Then Facebook would be fun again. I mean a bit oâ(TM) politics is fine but the constant barrage...well I left.

Yeah itâ(TM)s possible but the information is not as interesting as you might think. I know first hand that one of the top 10 websites doesnâ(TM)t collecting mouse location data. It would be a huge resource sink for limited insights.

It would difficult to enforce, yes, but there are ways of putting pressure on groups that violate international weapons bans.

Yes I think you are right. I, personally, am willing to support the fund year after year. I hope others will too.

Yes. He has a long history of general badassery. There are only a few people who I can think of who have the reputation and intelligence to properly navigate a project of this scale, and he is certainly one of them. I really hope that the fund makes it through to the next stage. It looks like it will.

Another source: http://www.ecf.com/wp-content/uploads/ECF_CO2_WEB.pdf

Any time I start to waste time randomly surfing I turn it on for 40 minutes. It helps to keep the habit from gaining a foothold. http://anti-social.cc/

Lol. Okay. I don't know if you've seen Roger Waters recently, but he's come a long way from the bitter man he was in his youth. People change and mellow with age, thankfully.

They are allowed to roll with the times.

Agreed. That game is Pacman. Time to drop the charade of technicalities.

I agree that for some excellent students, it will be hard to claim that they cheated, but for a large portion of the cheaters, it will be easy. Remember, I'm not claiming that the only data used would be the scores from this test. Other sources of data: The fact that it's known there was a test bank, which allows us to claim that cheating occurred. Getting people to confess (see 'the prisoner's dilemma'). Analysis of friend groups. Past grades.

Less useful, yes. Students with better records will have better cases. Students who decided to change their lives, do better in school and started with that test are screwed, though they might show different patterns of proficiency than the cheaters. Factors such as position on the tests bank pages, or overall order of test bank questions will influence the patterns of correct questions for the cheaters.

Once you have your 'suspects' are identified you work on the stronger cases via social pressure. As people confess, your algorithm gets more refined. The beauty of the problem is there are a large number of subjects, and a large number of cheaters. It would be fun detective work, except for the fact that that the situation is ethically depressing.

Nice correction, but you should know that when the pattern is spread across hundreds of students, the probability of that the outside factor is not cheating goes to zero. Take a statistics class. You'll get it.

On every test there are sets of questions that large amount of students get wrong, because of lack of emphasis in the classroom, or they are less obvious to study for. If there is an outside factor, like a test key, the students with the key will get these right. The more of these outlier questions they get right, the more likely it is that they cheated.

There are a number of statistical approaches to determine who cheated. For instance, find people whose midterm grade is an anomaly compared to the rest of their grades. Next, look for particular patterns of questions that the cheaters got right, compared to those who didn't. Use a pattern matching algorithm to find to tease apart the bimodality of the grade distribution. There would be some students for which it is nearly certain that they cheated, and other for which it would be more uncertain. The students with higher average grades would have a better shot at arguing against having cheated, but the poor students would be sniffed out immediately.