A former computer-system administrator at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth was arraigned in late February on charges that he hacked into student e-mail and Facebook accounts and downloaded a number of nude and partially nude photographs of 16 female students.

According to a local newspaper, The Standard-Times, Robert T. DeCampos, 30, would go to the Facebook home page and request that the site reset the passwords for the women’s accounts. (To do this, he had to supply the women’s e-mail addresses, which he had access to because of his position at the university.) Mr DeCampos would then use his administrative privileges on the university computer system to access the women’s e-mail accounts. Once in, he could open their e-mails from Facebook and retrieve the new passwords, then use them to access their Facebook pages, which contained images.

The university fired Mr....

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.

The project is led by Adrianne Wortzel, a professor of entertainment technology at the university.

I decided to recline on Eliza Redux’s virtual couch to see...

In an effort to broaden access to its image archives, Oregon State University has become the first university to join Flickr Commons, a section of the popular photo-sharing service devoted to making historic images available to the public.

“We’re always looking for new areas of engagement, new avenues for putting our materials out there,” said Tiah Edmunson-Morton, reference and instruction archivist at the university’s Valley Library, in an interview today. “It seemed a base to reach a whole new set of users.”

Flickr, the image- and video-sharing site owned by Yahoo, opened the Commons last year as a space where archival institutions—like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, which are both using the service—can post photos and visitors can comment on them. “The key goals of the Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography...

An information-technology malfunction early this week at Southern Methodist University offered students a harsh reminder of how heavily they depend on e-mail and other Web-based services and how helpless they are when something goes wrong.

“We’ve all gotten used to the digital age where we expect technology to work all the time,” said Joe Gargiulo, chief information officer at the university, “and when it doesn’t work as we expect it to, it’s a surprise to everyone.”

According to Mr. Gargiulo, a hardware failure in a unit that stored server data for the university’s e-mail and course-management software left many members of the campus community with sporadic or no access to those digital tools from Sunday evening until late Monday afternoon.

While several faculty members seemed largely unfazed by this development, a number of students felt at sea in the outage.

“I was unable...

Skidmore College’s baccalaureate distance-learning program, University Without Walls, may become another casualty of the economic crisis.

The program, started in 1971, was never designed to turn a profit. But the rate at which it is losing money—more than $100,000 annually since about 2003—has become a problem as the upstate New York college has sought to streamline its budget in the face of endowment losses. Unless the program is overhauled, officials say, it will sink deeper into the red.

The program, which costs $6,300 per semester for full-time students, offers a Skidmore degree at a significant discount compared to the nearly $25,000 per semester charged to residential students. Although economic downturns tend to push more students to enroll in online education programs, enrollment in University Without Walls remains well shy of where it would need to be for the program to...

A Calvin College student has been suspended for one year over a lewd Facebook message he allegedly posted about an ex-girlfriend.

According to an article in The Grand Rapids Press, a message about an ex was posted from Tony Harris’s account in November that “referred to the woman in two slang terms and referenced sexuality.” Calvin officials did not return calls from The Chronicle, but the newspaper reported that the college cited Mr. Harris, a sophomore, for violating technology and conduct codes at the institution, which refers to itself as “distinctively Christian.”

The acceptable-use policy on the college’s Web site prohibits “communication that degrades or harasses individuals or groups.”

Mr. Harris, who did not respond to requests for comment from The Chronicle, has insisted that the ex-girlfriend, who he said knew his Facebook password, logged in to his ...

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 room, whether they’re drifting into more intimate proximity with ...

In the face of looming budget cuts, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has issued a message to its professors, staff members, and students: Got any ideas?

Prompted by a suggestion at a recent town-hall-style meeting on the campus, the provost’s office at the Urbana-Champaign campus has created an online suggestion box for recommendations on how campus officials might trim expenses. “Your thoughts, ideas, and questions will help guide us as we navigate the challenges we face as a campus,” reads a message on the Web page.

“In light of the economic downturn it has become difficult to anticipate the size of state appropriations and we must plan for the possibility of significant reductions in state funds for this fiscal year and the next,” wrote Richard Herman, the university’s chancellor, and Linda Katehi, the provost, in a statement on the site. “We must bring together our ...

Washington State University has decided to go paperless for all internal communications on its four campuses, moving all memos, fliers, posters, and its weekly newspaper to cyberspace. “Experts have been predicting a transition to a paperless society for years,” wrote Elson S. Floyd, the university’s president, in a statement this afternoon. “Meanwhile, it seems that the piles of papers that cross our desks keep growing. We plan to reverse that trend.”

The decision, made official last month, comes amid an effort to trim $10-million from the university’s budget by June, with further cuts anticipated next year. Barbara B. Petura, vice provost for university relations, said that it was “probably impossible” to project how much Washington State would save by phasing out paper, and she admitted that the savings would only put a small dent in the amount the university hopes to cut from its...

The Cybermetrics Lab, a research group based in Spain, has released the latest edition of its biannual Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, which seeks to measure “the performance and impact of universities through their Web presence.”

According to the group’s Web site, the rankings—which Cybermetrics began publishing in 2004—were originally conceived as a way of promoting open access to academic materials online. It comes as no surprise, then, that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose OpenCourseWare project boasts the world’s largest collection of free teaching materials, tops the list.

Stanford University, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Cornell University round out the top five. American universities are the strongest performers: The University of Toronto, at No. 24, is the highest-ranked institution from outside the United...