Five universities were among the 10 winners of the Mellon Awards for Technology Collaboration, announced this week. They will share $650,000 in prize money for “leadership in the collaborative development of open-source software tools with application to scholarship in the arts and humanities.”

The university winners were:

Duke University for the OpenCroquet open-source 3-D virtual worlds environment.

Open Polytechnic of New Zealand for several projects, including the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment.

Middlebury College for the Segue interactive-learning management system.

University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana for two projects: the Firefox Accessibility Extension and the OpenEAI enterprise application integration project.

University of Toronto for the ATutor learning content-management system.

Other winners included the American Museum of the Moving Image for...

Microsoft is partnering with several universities to create open-access Web sites where chemists, freely and easily, can find details about molecules and atoms. That’s the report today from Peter Murray-Rust of the chemistry department at the University of Cambridge, in his blog.

Murray-Rust notes that Microsoft has financed and developed a software design called Object Re-Use and Exchange “which sees the future as composed of a large number of interoperating repositories rather than monolithic databases.” Using it, he continues, will allow bench chemists and undergraduates to browse libraries of molecular structures to get information they need for research and publications, rather than being restricted to whatever database to which they happen to have a password.

“We shall also be ‘scraping’ (ugly word) any material we can legally access,” Murray-Rust writes.

Partners in the...

Computer games can make the world a better place, and Parsons The New School for Design and the MacArthur Foundation are betting $450,000 on that proposition. The institution, with the non-profit organization Games for Change, just got a grant in that amount from the philanthropy to start a public-interest game design and research laboratory for interactive media.

The facility, to be called PETlab, will work with Microsoft’s Xbox development platform and Think.MTV.com—the youth-oriented network’s online activist community—to develop learning tools and digital games that explore social issues.

Gaming as an education tool is attracting attention from a number of higher education institutions, including Boston College, Columbia University, and Amherst College, which are supporting an online educational game environment called Immersive Education, The Chronicle reported earlier this...

Modern poetry, as well as introductory courses in physics, psychology, and political science, are four of seven classes from Yale U. that the institution put online today. Not only are the courses free for anyone who is interested, but they are as close to being there as online technology allows.

“These are gavel-to-gavel presentations,” Tom Conroy, a university spokesman, told The Chronicle. “We’ve put everything online that we could, and I think that’s what makes this different.” Lectures can be downloaded and run in streaming video or in audio only. There are searchable transcripts of each lecture, as well as course syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets, and other materials.

Diana E.E. Kleiner, a professor of the history of art and classics and director of the project, which is called Open Yale Courses, said in a written statement that the project’s leaders “wanted everyone to ...

X-rays were first detected in 1896, and the electron was discovered in 1897. The papers describing those scientific breakthroughs appeared in the journal Nature, and they have remained on paper until today.

Now they are online, as the journal unveils a digital archive of its first 80 years, from 1869 to 1949. (Issues since then are already available online.)

Some of the early material, from the 1880s, reads little like the jargon-filled scientific papers of today: Alexander Graham Bell rather informally describes the accents of deaf-mutes who had been taught to speak, and the photography pioneer Eadweard Muybridge laments the frequency of ties in horse races, suggesting that motion-capture photography could solve the “photo finish” problem. It did.

By the turn of the century, articles took a form closer to the dense scientific papers we now know. In 1908, with a series of...

Students aren’t interested in online information gateways about subjects. They’re interested in information related to their courses. That’s the message this week from ACRLog, the blog for academic and research librarians, as the blogger Steven Bell attempts to counsel professors and librarians on ways to reach out to students.

He cites a recent study in the journal Portal, in which Oregon State University librarians found that students were much more interested in information if it was linked to a course they were taking. Topic-oriented information collections were much less compelling. —Josh Fischman

Duke Law School announced this week that it has alerted 1,400 people that their Social Security numbers may have been stolen by identity thieves. The numbers were on a school Web site that was hacked.

The people were prospective applicants requesting information from the school’s admissions office, and the Web site stored their information; about 1,400 of these people listed their Social Security numbers on the site. The law school discovered the intrusion last week, took the site offline, and then alerted the possible victims that they were, well, possible victims.

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization, notes that public institutions are restricted by state and federal laws in their use of Social Security numbers for record-keeping. Duke, however, is a private university.

Universities in general have been sloppy with their use and care of personal information...

Climate change conferences on islands are in vogue this week. Not only is the U.N. hosting one in on the real island of Bali, but a scientific journal is sponsoring one on its virtual archipelago in a computer-generated world.

Second Nature is a locale built by the journal Nature in the virtual world of Second Life. (You have to be a member of Second Life to get on to the site.) It is the scene of four talks on the science of climate, beginning today and continuing through next week. First, Tara LaForce, a lecturer at Imperial College London, will speak about her research into carbon capture and storage, followed by Euan Nisbet, a professor at Royal Holloway College of the University of London. Next week Simon Buckle, Director of Climate Change Policy at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change, will give a talk, as will George Monbiot, columnist for The Guardian newspaper and a...

A University of Pennsylvania student has been indicted on charges that he crashed the campus server while attacking other Internet servers using “botnets.”

A botnet is a network of robot computers. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Thursday that Ryan Goldstein, a junior, was charged with using the university’s computer system to launch attacks, enlisting 50,000 computers against several online chat networks. He is alleged to have done this with the help of a New Zealand hacker known as AKILL.

The plot began unraveling after university computers crashed because of the attacks in February 2006. The botnet had loaded files containing virus software onto the computers. The police and the FBI began investigating.

One clue that led to Mr. Goldstein was the screen name Digerati, the...

The concert hall is dark and hushed, as such venues tend to be. Then the orchestra begins to play. First there’s a whirring, then a beep, then a high-pitched squeak. The 50-piece Worldscape Laptop Orchestra has begun its performance at the University of York, in England.

By “piece” the orchestra means laptop computer. Fifty of them, made by Apple, have been gathered by the university’s music department to perform works composed by Ambrose Field, a senior lecturer in the department. They will be streamed live from the university’s Web site later this month, a local newspaper reports.

The laptops are not simulating pianos or guitars. They are generating tones, the likes of which often issue from nonmusical computers. Yet “we wanted to approach this very much from the standpoint of an orchestra,” says Mr. Field, “so people are working together and playing together and making sounds...