In Brief: May 21, 2001

MYST WATCH If you lost sleep over Myst, the best-selling computer game of all time, put on some coffee: 500,000 copies of Myst 3: Exile ($45, for Windows and Mac) just hit stores. Exile has the same lush fantasy graphics as Myst, but now you can swivel your point of view a full 360 degrees to admire them. What's more, this time the puzzles are easier--not that you shouldn't still clear your calendar.

COPY CAUGHT Last week Louis Bloomfield, a physics professor at the University of Virginia, ran a simple pattern-matching program on his students' term papers to check for instances of plagiarism. He told his computer to look for papers that had blocks of six or more words in a row in common. It found a lot more than that: 122 of his students are now up on charges that they copied their work; and at U.Va., famous for its honor code, that means expulsion. The real culprit? Bloomfield blames e-mail for the cheating epidemic, which makes it easier for students to pass papers around promiscuously. He who lives by the sword...

CLICK, DOCK Americans bought more than 5 million digital cameras last year, confirming their status as the gadgets du jour--like cell phones but less annoying. Unfortunately, digital cameras can still be tough on the analog-minded. That's where Kodak's new DX3500 ($379) comes in. The 2.2-megapixel digital camera has its own USB docking station; simply plug the dock into your PC, plug the camera into the dock, press a single button, and your snapshots show up on your desktop, ready for printing, uploading or e-mailing.

--L.G.