exams

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Today’s word is invi­gil­ator, mean­ing “one who watches over stu­dents at an exam­in­a­tion”. I first encountered this word on the Real Prop­erty exam notice, ini­tially put­ting it down to Pro­fessor Peter Butt’s sense of humour. The word has a cer­tain Death Eater ring to it doesn’t it?

Alas, it’s a real word – although the OED tells me that invi­gil­ate used to mean “watch care­fully” in a more gen­eral sense.

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Jimbo writes about the free­dom that Wiki­pe­dia brings

The wis­dom of crowds – Wikipedia’s founder writes about what he sees as the fruits of the change inspired by Wiki­pe­dia. Although humans can be por­trayed as “irra­tional cap­tives to their back­ground and iden­tity”, Wales argues that it is pos­sible for object­ive col­lab­or­a­tion to occur if the lens of irra­tion­al­ity and con­flict is aban­doned and we accept non-​​initiation of force as a fun­da­mental prin­ciple. He believes that ration­al­ity will pre­vail, thereby pre­serving the best aspects of our cul­ture and per­mit­ting par­ti­cip­a­tion to thrive in the devel­op­ing world. The open pro­cesses of Wiki­pe­dia, where you are likely to be chal­lenged if there are flaws in your argu­ment, epi­tom­ise the “vir­tue of the mar­ket­place of ideas”, he says.

Other men­tions

Other recent men­tions in the online media include:

From the Wiki­pe­dia Sign­post.

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I’m back!

I haven’t blogged for quite some time, and for those of you who wished that you’d never see another hor­rid Enoch lit­er­ary com­pos­i­tion pop up on your RSS reader (you have put my blog on your RSS feed list right?), tough luck. I’m in my liv­ing room at the moment and the only thing stop­ping me from freez­ing is a cup of hot and steam­ing instant asparagus soup, and I’m just going to go and write. That’s right, I’m just going to get star­ted on my back­log of things that I’ve been put­ting off by just mak­ing myself write.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been bludging my time away suf­fer­ing under post-​​exam trau­matic stress syn­drome (PETSS), which is the one of the most ter­rible dis­eases known to man­kind, or at least to uni­ver­sity stu­dents. I’d like to think it was jus­ti­fied, and here is a quick sum­mary of the past semester to prove my point:

Semester 1, 2007

Argh.

In actual fact, I’ve been put­ting off writ­ing because I’ve been want­ing to reform the cat­egor­ies and the things that I write about (the three cat­egor­ies aren’t work­ing very well), among other changes I want to do to my site. but I couldn’t be bothered doing that until I bothered log­ging on to my blog. And I couldn’t be bothered log­ging on because I knew I’d have to go and do the dif­fi­cult task of reor­gan­ising things. This is known as a dead­lock. Thank­fully, I’m not your aver­age office Tur­ing machine.

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I can say with some con­fid­ence that that was prob­ably the most stress­ful stu­vac I had ever endured. A present­a­tion, an assign­ment and then another assign­ment due the same day as the exam on the first Monday… I was sur­prised I did reas­on­ably ok at the exam itself hav­ing only slept maybe 3 hours the night before? It would be nice if I could lay all the blame on the lec­tur­ers for put­ting everything together but I don’t think the fault is entirely theirs…

More bad things hap­pen­ing. Stuck without an umbrella in tor­ren­tial rain. Laptop latch broken, requires screw­driver. Norton Anti­Virus 2007 “upgrade” does funny things to com­puter, ditched in fury.*

I’m going back to bed. My next exam isn’t till next Tuesday.

Foot­note: * I am never buy­ing another Symantec product again.

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