Universal City, Calif. — Cheering and applause overwhelmed speakers here at the 2008 Internet Entertainment Workshop, a “summit” convened today by the movie industry and large university systems to discuss the divisive issues of college students downloading music and video, possibly illegally and probably aided by university network services. There were full-throated shouts of joy, and the sounds of people jumping from their seats.

Well, that was actually from the boisterous motivational seminar going on next door at the hotel (“Are you ready to change your life?”). These hotel walls at the Universal City Hilton are thin.

In the Internet workshop, the mood was more somber, despite efforts by the Motion Picture Association of America, which convened the meeting, to find common ground between the two sides. “This workshop is designed to improve relationships,” said Stewart McLaurin,...

When university information-technology departments make mistakes involving students, it often means releasing their Social Security numbers to the world. But at the University of Kansas, it meant dropping extra cash in student bank accounts.

At the university’s Edwards campus, in Overland Park, 421 students got checks or direct deposits of several hundred dollars each after an accounting program malfunctioned, The Kansas City Star reported today. The university’s Enroll & Pay system miscalculated tuition figures, and an automated check-writing program sent checks or direct deposits to the students. One lucky person received more than $700.

He had to give it back, though. A few students called the bursar’s office, wondering where the extra money came from. The university then discovered the mistake and asked for refunds on the refunds. Students, said the newspaper, complied....

When asked what kind of educational technology they wanted most, students—replete with iPods, laptops, and social-network pages on Facebook—say the thing they don’t have and wish for most is an online chat with their professors.

In a survey released today by CDW-G, the technology vendor, 39 percent of college students say they want regular online chats with faculty. The surveyors contacted 401 students to get this information.

The students are likely to be disappointed, according to the report. Only 23 percent of IT staff surveyed—there were 301 of them—said their campus offered that kind of electronic faculty-student contact.—Josh Fischman

The pterosaur, a winged creature that soared over the heads of dinosaurs 115 million years ago, today debuted as the model for a flying robotic spy. A paleontologist from Texas Tech University, an engineer from the University of Florida, and their students presented plans for the “Pterodrone” at a joint conference in Houston of the Geological Society of America and two other scientific groups.

The researchers, led by Sankar Chatterjee from Texas Tech and Richard Lind from Florida, decided to use the pterosaur as a model because it could walk, fly, and sail over the water. Flexibility will be key to successful drones, which have to operate in varied environments, the researchers said. Their design features a vertical tail at the front of the drone, which makes tight turns easier, and limbs that change shape for maneuvering on land, air, and sea.

This may be the only military...

Presidents of major universities want more library materials distributed online, without prohibitive charges.

At the Universal Access Digital Library Summit, held on September 24 and 25 at the Boston Public Library, Mark Huddleston, president of the University of New Hampshire, Peter Nicholls, provost of the University of Connecticut, and Jack Wilson, president of the University of Massachusetts, called for new approaches to the digitization of library collections that will allow access for all. The presidents urged libraries to halt what they described as an assault on the public’s right to knowledge, done in the name of copyright.

The meeting, which was convened by the Boston Library Consortium, also included the presentations of “Free Our Libraries! Why We Need a New Approach to Putting Library Collections Online,” a white paper by Richard K. Johnson, senior advisor to the...

People around the world will laugh themselves silly tonight as they watch an event, at a major university, that is guaranteed to entertain.

No, we’re not talking about the vice-presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis. We’re talking about the Webcast of the 2008 Ig Nobel Ceremony at Harvard University.

The event, produced by the science-humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, will take place at 7:15 p.m. at Harvard. It will honor research that first makes you laugh, then makes you think.—Don Troop

Updated August 27, 2008 at 6 p.m. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is crowing about a faculty and research coup: It has captured the Data Intensive Cyber Environments group, known as DICE, from the University of California at San Diego’s Supercomputer Center. The new East Coasters consist of 10 people, including a star computer scientist, Reagan Moore.

An additional four DICE members are remaining in San Diego, at the university’s Institute for Neural Computation, said Jose-Marie Grifffiths, dean of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, the group’s new home base. All 14 members, however, voted to make the switch, Ms. Griffiths said.

The DICE group has garnered a world-class reputation for open-source software that allows data sharing among researchers, publication in digital libraries, and preservation of data in archives. The group’s...

Wireless networks are great. They are particularly great for thieves, posing as trusted Web sites, who can pluck your financial information out of the air while you are shopping for jeans online at a coffee shop hot spot. Now university researchers have come up with a relatively simple fix—a plug-in to the popular Mozilla Firefox Web browser- that makes it much harder for pretenders to gain your trust.

David Anderson, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University,

It must be getting close to September, because that “back to school” month is when magazines come out with various rankings of colleges and, sure enough, rankings issues are starting to hit the newsstands. This week Computerworld released its list of 56 “most innovative” IT schools in the U.S. The magazine chose to profile 13 of them. Listed in no particular order (at least no order explained by the magazine), they are:

Carnegie Mellon University Georgia State University Indiana University at Bloomington Northeastern University Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Stanford University University of Pennsylvania University of Virginia Virginia Tech Polytechnic Institute of New York University San Jose State University University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign University of Washington

How were these universities selected? By their reputations among a small group of people....

A long, long time ago—about two years—students filled Facebook and found and “friended” others who were taking the same courses. They shared information and tips. Then in 2006 Facebook was opened up to nonstudents, and class interests got crowded out.

A new Facebook program aims to bring it back, allowing members to view their courses and chat with classmates and friends that have opted in to the program. The new wrinkle: the program is going to run through the universities, with information fed into Facebook by the registrar’s office once students give permission.

PC World reports that students who join the program, called Schools, can view their course calendar, and if they add or drop a course, changes will be reflected in Facebook as soon as the registrar’s office reports them. Schools also includes communication tools for student groups such as teams and residence...