Category: Offbeat
June 18, 2010, 04:30 PM ET
Are Your Texts Depressed? The Computer Knows, Maybe
By Matthew Kalman
Software may know when you are depressed by examining your online behavior. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beersheba, Israel, have developed a program that can detect depression in online texts and could serve as a screening tool to direct potential patients towards treatment. Psychologists caution, however, that it hasn't actually been tested on real people.
Yair Neuman, associate professor in the department of education at Ben-Gurion, led a team that developed a computer program capable of identifying language with signs of depression. In a test, the program was used to scan more than 300,000 English-language texts from blogs and from online queries that people posted to mental-health Web sites. After the program identified the texts as depressive, a panel of four clinical psychologists reviewed 200 examples of such writings. There...
Read MoreJune 18, 2010, 03:00 PM ET
Beer Makes Grading Easier, Says Facebook
Our colleagues on Tweed have noticed that even after much-publicized gaffes, some faculty members on Facebook have not enhanced their privacy settings. And this lets the world see a few off-the-cuff remarks on grading techniques as the semester rushes to an end. "Flag Brew IPA ... makes grading papers a little more bearable," says someone. (Tweed, sensitive to privacy, has redacted identities.) "Chances are you will get an A if your paper is in the last 10 [that the professor] grades," notes another.
But maybe this isn't such a big deal, says a Tweed commenter: "As a society are we really so uptight that A. people can't be tired and express it or B. joke about what they're doing?"
March 3, 2010, 04:00 PM ET
College Presidents Are Easy Targets for Cybersquatting and Hoaxes
Message to university presidents: Register your domain name.
Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California, was forced to let it be known on Tuesday that he was not, in fact, resigning, after a prankster posted a fake resignation letter online. The letter was posted on markyudof.com, a site designed to look like Mr. Yudof's personal home page. "I hereby resign my tenure as President," the fake letter reads. It then praises student protesters and adds, "I have decided to go back to school to study the history of social movements."
Mr. Yudof debunked the letter nearly immediately on his Twitter feed: "Complete nonsense. Reports of my resignation have been greatly exaggerated."
The perpetrator? The faux-Yudof site is registered to Kenneth Ehrlich, a visiting lecturer in art on the university's Riverside campus. He maintains a blog, UCR Mobilize, that criticizes Mr. Yudof and...
Read MoreApril 29, 2009, 04:07 PM ET
Anti-Obama Rant Misattributed to Naval War College Professor
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 least half a dozen of his and my ‘fans’ asking them who sent the article to them, in an effort to start tracing the fraud back to its source,” he wrote Monday, “but that seems to be a...
Read MoreApril 2, 2009, 02:07 PM ET
Vanderbilt U. Advises TV-Character Applicant on Twitter
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 Twitter feed. Also, the character’s own feed, created as a marketing ploy for the show, mentions her dream college.
“Vanderbilt is a wonderful school and I still have faith I’ll be able to go there someday,” Lyla wrote on March 23. A week later,...
Read MoreMarch 31, 2009, 04:40 PM ET
'BrainWave Chick' Digitally Performs Mind Music
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 do is be on stage and meditate,” Ms. Kaul says. She doesn’t like that word — meditate — but says that low-frequency brainwaves, those we produce when we quiet our minds, make the nicest music.
Audience members, she hopes, will...
Read MoreMarch 26, 2009, 03:59 PM ET
Some Students Swear Off Facebook for Lent
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 lauded such Web sites in the past for helping to strengthen friendship and understanding, but many students acknowledge that they offer hazardously convenient ways to waste time. –Steve Kolowich
Read MoreMarch 18, 2009, 04:08 PM ET
Dartmouth Professor Creates Recession-Inspired Video Game
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 Layoff, is a puzzle-style game (similar to Solitaire or MineSweeper) aimed at exposing the outrages of the financial crisis and...
Read MoreMarch 11, 2009, 02:04 PM ET
Universities Join a Contest to Power Down Computers
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.
Through the contest,...
Read MoreMarch 4, 2009, 02:09 PM ET
A Concert Where the Cellphones Are On
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 and computer programmers at the Georgia Institute of...
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Each day on Wired Campus, The Chronicle's technology reporters highlight key IT developments and put them in perspective.