The Next Step

I mentioned in last week's blog post about the 3D competition for the entrepreneurial business idea. My team (#20) was one of the top 20 selected for the semi-finals. Amusingly, I found out about it from a professor yesterday morning. It was several hours after the announcement hit the radio stations and the local paper before teams were notified by the college. After all, the university needs the good publicity. I'm feeling a bit better about our business venture which do intend to start this summer, whether or not we win prize money from the competition. We have a couple of dice trays in process at the moment, although I don't anticipate that we'll get into table or larger furniture construction until summer. Anyway, I think we stand a really good shot of getting first place then going on to compete against winning Kansas State University teams from the K-State Learn competition. (3D and K-State Learn are essentially the same competition.) 

In other related news, I've got another 2, possibly 3, semesters before I am done with my MBA. I'm not looking forward to repayment, but I'm definitely excited about the prospect of getting back to work at a more full-time basis. I like the funeral home, but I suspect my time there is going to be limited to another year at most.

 Here's what my entrepreneurial team watched last night while we celebrated with spicy fish tacos, grilled pineapple, chips and salsa, with some Apothic White. Enjoy your weekend! May it be full of happiness, laughter, and enough sarcasm to mess with the weak minded as you go about your day. 

The Issue of Plagiarism in Mass Media

High school might be the first time you get a real taste of what it means to cheat and why should not do so in terms of our education. Through college, we continue to learn to be extremely careful about how we reference source material and how we credit those sources. The Zakaria issue suggests, however, that there is some form of disconnect between what we learn during our undergraduate or possibly even our graduate academic careers that is permissive in how much we appropriately credit our borrowed phrasing.

Perhaps rather than focusing on plagiarism as much, however, somewhere people are losing the ability to express their own thoughts either in reaction to material or as building upon their research. Perhaps it is not so much a matter of dishonesty as we have so many people in our country who do not wish to think for themselves. It's difficult not to be dismayed at the thought that mass media, for all its positives, has created an environment where the anti-intellectual nature of our country has done more to shape how some professional writers craft their works than the desire to inform, entertain, and improve. Can we realistically consider journalists in this era of "new media" to be professional writers at all?