exams

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.

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:

• Falling exam passes blamed on Wikipedia ‘littered with inaccuracies’ – Scotland’s falling exam pass rates have been blamed on Wikipedia and other online sources, which are said to contain misleading or inaccurate information that students pass off as their own.
• A Look Inside Wikipedia’s Infrastructure – Domas Mituzas discusses Wikipedia’s infrastructure, which is an “unusual” case-study of a high-performance site.
• Tim Russert colleague fired for Wikipedia leak – American broadcaster Tim Russert’s death was announced on Wikipedia by a colleague 40 minutes before NBC announced the news to its viewers.
• On Wikipedia, storms, teacups, and _why’s notability – Deletionists and inclusionists both have their place on Wikipedia; this article says that in social software, you get the flaws as well as the intelligence and flexibility when you have human participants.
• Telstra CEO in web legal spat – Telstra’s CEO Sol Trujillo’s threats of legal action if “defamatory statements” were not removed from his Wikipedia article have been revealed in a letter released by the Chilling Effects website.

From the Wikipedia Signpost.

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:

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.

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.