Saturday 11 May 2013

Politics in Heaven


Politics in Heaven


There lay a kingdom by the sea,
That shone alone in magnificent beauty and zeal.
A wondrous pile of earth it was,
E'ven the insects dare not enter into its crust.

The Lords of heaven, heard of tis' land;
Their servants’ intolerance towards their plan,
Grew a certain curiosity amongst them,
They wondered how tis' hath happened to pass their realm.
Thus, a meeting was called by the board of the Gods,
"We need to find the cause of this" shouted the Lords.

And many gathered in all shapes and size,
To discuss on this matter and destroy its pride.
"What should we do?" saith one of the Lords;
"Should we destroy it? Burn it? Or consume it with floods?"
None agreed to a plan that sufficed.
Alas, a voice was heard from tis' crowd of vice.

"Politics!" saith a frail voice from below.
It then flew above the Lords in an Angel’ish glow.
The crowd murmured with the sound of that word.
"What thus thou mean? O Dark one from the ground?”
The head of the Lords had asked with a frown.
“T’was your very creation, my Lord” saith the stranger,
“It has been the best device, since mankind was known.
I have used it for chaos, to destroy and confuse,
Except tis’ nation, you talk of; I dared not abuse.
My power of politics is too weak for tis’ land,
Their gates of iron chases ‘Politics’ from its stand.”
But your powers combined, my dearest Lords can you break,
Tis’ land of its virtue and pride, which is all yours to take.”

The stranger then stood his grounds,
Awaiting for the Lords to come to a sound.
Alas! The head of them hath come to terms.
“What thus ye have in mind? O dark one, what is thy plan?
The stranger grinned silently and then whispered his plans to the Lord;
And vanished, as it hath come, without a noise.

A fine day t’was, down at the land,
Just like any other, except happier with every hand.
Lo! Came a visitor present at their gates.
“What business thus thou have at our land my friend?”

“I have heard of tales bout’ thy land from afar,
Now my eyes rest in peace from thy sight of tis’ star.
I bring thy gift, tis’ book so old.
It comes from the North and would rest gloriously in your beauty’s tomb.”
The stranger saith not a word more and began his way back.
The land confused at tis’ gift, and gave curiosity to take its plan.
Thus, the Land took the gift by its study to read,
And read it did the stranger’s gift of reed.

Years hath passed and seasons gone.
The stranger hath come again, to visit the ‘once’ beautiful throne.
No expression was made, as though t’was planned.
The stranger entered the city and walked bout’ its land.
“What have thou done to us? O stranger of the North
Tis’ beauty of a land has destroyed itself and now tis’ beauty has gone.”

“T’was was Politics, my Sire’, the tricks of the Gods.
Your land required it, to fill the coffers of the Lords.”
The Land was confused and wandered how tis’ could have come.
The nature’s way of taking things was a better way to have gone.

The stranger thus grinned and whispered to the Land,
“Now tis’ disease is yours my Sire, it’s yours to command.”
And vanished he did, without a noise;
The Land confused, whilst the Gods rejoice.

Thus, there lay a kingdom by the sea,
That was dull, filled with darkness and thriving felony,
A large pile of abyss it was,
Filled with insects that roamed its crust.

-      Khan M. R. Abir


Sunday 24 February 2013

Beating "Plagiarism Softwares" through Simple Tech Tricks!


IT scholar says PDF tweaks allow students' copied work to evade detection.

Turnitin WriteCheck™ Technological loopholes allow savvy students to beat academic plagiarism software, an IT expert has warned.

James Heather, senior lecturer in computing at the University of Surrey, has revealed that plagiarism detection systems such as Turnitin that are routinely used by universities are open to simple cheats allowing students to evade detection when submitting copied material.

The software works by extracting text from an essay or assignment and checking whether it matches text from other sources, such as documents available online.

But in a new paper, "Turnitoff: identifying and fixing a hole in current plagiarism detection software", Dr Heather reveals that beating the system is simple.

"In their current incarnation, one can easily create a document that passes the plagiarism check regardless of how much copied material it contains. When there are loopholes that can be exploited, they give the operator a false assurance that a submission is original."

The study, which appears in the journal Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, demonstrates ways in which students can modify plagiarised work to avoid detection.

"If we can stop the text from being properly extracted from the document, without affecting how the document looks and prints, then the software will not be able to identify any plagiarised material," Dr Heather writes.

Students aware of this loophole could get around the system by converting a plagiarised essay to PDF format, he says, and then altering the corresponding "character map" - a map of the sequence of characters used in the text. Although the text would remain visually unaltered, extracts tested by the plagiarism software would be garbled, and so matches would not be detected.

Or, he says, students could rearrange character codes, or "glyphs", in the PDF so they no longer correspond to the alphabet and "the link between the text and its printed representation will be broken".

In this scenario a tutor could print out and read the essay, but the computer running the detection software would scan nonsense.

Finally, students could convert text into a series of Bezier curves to represent the shape of letters rather than using the characters themselves.

"If there is no text, then the plagiarism detection cannot function," the paper notes.

Dr Heather argues that requiring students to submit work in Microsoft Word is not a solution to the problem; students could simply convert a doctored PDF into Word.

Instead, he says, universities should supplement detection systems with a secondary optical character recognition (OCR) program.

"The only reliable way to make certain that the extracted text matches what is represented on the printed page is to use OCR," the paper concludes.

Such a system attempts to "do the same thing as the human reader of the submission: take a rendered copy of the work and interpret the marks that appear on the page. This immediately counters all attempts to alter the internals of the document."

This method places a burden on a university's server, costing time and money. But free OCR software is available and universities should make use of it, Dr Heather says.

A spokesman for Turnitin said the cheating methods required a high level of technical skill but the company is working to detect when tricks have been used.

(Source: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=414881)
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