With a tool from Google that tracks searches, researchers from Ball State University have uncovered a few patterns in the way that consumers search for health information.

The report, released yesterday and available free from the university, shows that the time of year and the health problems of the rich and famous influence what health topics people research on the Internet, according to the investigators from the university’s Center for Media Design.

The researchers used Google Trends, a tool that tracks public searches and holds data going back to 2004.

Information on diet and exercise peaked around New Year’s Day, says Peter Ellery, one of the researchers. That’s not shocking: it’s New Year’s resolution time.

The researchers also learned that illnesses reported by celebrities led to more searches about such diseases. People in the public eye have always been able to draw ...

William Patry, Google’s senior copyright lawyer and a former lawyer for the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, has dissected the provision in the mammoth higher education bill regarding peer-to-peer file sharing on college campuses. And what he writes on his blog Wednesday is not encouraging for colleges. The provision requires colleges to develop plans to use technologies for stopping illegal file sharing and “to the extent practicable” to provide students with subscription based services for downloading movies and music.

After reading a congressional report that clarifies the bill’s language, Mr. Patry concludes that the next Congress...

Lawyers for two women at Yale Law School who charged a Web site with destroying their reputations have learned the identities of some of the individuals who posted to the site derogatory comments about the women, according to an article Wednesday in Wired.

A year ago the women sued an administrator for the Web site, AutoAdmit, and several others who posted messages to the site under pseudonyms. The messages were filled with misogynist attacks on the women. One message called one of the women a “stupid bitch.” In another, the commenter announced his/her intention to repeatedly sodomize one of the women.

The women who filed the lawsuit have not revealed their identities. They stated in their lawsuit that the online postings caused them to...

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Technology are working on developing a $100 laptop, Indian officials said today, correcting a previous statement from the Indian Minister of State for Higher Education, who yesterday said that the laptop would cost only $10.

Another initiative, Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child, had previously tried to develop $100 computers for the developing countries, though finally the cost of the laptops had run up close to $200.

The higher-education minister, who would not elaborate on the specifications of the computer or say if the government would subsidize it, said the laptop would be used for higher education applications. The initiative would be part of a new “National Mission in Education Through Information and Communications Technology,” which aims to make existing distance-learning programs accessible on...

Richard A. DeMillo is stepping down as dean of Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Computing. During his six-year tenure at the college, Mr. DeMillo expanded the college’s research funds by 60 percent and increased the number of faculty members by 40 percent. A former chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard, Mr. DeMillo plans to write technology books after he leaves the dean’s office November 1. Then he will return to the university to teach computing and management.

Q. You told Cox News Service that your decision to resign was prompted by disagreements with the university’s provost. Can you elaborate?

A. Any questions about what the provost’s perceptions might be need to be addressed to him. I’m in the dark about that.

Q. What was your next big priority for the college of computing?

A. We’ve been working on establishing schools in biomedical...

In the longstanding battle between the higher-education community and the entertainment industry over how aggressive colleges should be in trying to stop the swapping of music and video files over campus networks, the entertainment industry has prevailed.

The industry triumphed in pushing through a provision in the renewal of the Higher Education Act that would force colleges to use “technology-based deterrents” to curtail the ability of students to share copyrighted works using peer-to-peer networks. The industry also succeeded in attaching language to the bill that would force colleges “to the extent practicable” to offer students music and video through subscription-based services such as Ruckus Network Inc. Negotiators for the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate

The leaders of Internet2 are lending a hand to what could be called “Internet 3.” The Internet2 advanced research project, a consortium of colleges and others, announced this week that it will loan a small part of its network backbone to GENI, a research project hoping to design an updated replacement for the current Internet.

This doesn’t mean your course Web pages will load faster anytime soon. GENI’s leaders are still deciding what kind of approach they should take to building a replacement Internet. And then they’ll most likely build an even bigger experimental network to test their ideas, which, if they work, could be incorporated into a new network. —Jeffrey R. Young

Many scholarly archives on college and public Web sites don’t show up in Google because the search engine doesn’t index them — they’re in what many call the “deep Web,” below the level that most search engines look. A new study found that fewer than half — just 44 percent — of a sample group of deep-Web pages from scholarly archives showed up in Google searches.

The study was done by digital librarians at the University of Michigan who are also involved in the Open Archives Initiative, an effort to help search engines find items deep in Web archives.

This year Google stopped supporting the Open Archive Initiative’s indexing standards. Google officials said in a blog post...

If you are planning a lecture on the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, you might want to spruce it up with some free new software. Classroom Presenter, the program that lets professors using a tablet PC write on their electronic slides, and lets student scribble back for real-time feedback, is now available in Chinese. Richard Anderson, the University of Washington computer scientist who has led the development of the program, says more languages are coming. Translation features for multilingual classrooms? That’s a taller order of interactivity. Maybe by the next Olympiad. —Josh Fischman

Researchers at the University of California at San Diego are launching an experiment to test and improve the energy efficiency of computing systems used for scientific research.

Making computer processing and storage systems more energy efficient is much needed because the information-technology industry, which currently consumes as much energy as the airline industry, keeps on growing. This growth is in part fueled by highly data-intensive scientific research, which demands huge computing facilities that consume large amounts of electricity, not only to power them, but also to cool them.

The GreenLight project, which plans to connect labs to computing systems more energy efficiently by using photonics instead of optical fiber, is being financed by the National Science Foundation, which will provide $2-million over three years, and the UCSD division of the California Institute for ...