Black Americans use blogs to discuss sensitive health issues — like the spread of HIV and AIDS — that often are not broached publicly, according to a Pennsylvania State University researcher.

Lynette Kvasny, an associate professor of information sciences and technology at Penn State, first noticed the trend when she read a blog conversation spurred by “Out of Control: AIDS in Black America,” a 2006 report by ABC News. For her study, “An African-American Weblog Community’s Reading of AIDS in Black America,” she, along with her co-author, C. Franklin Igwe, also of Penn State, analyzed 128 blog responses to the ABC News report.

The duo paid particular attention to what writers said were the chief causes of the spread of HIV and AIDS. The three most commonly cited factors, they...

An article about the College of New Jersey’s Facebook page reminded me that I had been meaning to see whether my alma mater — Franklin and Marshall College — has a page on Facebook. A quick Facebook search turned up a number of F&M pages, but the one at the top of the list has nothing to do with the college: It’s a page for an Italian clothing line that inexplicably picked up the college’s name back in 1999.

The

Of the many books that pass through The Chronicle‘s newsroom, this one caught the eye: iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. Given the recent discussions about technology, learning, and the so-called digital generation over at The Chronicle Review, the book’s theme seemed timely. Mark Bauerlein might feel vindicated by the book’s description of how technology is altering human brains and cognition. Siva Vaidhyanathan might shudder at the characterization of young “digital natives” and old “digital immigrants.”

The book was written by Gary Small, a prominent...

Thomson Reuters Inc. sued George Mason University in a Virginia court this month, arguing that a free software tool made by the university makes improper use of the company’s EndNote citation software.

The company’s complaint argues that programmers at George Mason’s Center for History and New Media reverse-engineered EndNote to create a free program called Zotero. The university’s free software is a plug-in for the Firefox Web browser, and it is designed to help scholars store and organize their online research. It has been downloaded more than 1 million times.

Thomson Reuters argues that the latest release of George Mason’s software, which can import files created by EndNote and turn them into files that can be used and...

After the dot-com crash of 2001, enrollments in computer-science departments dwindled. Students fled the departments, opting for majors in more lucrative fields like business and finance.

But all that is slowly changing, in large part due to the collapse of Wall Street, according to Computerworld.

Educators said they have already noticed a shift, and numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest that jobs in information technology are on the rise. According to the bureau, one of the fastest-growing job areas is network-systems and data-communications analysts, with an expected increase of 53 percent over the last two years.

John Gallaugher, an associate professor of information systems...

Mathematics researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles have discovered the largest known prime number — a 13-million-digit behemoth — almost a year after setting up 75 computer-lab PC’s to work on the search in their spare time. The researchers are believed to have won a $100,000 prize offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the discovery of the first prime number of more than 10 million digits.

According to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, a project that has harnessed excess computing power of machines around the world to carry out the search, a UCLA computer discovered the number on August 23. A Mersenne prime takes the form 2P-1, and UCLA’s — the 45th known Mersenne prime — is 243,112,609-1. The

Last month we wrote about a professor’s experiment in “open teaching,” in which he allowed anyone to take his online course and fully participate in discussions. Since then readers have alerted us to at least three other experiments in open teaching, in what appears to be a growing movement.

More than 2,000 people have signed up to be informal students in an online course on “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge” taught by Stephen Downes, a senior researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, and George Siemens, associate director of research and development at University of Manitoba’s Learning Technologies Centre. Students can add to a course blog and a wiki, and read highlights on a daily e-mail newsletter....

On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition today, the reporter David Kestenbaum took a look into a crystal ball for our economic situation.

That is, he reported on a computer model that was developed in the 1980s by Mark Gertler, now an economics professor at New York University, and Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Before becoming chairman, Mr. Bernanke had taught at Stanford University, New York University, and Princeton University. One of his academic interests — and we can hope he studied this one thoroughly — was the Great Depression.

It turns out that his work on the computer model is relevant today, too. “There are lots of models of various aspects of the economy out there,” says Mr. Kestenbaum. “This one is sort of...

About $4-million in student aid for some 15,000 students attending four California community colleges has been held up by problems with new student-services software.

The Contra Costa Times reports that the Peralta Community College District, based in Oakland, has been unable to process aid checks because of a difficulty in adapting the software to the needs of a multi-campus system. The district comprises Berkeley City College, the College of Alameda, Laney College, and Merritt College.

With some angry students walking out of classes to protest the delays, administrators have scrambled to offer fee waivers, vouchers for textbooks, and even short-term loans. But many students use the aid money for expenses that vouchers can’t cover, like rent and food. College officials told...

In its short life, the online campus of the University of Illinois has not quite reached the bar administrators set when it opened nine months ago.

Just 121 students are enrolled in five degree programs, and the university’s president, Joseph White, fears that the $8.9-million project won’t hit its goal of enrolling 9,000 students by its fifth year, the Associated Press reports. That’s why he’s introducing the idea of making the project, known as the Global Campus, independent from the university’s Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, and Springfield campuses, and of equipping it with its own accreditation.

Mr. White will present the idea to the university’s board of trustees in November and is convinced the virtual campus could generate around...