It’s hardly scientific but certainly interesting: A Web site that correlates colleges’ average SAT scores with college students’ “favorite book” preferences on Facebook.

To come up with Booksthatmakeyoudumb, Virgil Griffith, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, visited Facebook and determined the 100 most-mentioned “favorite books” at colleges. Then he put the data together with the average combined SAT scores of students at those colleges.

The Five Highest-Scoring Books (and Average SAT)

1. Lolita (1317) 2. 100 Years of Solitude (1308) 3. Crime and Punishment (1307) 4. Freakonomics (1275) 5. Catch-22 (1233)

Ranking 87th: “I Don’t Read” (968). That’s not a book title, folks.

Mr. Griffith has released Musicthatmakesyoudumb as well.

He also developed WikiScanner, where users can track edits to Wikipedia entries back to the IP address of the editor. —Hurley...

A couple of blogs have pointed out that Matt Ivester, creator of the campus gossip blog JuicyCampus.com, has pleaded for a cease-fire among users who have apparently gotten particularly hateful. This comes in light of the backlash the site has received from various students and administrators.

“Some of the things that have been posted have been mean-spirited, and we have received e-mails from people claiming to have been defamed on the site,” Mr. Ivester writes. “Our hope for the site has always been that JuicyCampus would be a place for fun, lighthearted gossip, rather than a place to tear down people or groups.”

But what did he think would happen?

Not that this is the first place this has been said.—Hurley Goodall

After the nationwide scramble on college campuses to create systems for emergency text alerts, administrators are finding that students are slow to embrace the idea, according to the Associated Press.

Surprisingly, four in 10 students have still not signed up for the service at Virginia Tech, the article says.

Why is that?

“Campus-safety experts point to several factors to explain the lack of interest among students, including feelings of invincibility and reluctance to give out personal information.

“Others hesitate to pay the fees — generally a matter of pennies — that some cellphone providers charge to send and receive texts. Colleges generally pay $1 to $4 per enrolled student to the companies that set up the alerts.”

Notably, one administrator from Northern Illinois University told the Associated Press that he didn’t believe total saturation was necessary for the service to work,...

Harvard’s research center for Internet law will head a new task force dedicated to the safety of children online, according to an article from the Associated Press.

The Internet Safety Technical Task Force will include several large tech companies, such as Facebook and Myspace, in addition to nonprofit groups who aim to make the Internet safer for minors. Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society will run the group.

One of the big goals of the task force is to discuss identity authentication tools, including ways to verify users’ ages on Web sites.

However, critics argue that age verification on the Internet isn’t an effective solution to stranger-danger online, because it raises too many questions concerning privacy and public policy.

According to the Associated Press, MySpace originated the task force, which rose out of an agreement with 49 state attorneys general in January....

Erick Schonfeld from TechCrunch reported Friday that the four-year honeymoon period with Facebook just might be over.

He bases that assertion on statistics from comScore, a marketing research firm, along with a couple of quasi-descriptive line graphs.

The comScore statistics say that the number of unique visitors has hit a plateau over the last few months in the U.S., and has even dipped a bit in January by 800,000 users.

He goes on to say that Facebook continues to thrive in the rest of the world, where the number of unique visitors increased three percent.

Judging from some of the responses to the post, Martin Weller wasn’t too far off from the truth in some respects.—Hurley Goodall

Ever think about how quaint it now sounds to adjust the tracking on a VCR? It almost seems like doing the Charleston.

A Web developer from the University of Wollongong in Sydney, Australia, reminds us of that and other obsolete skills with a wiki.

Brad Kellet was inspired to create the Obsolete Skills wiki by a blog post from Robert Scoble, a former Microsoft employee.

When was the last time you formatted a floppy? —Hurley Goodall

Microsoft announced today that college students will now have access to development and design tools free of charge.

DreamSpark is a Web site where students can download a suite of Microsft development and design software, including: Visual Studio 2008 Expression Studio Windows Server 2003 XNA Game Studio 2.0

In order to take advantage of the free service, students must verify their student-status every 12 months.

TechCrunch reports that Bill Gates is scheduled to speak at Stanford University today to announce the deal.—Hurley Goodall

In the wake of the shooting at Northern Illinois University, numerous groups commemorating the event have already cropped up on Facebook.

On one of the largest groups, “Pray for Northern Illinois University Students and Families,” hundreds of students from different universities contributed almost 2000 posts within a day’s time — the earliest as soon as 5:43 p.m.

Some sent their condolences. Others reacted with shock. Some even said a family member was caught in the gunfire. One high school student writes at 7:50 p.m.:

“hey guys my cousin was shot in the class room in the back of the head if anyone was in the class room can they please send me a message or something so we can talk. Thank you sooo sooo much most of my family are heading out to Dekalb i ddnt get to go so please respnd back,”

Another student warns of an overload in the cell towers at 9:19 p.m.

“If you can’t get a hold of...

Michael Witmore, an associate professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University, announced the launch of Shakespeare’s Global Globe on Saturday. The site is a map that indicates the locations of self-reported Shakespeare readers across the globe. If they’re reading one of Shakespear’s works, visitors can input their location, and one of his plays, via a slick revolving display. You can also filter the map according to genre or the title.

This isn’t the first time Shakespeare has made a social foray into the online world. A recent attempt came from Indiana University in the form of Arden, which was basically a modified version of the somewhat popular multiplayer computer game Neverwinter Nights with a Shakespeare theme. The game, however, had problems: Edward Castronova, associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and creator of the game elaborates in a previous

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the arm of the University of Wisconsin at Madison that handles the university’s patents, is suing the chip maker Intel for patent infringement, Ars Technica reported Thursday.

According to the complaint, Intel’s Core 2 Duo processor uses technology patented by the university.

The lawsuit didn’t come out of nowhere, says Ars Technica:

“The fact that Intel and WARF have had dealings with each other in the past makes this claim more interesting. WARF received the patent in 1998 and first approached Intel about licensing back in 2001. The two organizations apparently met several times over the next few years, but were unable to come to an agreement. This lawsuit was apparently a last resort for WARF.” —Hurley Goodall