Archive for December, 2009
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Saturday, December 12th, 2009U. of South Florida Promises a Laptop for All Athletes
Doug Woolard, director of intercollegiate athletics at the University of South Florida, says his athletes travel the most miles of any college in a Bowl Championship Series conference. All this time on the road could either take an academic toll on the students, or, Mr. Woolard [...]
New Project Promotes Virtual Science Labs, Despite Skepticism
Saturday, December 12th, 2009New Project Promotes Virtual Science Labs, Despite Skepticism
Atlanta – Can online science laboratories replace the experience of sitting at a lab bench with beaker in hand? No way, say many professors. But Kemi Jona, director of Northwestern University’s Office of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education Partnerships, argues that virtual labs are at least as [...]
Archive Watch: New Orleans Stomp
Thursday, December 10th, 2009Archive Watch: New Orleans Stomp
New Orleans — Now that so many archives have gone digital, it can be easy to forget that many collections exist only partly online, if they have a digital component at all. An interesting case is the William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz at Tulane University. The Chronicle sat [...]
New Content-Sharing Site for Student Journalists Tries to Fill UWIRE Void
Thursday, December 10th, 2009New Content-Sharing Site for Student Journalists Tries to Fill UWIRE Void
The College News Network isn’t much: a bare-bones Web site, expenses totaling $17, and a single advertisement that covered every penny. But the Ohio University undergraduates who founded the college-journalism content-sharing cooperative hope the new wire-service-style Web site can help fill a hole in the student [...]
Online University, Struggling to Attract Students, Loses Investors as Well
Thursday, December 10th, 2009Online University, Struggling to Attract Students, Loses Investors as Well
U21 Global, an online university, hoped to have 500,000 students by 2011. After being open for eight years, however, it has only enrolled 1 percent of its goal. Now Universitas 21, an international association of research institutions, is giving up its controlling interest in the ailing [...]
Untagged or Under Arrest: Police Set Up Facebook Account to Catch Underage Drinkers
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009Untagged or Under Arrest: Police Set Up Facebook Account to Catch Underage Drinkers
This fall, 20-year-old Tyrell Luebker made two mistakes on Facebook. He posted pictures of himself drinking beer with his friends in an album titled “Not Sober Fest.” And he confirmed a friend request from an attractive young lady named Jenny Anderson. He assumed [...]
Lost U.: New Multimedia Web Site Explores ABC’s ‘Lost’
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009Lost U.: New Multimedia Web Site Explores ABC’s ‘Lost’
Think you understand the academic grounding of the TV show Lost? Can you explain in detail how Desmond Hume might actually be able to travel through time using worm theory? Can you see similarities between the rifle-toting jungle woman Rousseau and Jean-Jacques Rousseau? If you answered yes [...]
Judge Rejects RIAA Request to Censor Student Downloader
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009Judge Rejects RIAA Request to Censor Student Downloader
Joel Tenenbaum can bash the Recording Industry Association of America all he wants.
A judge today rejected the industry’s request to gag Mr. Tenenbaum, a Boston University graduate student who was ordered to pay $675,000 to record labels for music piracy, according to a Wired article. The RIAA had [...]
MIT Uses Social Networking to Win High-Tech Scavenger Hunt
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009MIT Uses Social Networking to Win High-Tech Scavenger Hunt
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won a social-networking scavenger hunt over the weekend, locating 10 red weather balloons tethered across the country in less than nine hours, The New York Times reports. And all it took was a sort of pyramid scheme.
The contest was organized [...]
A ‘New Digital Class’ Digs Into Data
Sunday, December 6th, 2009A ‘New Digital Class’ Digs Into Data
Fifty-three thousand 18th-century letters. Twenty-three thousand hours of digitized world music. The records of more than 197,000 individual trials held in Britain over 240 years. What can humanities scholars and social scientists do with such large tracts of raw material? This year the Digging Into Data Challenge invited research [...]