(no subject)

[muckefuck]

I think I have a tie for Most Unusual Request at the service desk today, between the woman who wanted me to take a scissors and cut off her hospital wristband and the man who wanted access to plagiarism-detection software to use on his own thesis.

Now here's my Unusual Request for you all: I want a recipe for "Peepza" (dessert pizza involving Peeps).

Comments

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Plagiarism-detection software? Exactly how does THAT work?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Essentially by scouring likely corpora (a much, much easier job than it used to be thanks to the Internet) for matching strings. As pointed out in Language Log, identical strings of more than five words are exceedingly rare unless they are clichés of some sort or another. If, for instance, an essay on Peoria includes the line "this fort would later burn to the ground", you can be all but certain that the author lifted it from the the relevant Wikipedia article (or from the same source that its author cribbed from).

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

Depressing story: a friend once had a student plagiarize the friend's own work, in a class which covered plagiarism-detection algorithms.