The federal government may come up with more money for technology research and other scientific work, much of which is done at universities, and it may do so this year. That is if the current inside-the-Beltway Washington gossip is to be believed.

A supplemental appropriations bill, slowly grinding its way through Congress, may contain more money for research, say the folks at the Computing Research Policy Blog, which comes from the Computing Research Association.

“We’re starting to hear from folks on the Hill that it’s looking more like science funding might be included in the initial supplemental when it comes out of the Senate,” report the bloggers. “What’s less clear is how much, though the consensus seems to be ‘likely less than the science and technology community hopes it will be.’”

The House has its own version of the supplemental bill, and there is not a lot of...

Today DePaul University has a School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems. Tomorrow it will be gone, replaced by the College of Computing and Digital Media.

David Miller, dean of the old school, will be the dean of the new college. So what’s new, besides the name? The university announced that the college will be split into two parts. One, the School of Computing, will focus on traditional IT subjects, while the other, the School of Cinema and Interactive Media, will feature courses in digital cinema, computer games development, and interactive media.

“The new structure provides a platform for the digital arts majors, which have seen phenomenal growth,” said Mr. Miller in a statement, “while complementing our existing, outstanding computing program.”

For instance, the university notes that its digital cinema program, which began four years ago, is now the...

And the winner is….the St. Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics!

The Russian university emerged yesterday as the home of the top computer whizzes in the “Battle of the Brains,” also known as the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Collegiate Programming Contest, which is sponsored by IBM.

In the contest, each team of three students is given 11 computer programming problems, and only five hours in which to write software to solve them. The challenges included writing code to determine the length of a city skyline, map the size and capacity of a new building design, and cracking an encrypted file to obtain the top secret information it holds.

St. Petersburg State solved eight of the 11 problems, edging out the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose team solved seven.

The top 10 institutions —out of 1,821 whose teams...

Four Boston University students, accused of pirating music with their computers, got a sympathetic ruling this week from a federal judge. The ruling notes that the students’ privacy and First Amendment rights might have been violated.

U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner did not throw out the complaint by a group of record companies. But she did say that Boston University cannot turn over their names to the industry—which usually sends letters threatening lawsuits to students once it has those names—until she considers the students’ rights more carefully.

The students “are entitled to some First Amendment protection of their anonymity—albeit limited. Second, the defendants may have expectations of privacy with regard to their identity,” the judge wrote in a 52-page decision.

The decision is not a “win” for the students—as the Boston Globe headlined a story on the...

There is a growing sense that bad student behavior online—pirating music files, posting drunken photos on their Facebook page, passing along malicious gossip about other students on the Web—has roots in earlier childhood, when they were not taught that, even online, there are boundaries.

Now a British psychologist, asked by her government to review how parents and children are affected by new technology, has weighed in with some support for this notion.

This week the psychologist, Tanya Byron, released her report, noting that in an increasingly risk-averse world, where children are not allowed to play outside without supervision, they are naturally drawn to the Internet as a place for exploration, to test their skills and their limits.

Ms. Byron says, however, that just as parents have taught children to cross streets safely—by doing it in stages, achieving more independence a...

There are no Nobel Prizes for computer science. There are, in fact, few awards in this discipline that recognize leadership and major accomplishments.

Two professors, however, have won two of the rare accolades: the Katayanagi Prize for Research Excellence and the Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize, announced this week by Carnegie Mellon University and the Tokyo University of Technology.

The research excellence prize, for sustained achievement, goes to Christos Papadimitriou, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. He is an expert in algorithms and complexity, and how their theory applies to everything from databases to game theory. (He is also the author of a novel, Turing, and plays in a band called Lady X and the Positive Eigenvalues.) The prize comes with a check for $20,000.

The emerging leadership prize...

Thomas Edison, long considered the inventor of recorded sound, had a rival who captured sound nearly two decades before Mr. Edison invented the phonograph.

Tomorrow at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, Calif, eminent audio historian David Giovannoni will play a 10-second recording of “Au Clare de la Lune,” made in 1860, 17 years before “Mary had a little lamb” came out of Mr. Edison’s invention, the New York Times reports today.

The recording wasn’t intended to be audio, oddly enough. It was made on a device called a phonautograph, which used a stylus to trace sound waves onto a sheet of paper. The inventor was Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a typesetter from Paris. When the phonograph reached mass popularity in the 1880s, it reproduced sounds using wax cylinders. (The cylinders could be delicate. One of...

Thirty-two different versions of Hamlet, all printed before 1641, are held in the vaults of the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, and other institutions—and all 32 are going digital with the help of the University of Maryland.

The university announced today that its Institute for Technology in the Humanities will be working with the Folger library to digitize the texts. There is no single authoritative version of the tragedy, since what survived are editions cobbled together by printers from actors’ memories or from marked-up scripts used in various productions. Digitizing the 32 texts—a project financed by the National Endowment for the Humanities—will make it easy for scholars to compare and contrast versions, noting similarities and differences.

The result will be a free, open, and interactive Web site housed at the University of Oxford. And if Hamlet‘s opening...

The National Endowment for the Humanities has decided that digital technology is here to stay, apparently. The agency just announced that what used to be their Digital Humanities Initiative is now the Office of Digital Humanities.

“Time to get those new business cards printed, I suppose!” blogged Brett Bobley on the official NEH Web site.

In addition to the presumed new cards and new building signs (changing DHI to ODH), one real but small change will be transforming the DHI—er, ODH e-mail newsletter to a Web-based update with an RSS feed.

And it’s true that an office does have a more permanent feel than an initiative. The mission, though, remains the same: To help scholars figure out new ways to analyze, preserve and teach materials using digital formats. —Josh Fischman

Snooping isn’t as fun as you might think. Perhaps the one thing college IT staffers like least about their jobs is when they are ordered to see if faculty or staff members are visiting Web sites forbidden by college policy, such as porn sites.

Technology auditor Cynthia Davis had to do that at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston back in 2003, and told officials that at least 300 university employees were surfing X-rated Web sites. This weekend the Austin American-Statesman reported that the health center fired one employee and placed a written reprimand in the personnel files of nine others.

But Ms. Davis alleges the real retaliation was directed against her. In a lawsuit against the health center, she contends she was pressured to leave her job late in 2003 because of her investigation. Officials vehemently deny that.

The litigation continues....