Rubenerd

I received this email regarding Academic Integrity. I think it’s important to understand as many different universities, schools and the like take the words plagiarism, integrity and ruben is awesome to mean different things.

Dear Student

In your time studying at UniSA, you may have come across the phrase “academic integrity” – in your Course Information Booklet, on the UniSA website, from your lecturer.

So what is academic integrity?

Academic integrity is a term used at university to describe honest behaviour as it relates to all academic work. This includes papers written by staff, student assignments, conduct in exams, use of data etc. One of the main principles is respecting other people’s ideas and not claiming them as your own in your writing or presentations. If you do use resources from other people you will need to reference them correctly.

The University of South Australia takes academic integrity very seriously. The website has information for you including:

• academic integrity and why it’s important
• referencing resources
• what you can do to avoid unintentional plagiarism
• UniSA policy

You should familiarise yourself with the procedures that the University uses to deal with cases of academic misconduct and also the possible outcomes.

If you are still unclear about referencing, you can access individual advice from learning advisers at Learning Connection.

New to 2006

Academic Integrity Officers have been appointed to each School. These people will be work directly with cases of academic misconduct identified by teaching staff. The University is also using text-comparison software to check for plagiarism.

If you have concerns about any aspect of academic integrity please don’t hesitate to contact Learning Connection staff or the Academic Integrity Officer in your School.

Technorati Tags: unisa, university of south australia, plagiarism, academic integrity

I can't stand chain emails. They're a waste of my valuable email reading time! Even if they appear to have good intentions, I've made it a habit to NEVER forward any chain emails. If the information containted in such messages was really that useful, I'm sure I could find it elsewhere beforehand and besides, who actually believes what they read in chain emails?

Question everything! E-mail is an unreliable medium for sharing information. It is unreliable, cannot be tracked and no company uses it to give away money or products. It’s an ineffective tool for political activism and won’t make you a millionaire overnight.

Don’t want the junk! If you forward chain letters, stop! If others send them to you, stop them! The more junk you send, the more you will get. Sending or receiving chain letters increases your exposure to spam, scams and other junk mail.

Stop junk e-mail and misinformation!

Good on them!

Break The Chain!

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Just wanted to say that if you're in Australia and you want good new or used computer parts at decent prices, these guys are pretty good. They appear to be very honest about their shipping prices as well, a rareity these days on eBay. I purchased a second hand Apple DVD ROM and it was in great condition and it arrived very quickly. Good stuff.

And no before you ask, this was not a paid endorsement ;).

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Podcast: Play in new window · Download

10:00 – Messing around with my mixer console (I thought it was a mixer board), high school memories, debunking the stigmas attached to bipolar disorder and manic depression (they are not the same as depression), Stephen Fry being interviewed on Parkinson and dropping cameras.

Recorded in Adelaide, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

10:00 – Drinking way too much coffee, being addicted to sashimi and sushi (mercury poisoning), a Rubenerd Traffic Report, contacting Boyd-Anderson, Boyd-Anderson.com post (New Zealand still hasn't got over their pavlova being "stolen"), and why I don't really consider anywhere "home" anymore.

Recorded in Adelaide, Australia. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

If you haven't taken the opportunity yet, I highly encourage you to check out Dave Wares' (aka: Rubenerd Forum's Mr Bunny) photographic website. He claims that he's an amateur photographer, but the depth and quality of his work clearly contradict his self-assessment.

This month's photograph is Birling Gap. To see the full sized image, as well as all his other brilliant work check him out at:

DavesPhotoGallery.net.

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AFL (Australian Football League) and NRL (National Rugby League) here in Australia are the lamest excuses for sport I have ever witnessed. If I wanted to watch barbaric testosterone overcharged jocks in tiny shorts lunging at each other and groping I'll watch wrestling thanks. And its all anyone can talk about here!

Fortunately I'm not alone:

The Anti-Football League is an Australian organisation that pokes fun at the obsession with Australian rules football. It was founded by Melbourne journalist Keith Dunstan in 1967.

The movement still has a strong band of loyal sympathisers and supporters, and since June 2006, a website. The chief qualification for membership is not an active dislike but a disinterest in football, a desire to spend one’s time and conversation on other things.

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A recent study by researchers at my university has discovered some interesting facts; potentially disturbing to the media companies; regarding the television programme viewing habits of the average person. I was surprised.

While ratings for certain television programs might be fairly steady, with about the same number of people watching each week, researchers at the University of South Australia have discovered that week-to-week it is largely different people watching the program.

For example, in the US only 30 per cent of the people who watched a program one week had watched it in the previous week, according to the Director of Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, Professor Byron Sharp. “Seventy per cent of its audience in any week did not watch it the previous week,” Prof Sharp said.

“We tend to overestimate our loyalty for lots of things so when someone says ‘I always watch that program,’ they mean when I am watching TV, and not watching something else!”

“For example, we can’t predict which fast food outlet or which bank people will go to but we can predict how many people will go there and how often, and how many will go regularly and how many will go occasionally if we simply know the market share of, say, McDonalds. This is the sort of fundamental knowledge being discovered at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute,”

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My family has several machines that I built myself that have cheaper integrated mainboards, aka the graphics and sounds are built on the board. If you're serious about gaming or any complex work these boards are a poor choice, especially if you want to be able to run the latest Microsoft ram-guzzling, graphics-card-frying, wallet-burning bug-fest, but for my mum who uses her machine with Xubuntu Linux for email and light web browsing they easily provide enough power, and you sure can't argue with the price.

One thing I always wondered though was: what is AC'97? I knew it was the on board sound, but what did it actually stand for? As usual the almighty Wikipedia has the answer:

AC’97 (short for Audio Codec ’97) is Intel Corporation’s Audio “Codec” standard developed by the Intel Architecture Labs in 1997, and used mainly in motherboards (also known as ‘on-board’ or ‘integrated’), modems, and sound cards.

Audio components integrated into Intel chipsets consists of 2 components – an AC’97 digital controller, which is built into the I/O Controller Hub (ICH) of the chipset, and an AC’97 codec, which is the analog component of the architecture. AC’97 defines a high-quality, 16- or 20-bit audio architecture for the PC that is used in the majority of today’s desktop platforms. AC’97 supports 96 kHz in 20-bit stereo resolution and 48 kHz in 20-bit stereo for multichannel recording and playback.

There you have it. Don't say you never learn anything from this blog. Unless you knew that AC'97 stuff already… if so just pretend to look surprised.

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An interesting physical comparison between a traditional modem card and a more recent winmodem which uses the hardware in the host computer through software instead of dedicated components. Of course the earlier winmodems were; funnily enough; designed for the Microsoft Windows operating system, so its understandable why Linux drivers etc took so long to come to fruition. Mmm…. fruition.

I can't say I miss the good ol' modem all that much anymore, thank you WiFi :D.

WinModem and Regular Modem Comparison

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