NHL... the horrible commentators on their national broadcasts, but that is an entirely different issue all together.

Plagiarism in the digital age

I came across this article from the New York Times today about plagiarism in the digital age. I found it interesting because while teaching last year I caught two different cases of plagiarism. What really stood out to me in the article was this:

But these cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.

It is a disconnect that is growing in the Internet age as concepts of intellectual property, copyright and originality are under assault in the unbridled exchange of online information, say educators who study plagiarism.

Digital technology makes copying and pasting easy, of course. But that is the least of it. The Internet may also be redefining how students — who came of age with music file-sharing, Wikipedia and Web-linking — understand the concept of authorship and the singularity of any text or image."

One problem is that students simply don't understand what plagiarism is. One may expect college students to be able to figure that out, but many would be surprised what type of students get into good schools these days. On my syllabi this past year, I had an entire page discussing plagiarism, what constituted plagiarism, and what the penalty for plagiarism was. I went over this thoroughly the first day of class both semesters, and still two students took the risk. (I even used turnitin.com and they still had the gall to copy and paste from the internet.)

I think the bigger issue that was addressed in the NYT article is what to do about sources that do not have a specific author, like a wikipedia or other random website. Because no author is given is it correct to assume that something on the internet is then common knowledge? Such a deduction is asinine because it assumes that everyone is familiar with all parts of the internet, which is totally unfeasible. That's precisely why one needs to site wikipedia if they choose to use it (which is also highly recommended against in my classes). In the very least, if you site the wikipedia page you won't get dinged for plagiarism. You might get points taken off for using poor sources, but if those quotation marks are present and the footnote good enough to decipher, most of my students will dodge a major bullet.

Oh, and the penalty for plagiarism in my class? A ZERO for the class, not the assignment, the entire course. That'll put a serious dent in your GPA. Harsh? Perhaps, but such a rigid policy forces students to be more careful with their work. My two plagiarizers were in my Fall class and I think having that experience dealing with it (which is never pleasant), and the ammo of actually having failed students the previous semester, made my Spring semester students much more attentive and careful NOT to plagiarize.