Thoughts for today: 26th March 09

Some of my thoughts today are on plagariasm and detecting it, including a free online checker for such purposes, and some thoughts on a discussion I had today with Leonard regarding the riser tensioner system found on board semi-submersibles.

University: On Plagiarism

Free plagiarism checker: http://www.dustball.com/cs/plagiarism.checker/

Pretty nifty tool. From personal experience, students here (my uni) love to copy and paste. I think even other universities are the same. There's nothing wrong with taking text from other people's website, but at least have the decency to use it as a paraphrase or quote rather than passing it off as your own work.

It doesn't help that some lecturers here love to look at quantity of writing rather than quality. So students are sometimes forced to pad their work with superfluous material that do not add anything other that dead weight to their reports. I try not to copy and paste, but sometimes we have to give in due to page minimum quota that have to be reached! However, I do take pains to indicate which parts of the report is quoted, and then work on original material that add my view and opinions to the quoted text. But I am sure there are some reports which can end up as a huge 'quote' after 'quote' copied from resources like Wikipedia.

I think lecturers should enforce a MAXIMUM page limit rather than a minimum because in doing so, they are actively encouraging students not to plagiarize and pad. The above tool can be immensely helpful to quickly weed out errant reports that takes material from online sources (frequently wikipedia) willy-nilly. After a few times of getting caught, most students will quickly wise up.

Imposition of maximum page limit will also focus the student on producing quality and concise writing, rather than encouraging them to talk at length producing text which end up more confusing than interesting.

I hope more lecturers can take advantage of this free tool and try to root out plagiarism as it is absolutely not doing any good in helping to raise the standard of English in students and the quality of their reports.

Work: On Riser Tensioner systems

Had a discussion with Mr Leonard this morning regarding the riser tensioner system. He's the Principal Drilling Engineer of my section and very knowledgeable on all sorts of offshore related equipments and functions, since he has been working on rigs for a major part of his life.

The riser tensioner system is unique to semisubmersibles and drillships in that they are needed only when drilling in extremely deep waters. In such conditions, the BOP stack along with christmas tree is usually installed on the sea floor. Then a riser (hollow pipe, essentially) is connected from the seafloor to the drillfloor on the vessel. The distance separating the two extremes can be in the order of thousands of feet. In such distances, the weight of the riser pulling down can be enough to cause it to buckle under its own weight.

Thus the top of the riser needs to be kept in tension (the vessel has to pull up on it) in order to keep the whole assembly from falling apart. Thus the riser tensioner is used, which consists of hydraulic sheaves connected to some wire line that is attached to the riser that pulls upwards on it. The hydraulic system allows the vessel to heave without affecting the tension too much.

Leonard commented that even the system is still quite new, as people explore deeper parts of the ocean, it might be possible that some day, we have to abandon the riser system as the depths are such that even with the riser applying tension, it will still collapse as it's just too heavy. He also commented that the riser system installation can take up to ten days, a significant amount of time for just a single operation!

I am reminded of how drillers can float drill casing by corking up one end and lowering it down the drill hole and when in position, drilling through the cork. Is it possible that one day the riser will be installed in such a way? Of course, there would have to be a system in place to admit water into the riser as the depths increased, although in such a way we could conceivably control the overall buoyancy of the riser leading to a faster installation? Currently the riser is lowered down after the BOP stack and assorted equipment is installed then guided in place using an ROV.

Will keep this in mind for future references.