Natural disasters have been in the news a lot lately. The comparatively small number of lives lost when Hurricane Ike swept ashore over the weekend suggests that Americans are learning to heed public officials’ warnings — at least when those warnings are in attention-getting language, and the threat is obvious and imminent.

Now the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, Calif., is undertaking a multimedia effort to persuade Californians to prepare for the unpredictable: earthquakes. The effort, called the Los Angeles Earthquake: Get Ready Project, includes a Web site that will link to resources and data. It will also let users play an online game about reacting to, and recovering from, a quake in Los Angeles. The site and the game are tied to a November 13 regional quake-preparedness drill, the Great Southern California ShakeOut.

The design college plans a quake-awareness...

While some other institutions are installing digital-alert systems on their campuses, the Rhode Island School of Design has just installed seven large-screen digital bulletin boards that will cycle through announcements, calendar items, and “musings, artwork, photographs, and messages posted by anyone on campus.”

A news release says the system is the brainchild of the college’s new president, John Maeda, who envisioned “an open communications tool that would provide the RISD community with a highly visual and spontaneous method of connecting with one another.” Mr. Maeda, who is also a member of Samsung’s North America advisory board, persuaded the electronics company to donate the seven 52-inch screens, together worth $25,000. The interface for the system was designed by former students of Mr. Maeda’s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab who now work for a New York ...

Researchers at the University of Melbourne are looking for ways to make computer networks more efficient—and warning that if networks continue to suck up electricity at their current rate, they could be using as much as 10 percent of Australia’s power in 10 or 20 years, according to The Australian.

The research team is led by Rod Tucker, a professor at the university who is director of the Special Research Centre for Ultra-Broadband Information Networks. He says the Internet already consumes half of one percent of Australia’s electricity to bounce information around on optical telecommunications networks. Data centers consume another half a percent, he says.

And those figures don’t include the power required by end-users’ machines. “The part of the internet that consumes most of the energy is the modem in the home,” Mr. Tucker says. “The home modem is usually switched on all the time...

Brown University has upgraded its campus network in ways that will make it friendlier to handheld devices, including Apple’s iPhone and Palm’s Treo, according to The Brown Daily Herald.

The university installed Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync on its mail servers over the summer, which will let people handle their e-mail on handhelds. The university also made changes that will let handheld users gain access to the university’s secure network using virtual-private-network software, the newspaper said.

“We knew there would be more wireless devices on the network this year, in addition to laptops,” said Christopher Grossi, Brown’s manager of help-desk field support and software distribution. —Lawrence Biemiller

Sure, you enjoy watching those flashy halftime shows by big universities’ marching bands—lots of brass, lots of snare drums, lots of Sousa. But unless you’ve been in a band yourself, you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how much effort goes into preparing each performance.

The Web site of the Longhorn Band at the University of Texas at Austin starts to put the process into perspective. The site offers a series of smartly-produced QuickTime videos demonstrating basic marching moves that would-be band members need to know before they audition for the 350-student ensemble. Slides, turns, marching backwards — band members need to know not only a lot of moves, but also how to follow the very precise directions that link the moves together into choreographed performances. And that’s all before anyone’s played a single note.

Add music, a football field, and 94,000...

How robust is your institution’s wireless network? Students, faculty members, and others now expect to be able to connect their laptops to the Internet anywhere, to say nothing of their iPods and other devices. And they’re not just checking e-mail, either—they want to listen to music, keep up with YouTube videos, and maybe even watch television online. But that kind of heavy demand, especially in areas that attract lots of simultaneous users, is a challenge for those who oversee campus networks, according to an article in PC World.

Carnegie Mellon University, for instance, is upgrading wireless networks in its residence halls to use the latest 802.11n technology, as well as connection points that each packs up to 16 WiFi radios, with antennae divided by sector to reduce interference. Other institutions are dealing with overloads on the servers that assign Internet addresses as machines...

An 1800 map showed a completed Washington, but at the time the city had only a handful of streets and buildings. (Library of Congress image)

Nearly everyone has a good idea of what Washington looks like now — broad avenues, columned porticos, the tree-lined Mall, the Capitol, the Washington Monument. But what was here before all that? Turns out that’s been a tough question for scholars to answer, according to an article in The Washington Post Magazine. Early maps are scarce, early drawings are unreliable, and the original landscape has been significantly altered as the city has grown up.

Now students and faculty members in the Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County campus are recreating the original landscape digitally. They have brought together details from maps, old paintings, old letters, surviving site surveys for buildings like the Capitol, and ...