By linking some 1,400 processors at five universities, Indiana University intends to create a virtual supercomputer in the form of a network called FutureGrid. The project just garnered $10.1-million dollars in grant support from the National Science Foundation. But just why do universities need a new network when current ones, like TeraGrid, are still running? Geoffrey C. Fox, a professor of informatics at Indiana and director of FutureGrid, says in an interview on the blog Next Big Future that TeraGrid is a current workhorse, providing computing for current projects. But FutureGrid is supposed to develop new ways of doing things with more...

More than 300 students at Bucknell University got hit with letters from a collection agency last week charging that they had illegally downloaded material from Cayman Academic Resources and must pay $500 "to settle this matter."

Several of the students who got the letter contacted university officials and said that they had never heard of the company and that they did not do the downloading. Now Jason Friedberg, chief of public safety for the university, suspects that the letters were part of a scam. He contacted the collection agency, Advanced Collection Services, which told him it is now having trouble contacting the client and plans to rescind the letters.

When The Chronicle called Advanced Collection Services today, a woman who answered refused to answer questions about the incident and hung up abruptly. Messages to other employees of the company were...

In an effort to bring down the cost of learning materials, a new project will allow Florida college students to get digital versions of some of their textbooks free of charge, the St. Petersburg Times reported on Thursday.

The undertaking, called Orange Grove Texts Plus, is being spearheaded by the University Press of Florida with support from the state’s digital library database.

The project houses 124 books that students can either read free online, or -- if they prefer ink and paper -- have printed and bound at a much cheaper price than the original, the Times says.

The article says the average yearly cost of textbooks for Florida students exceeds $1,200 dollars.

College bookstores are taking steps to turn their Web sites into e-book portals, hoping to stay relevant as publishers make a push to electronic textbooks.

A project announced this week by bookstore associations in the United States and Canada will bring a library of downloadable e-books to participating stores. A few stores in Canada are experimenting with the system this fall, and some U.S. stores will try the system starting this spring.

Trying to set up an e-book-distribution operation at each college store would be difficult and expensive. So the groups -- the National Association of College Stores and the Canadian Campus Retail Associates Inc. -- have pooled their resources to develop a shared system. Each store can integrate it into its own Web site, to let students buy and download an electronic text in just a few clicks, similar to the way Amazon and other...

Washington--Supercomputers keep breaking records for processing speed, but software to operate them has not kept up with that increasingly zippy hardware. The often-rickety supercomputing computer code is becoming an obstacle to making better weather models, medical simulations, and other applications of high-performance computers, said experts at a conference here Wednesday on the future of academic supercomputing.

"Codes are still being used from the 1960s," said Ed Seidel, director of the National Science Foundation's office of cyberinfrastructure, in an interview at the meeting. "Those have to be retooled or rethought" to take full advantage of the latest supercomputers, he said.

Attendees at the meeting said one of the most popular computer languages used to create programs for supercomputers is

Henry Farrell thinks academic conferences go on too long.

Mr. Farrell, an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, uses a blog post for The Monkey Cage to call for a system that would keep presentations at the American Political Science Association moving along—and that would cut them off after five minutes, or perhaps 10 as a compromise.

Mr. Farrell takes the idea from Ignite, a Seattle company whose software keeps slide shows inexorably plugging forward at 15 seconds per page for a total of five minutes. Mr. Farrell says this approach has become popular at technology forums, and could easily be adopted in academic settings.

“I don’t think I have ever seen a conference presentation at...

How's this for "hounding" diploma mills?

GetEducated.com, an online-learning consumer group, managed to purchase an online M.B.A. for its mascot, a dog named Chester Ludlow.

The Vermont pug earned his tassles by pawing over $499 to Rochville University, which offers "distance learning degrees based on life and career experience," according to a news release from GetEducated. He got back a package from a post-office box in Dubai that contained a diploma and transcripts, plus a certificate of distinction in finance and another purporting to show membership in the student council.

GetEducated.com belives Chester is the first dog to get a diploma for life experience. But his bow-wow...

Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a computer program that they say can deduce whether or not someone is gay by doing an analysis of his Facebook profile, The Boston Globe reports.

According to The Globe, two students in a course on Internet ethics and law designed a program that looked at the profile information—including gender and sexuality—of a person’s Facebook friends and analyzed the information to predict the person’s sexuality. The students called the program “Gaydar.”

The students taught their computer program to make predictions by looking at profile information from profiles of 1,544 men who identified...

An administrator at Amherst College has put together a list of numbers that demonstrates how the role of technology is changing at Amherst, and perhaps at other colleges. Peter Schilling, director of information technology, models his list after the index in Harper's magazine, which comments on politics and culture.

Mr. Schilling has published the index for the second year in a row. Some of his findings from this year:

Between the 2005 fiscal year and the 2009 fiscal year, the decrease in the total number of outgoing phone calls placed by college employees: 117,823 calls, or 25 percent.

In the same period, the decrease in the total number of incoming calls: less than 2 percent.

Percentage...

The Samaritans of biblical fame still exist, although their numbers are small: The current community, split between Holon, Israel, and Mount Gerizim in the West Bank, numbers just over 700 people. In 1901, a Michigan industrialist named E.K. Warren traveled to the Middle East and was asked to bring home a collection of sacred Samaritan objects for safekeeping. The objects include prayer books and centuries-old versions of the Samaritan Pentateuch, or Torah, which has some significant differences from the Jewish Pentateuch. The collection has been housed ever since at Michigan State University.

In 2007, as a graduate student at Michigan State, James Ridolfo came across an electronic index to the collection. He got in touch with a Samaritan elder, Binyamin Tsedaka, who had been asking Michigan State to “promote Samaritan studies.”  Working with William...