Since Saturday, we've got adsl connection here - which seems to be faster than what we have in Moscow.

Among the many wonderful things I can do now is listen to NPR - really cool, especially when I'm carrying Marta around the room to help her fall asleep or when I have my right hand occupied by her. Besides being interesting and informative, NPR reminds me of the time when I had a car, in Iowa City. Too bad a car isn't part of this adsl/NPR deal... Ah well.

Marta is now exposed to good English - as well as some Bosnian/Serbian (I listened to the BBC in Serbian and VoA in Bosnian yesterday) and Turkish (BBC and VoA)!

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Sasha, Julinka and the rest of you radio people - do send me links to the stuff you think I'll enjoy! (Somehow, I haven't able to listen to The World, but maybe I just didn't try hard enough.)

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I liked this show today: Cut and Paste Plagiarism on Talk of the Nation.

When I was a student, plagiarism was never encouraged here, either - but this doesn't mean originality was a requirement for many classes. Most of the time, we were told to repeat what the textbooks said, as close to the original as possible, all that Communist bullshit, and that wasn't considered cheating. I'm not sure what it's like now, though I do hope a lot has changed in the past decade.

As for the way it's done in the States, the most amazing thing is that someone's found a way to make what must be good money preventing and detecting plagiarism - TurnItIn.com.