In the era of anonymous Internet publishing, it can be difficult to determine who said what — and who didn’t. Just ask David Kaiser, a history professor at the Naval War College, who has struggled to dispel rumors that he authored a tempestuous anti-Obama rant (including, in the tradition of all political rants, a Hitler comparison) that went viral last week.

Mr. Kaiser clarified the attribution error on his blog this week, but has had little luck finding out who is responsible for propagating the rumor that he wrote the diatribe. He said another David Kaiser in academe — a scientist for an unnamed “well-known university” — has also received mail about the rant. “I have queried at...

This week’s sign that the Twitter revolution is upon us: campus officials’ tweeting financial-aid advice to television characters.

Lyla Garrity, a cheerleader turned Christian youth leader on Friday Night Lights, a series about small-town life in Texas, dreams of Vanderbilt University. But — conflict! — her father loses her college savings in a bad business deal. As it stands, Lyla may have to follow her boyfriend, Tim, to the fictional San Antonio State University (he tells her she’s too good for that).

Melanie Moran, associate director of Vanderbilt’s news service, recently discovered that “LylaGarrity” is following the university’s

Paras Kaul wants you to listen to her brainwaves.

Ms. Kaul, director of Web communications at George Mason University, is better known as the “BrainWave Chick.” With electrodes and digital technology, she has devised increasingly sophisticated ways to perform the music of her mind. (It’s got an eerie, ethereal sound, something like Brian Eno’s ambient compositions.)

To project her brainwaves, Ms. Kaul wears a headband that presses three electrodes against her brain’s frontal lobe. A Bluetooth adapter transmits data to a laptop, where software converts brainwaves to a Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and synthesizers play it.

“All I have to...

Students nonplussed by the absence of certain friends from their Facebook news feeds in the last month may have the church calendar to blame. During the season of Lent—a 40-day Christian holiday during which celebrants traditionally abstain from selected indulgences as a gesture of piety—some students at Texas Tech and elsewhere have reportedly sworn off social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

The Lenten season began in late February and ends on Easter, which is April 12. The pope has

Some academics may deride video games as mindless escapism, but Mary Flanagan and her collaborators are trying to push the medium into service as a tool to educate gamers on pressing social issues.

Ms. Flanagan—who is a digital humanities professor at Dartmouth College—and her colleagues with the Values at Play research project design video games that seek to engage players with the real world, rather than distract them from it. Funded in part by the National Science Foundation and Microsoft, the project aspires to “harness the power of video games in the service of humanistic principles, or human values, knowing that their work can have a tremendous and wide-ranging impact on our world,” according to its Web site.

Ms. Flanagan’s latest creation, called

A handful of universities are gearing up for a contest to reduce power use among computer users on campus, and there is still time to join the contest if you are interested in participating. The contest, called Power Down for the Planet, is sponsored by the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, a nonprofit group devoted to reducing energy use in computing.

Pat Tiernan, executive director of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, says that information-technology devices consume up to 3 percent of the power generated in the United States. Personal computers make up some 40 percent of the total power draw from technology. There are a billion personal computers on the market today, and that number may grow to 2.5 billion within six years. “The need to focus on the problem now is immense,” Mr. Tiernan says.

Cellphones have traditionally been the bane of concert halls and other performance venues. But the researchers at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics are challenging that taboo, at least for the performers on the stage.

Ge Wang, an assistant professor of music who previously founded a laptop orchestra at the center, has now organized a Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO) that takes advantage of the iPhone’s multiple built-in technologies to create a powerful performance device.

“Mobile phones are becoming so powerful that we cannot ignore them anymore as platforms for creativity,” Mr. Wang said in a university press release.

The idea of the cellphone as a performance device isn’t entirely new: Gil Weinberg...

Researchers at the City University of New York’s New York City College of Technology have updated a famous 1960s computer program that simulated a psychotherapist by asking users a series of questions and having them type out responses.

The original robotic therapist was called Eliza, and was intended to parody the Rogerian method of psychotherapy by taking the patient’s comments and regurgitating them as questions. Neither the original project nor the new one, called “Eliza Redux,” was meant to simulate cognizance in any serious way—the first attempt was concerned with linguistics, while the new project is an exercise in “interactive theater,” according to its Web site.

Computers have already relieved their human creators of plenty of mental chores, such as doing their taxes and keeping track of their appointments. But what about reading a date’s signals at dinner?

Now, just in time for Valentine’s Day, three undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon University have applied computer technology to the science of romance with their EyeTable, an artificially intelligent dinner table that reads physical gestures and speech patterns and lets the participants know how the date is going—in real time.

Here’s how it works: EyeTable’s centerpiece is a pair of motion sensors that communicate with sensors attached to a headset worn by each participant. The table analyzes the movements and orientation of the participants’ heads—sensing whether they are making eye contact or glancing restlessly around the...

It was a very good year for Tech Therapy, The Chronicle’s technology podcast. Actually, to call it a technology podcast is a bit misleading. It’s often really a show about management and communication, efficiency and psychology.

That said, in 2009, Tech Therapy’s co-hosts, Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast, plan to take on an array of techie topics, like cloud computing and energy efficiency in technology. If there is something you want them to talk about, write in at techtherapy@chronicle.com.

But the most popular episodes of 2008 didn’t really have technology at their core. They were more about hiring, leading, scandal, and, of course, libraries. Thank goodness for librarians. Anything and everything The Chronicle publishes about them is tremendously popular.

So here...