Philip Agre, a former computer-science professor at UCLA whose disappearance sparked an online search effort, was located and is safe, according to a police report.

The bulletin said the scholar "was located by LA County Sheriff's Department on January 16, 2010 and is in good health and is self sufficient." No further details were given, and Mr. Agre or his friends who led the search effort could not be reached for comment.

A Web site by friends of Mr. Agre had not yet been updated as of Monday afternoon, and apparenlty they are not satisfied that he is back on his feet. "Those of us guiding the search for Phil have more detailed information about the interaction between the officer and Phil that is not being made public.," wrote Charlotte Lee, an assistant professor of human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington who worked under Mr. Agre when she was a...

We hope you enjoyed a holiday break from news of the Google Book Search settlement. A month into the new year, though, it's time to check back in with the case. January 28 was the deadline to file objections to the revised version. Denny Chin, the federal district judge charged with reviewing the settlement, is scheduled to hold a fairness hearing on Settlement 2.0 on February 18th.

Here are some of the latest developments and reactions to catch our eye. If you have come across other useful commentary or reactions, please share those in the comments.

--A group of some 80 professors, led by Pamela Samuelson, a professor of law and information at the University of California at Berkeley, has sent Judge Chin a letter explaining some academic authors' concerns over Settlement 2.0. The letter-signers write that "whatever the outcome of the fairness hearing, we believe strongly that the...

Washington and Lee University dancers Anna Rogers (kneeling), Stephanie Brown (standing, left), Jennifer Ritter (standing, center) and Hannah Kate Mitchell pose with Wii remotes, which they used to transfer their motions into sounds during several performances. Kevin Remington/Washington and Lee University

Performance halls usually frown on patrons whipping out their phones to check Twitter in the middle of an event.

But at a dance concert at Washington and Lee University, using Twitter isn't just allowed; it's encouraged.

During a set of performances at the university at 7:30 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Saturday, the W&L Repertory Dance Company will have a student running a live Twitter feed with context and commentary for dance pieces. One performance will also feature dancers using Wii remote controllers to create the music accompanying the piece. William H. Meadows, a...

The Maryland Higher Education Commission has decided not to reconsider its decision to bar University of Maryland University College from offering an online community-college administration degree to in-state residents, The Sun of Baltimore reports.

The commission had ruled that the program would duplicate a similar offering at Morgan State University. It was an apparently unprecedented decision in online education, one some observers think may have repercussions in other states. State university leaders had urged the commission to reconsider the matter.

Just over four years ago, Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society started a project to experiment with ways to combat malicious software. Leaders of the project, called StopBadware, announced this week that it now stands alone as a nonprofit organization. Google, PayPal, and Mozilla, which have supported the organization in the past, will continue to do so.

Malicious software, or "badware" as the organization calls it, includes viruses and spyware that infiltrate a computer without the user's consent. StopBadware analyzes data and reports trends in Web-based infections on its blog. It also encourages people to prevent and remove badware from their computer, clean and secure their Web site, and join an online discussion about badware.

Maxim Weinstein, the executive director of StopBadware, explained that in the years since its conception, StopBadware evolved from an a...

A leading publisher in health-science textbooks is the latest to add interactive tools to online books and one of the first to offer e-textbooks without an expiration date.

Elsevier introduced the Pageburst service this week, with interactive features such as social networking, integrated multimedia, and incorporated grade-book tools. Daniel Behan, the company's product director for e-books, said health-science students were a good market for interactive, permanent e-textbooks because they often need to reference multiple texts throughout their education.

Flipping through pages of material every time they need information is too time-consuming for students, Mr. Behan said.

"Obviously we aren't going to fundamentally change student behavior," he said, "Students today aren't going to act the way that students did 15 or 20 years ago, where they were willing to sit down and read."...

Tablet-style computers could be game-changers for colleges, bringing in a new era of classroom collaboration and pushing the adoption of electronic textbooks over a tipping point. Today's announcement by Apple Inc. of the iPad tablet has education watchers predicting a wave of student purchases, major textbook publishers rejoicing, and at least one college saying it will consider giving them to all incoming students.

But wait -- it might be time to take a deep breath to let the excitement of the sales pitch fade. Tablets have been tried before, with similar fanfare, and have fallen flat. And so far e-textbook sales are growing more slowly than expected. And even Apple doesn't always hit big with new products (the Newton personal organizer being its most famous flop). Even the institution considering a give-away, Abilene Christian University, said it will have to play around with the...

A new report this week found that the average cost of a data breach at U.S. institutions last year was the highest it has been since the study began, five years ago.

The study, by the Ponemon Institute, was based on data gathered from 45 organizations, including some from the educational sector.

Among those surveyed, the average cost of a data breach rose from $6.65-million in 2008 to $6.75-million in 2009. Furthermore, the average cost per compromised record rose slightly, from $202 to $204. While educational institutions made up only 7 percent of the study, Michael Spinney, a senior privacy analyst at the institute, said the findings were still relevant to higher education.

"Any of the information that a commercial organization would have, it's likely that a school would have that information," Mr. Spinney said, citing payroll data and students' credit-card numbers as examples.

The...

California researchers have developed a system they believe could stop the most common kind of spam from reaching people's in boxes.

Most spam e-mail messages are transmitted using a few infected computers that use a template-based system. The new system works by analyzing the small changes in messages that spammers make to slip past spam filters, according to the team from the University of California at San Diego and the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, Calif.

Researchers looked at 1,000 e-mail messages generated by a software bot and reverse-engineering the template. Knowing that template, researchers could block spam with total accuracy without letting legitimate messages get caught in the filter.

Christian Kreibich, a research scientist from the International Computer Science Institute, said any sort of software using the system will probably not appear in...

Colleges saw a 17 percent increase in online enrollment, with more than one in four students taking at least one online course in the fall of 2008, according to the findings of an annual survey published on Tuesday by the Sloan Consortium.

The growth rate eclipsed last year's 12-percent increase and dwarfed the 1.2 percent growth rate of the overall higher-education student population. The report, which has become a widely cited benchmark of distance learning, found a total of more than 4.6-million online students overall. That's up from about 3.9 million the previous year.

Despite this surge, the data suggest that not enough institutions have taken online education into account as they conduct planning around issues like how to deal with budget cuts and space shortages, says A. Frank Mayadas, a special adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

"They have to wake up and begin to...