About 30 students at Duke University spent a recent weekend watching YouTube clips and Twittering about them.

That may sound like any other campus weekend in these high-tech times, but the hours of tweeting and YouTubing were actually part of the “First Ever Twitter Film Festival,” organized by Duke students taking an introductory film class. After embedding short YouTube clips from 39 movies on a blog and creating a shared Twitter account (twitfilm), the students spent April 4 tweeting their thoughts as different sets of clips were screened every hour. A roundtable Twitter discussion followed the next day.

“Narrative enhanced by visual: Bateman’s projected model existence vs. the dark creature within,” read a tweet about a clip from...

Some spurned college applicants hoping to burn their rejection letters won’t get their pyrotechnic satisfactions this year — a handful of colleges and universities have stopped sending rejection letters in paper form.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University nixed paper rejection letters for applicants who checked their admissions decisions online this year. At Penn and Yale, letters were still sent to rejected applicants who did not check their admissions decisions online within a certain time; MIT made an exception for applicants who did not have access to online decisions.

Jeffrey Brenzel, dean of admissions at Yale, said the decision was aimed at cutting the “significant expense” of sending out rejection letters, the Yale...

Computer science is taking on a public-service bent at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where students and faculty in a new program are using code to combat societal problems like homelessness and the spread of HIV.

The program, dubbed “Computing for Good,” or “C4G” for short, spun out of a course taught last spring by Santosh Vempala, a computer-science professor at Georgia Tech, and two other faculty members. Students in the class, which saw its enrollment jump to 50 this fall from 17 last spring, developed mobile kiosks for recording war-crimes testimony in Liberia and built a Web-based monitoring system for blood supplies that the World Health Organization is considering deploying worldwide. Other projects included developing computerized systems for Atlanta homeless shelters trying...

Watch out, Second Life.

The University of California at San Diego announced today the creation of a new research center aimed at creating the “next generation” of virtual worlds, which designers hope will be more visually rich and have more features than Second Life and other popular online environments.

The center will use a new hybrid-computing platform developed by IBM. Sheldon Brown, a professor of visual arts at the university who is also the director of the new center, said artists working with simulations have been limited by the computing technologies available. The new IBM platform, Mr. Brown said, offers an increased level of flexibility and power that will give artists more freedom.

Among the center’s first projects will be the development of a virtual world based on Scalable City, a...

Consumer Digest blasts online universities in an article published this month, alleging that the institutions aggressively court unqualified students who are likely to fail or drop out, leaving them with significant debt and poor employment prospects.

Based largely on anecdotal evidence from 26 former students and employees of for-profit online universities, the article, which is not available online, also accuses institutions of misleading students about tuition costs and the worth of their degrees to potential employers.

At the same time, the article, which bases many of its conclusions on conjecture, concedes that individual institutions’ programs differ and that not all students have negative experiences with online universities.

“It’s difficult for us to say what value a degree from a for-profit online university delivers,...

Grant seekers beware: Stimulus money may soon be raining from the skies, but a cantankerous Web site may prevent you from getting your hands on it.

Grants.gov, the government’s portal for those applying for federal grants, is expected to see a 60-percent increase in traffic because of the stimulus bill. The site faces a “significant risk of failure,” The Washington Post reported yesterday, quoting Peter R. Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget. In a memo sent to federal agencies on Monday, Mr. Orszag warned that a surge of stimulus-induced traffic could overwhelm the site, which is already frustrating users with error messages and general slowness.

Mr. Orszag said storage space had been added to the system in preparation for...

There’s a lot of debate over the state of the news media these days, but a team of researchers at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society is trying to make discussions of content and bias a bit more precise.

This morning, the Berkman Center unveiled Media Cloud, a research tool that designers say will help researchers study news-media trends with a level of quantitative precision previously unavailable. Powered by software that automatically identifies various elements — such as people, places, and topics — contained within an article, Media Cloud allows users to query a database of online content from more than 1,500 blogs and traditional publications.

Currently, three query tools are available to researchers: viewing the top 10 topics a news-media source covers, mapping how...

Barbara Liskov, the first woman in the United States to earn a Ph.D. from a computer-science department and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been awarded the A.M. Turing Award for 2008.

Ms. Liskov was chosen for the $250,000 prize, given by the Association for Computing Machinery, for her contributions to the computer programs that “form the infrastructure of our information-based society,” an association statement said. In addition to laying the groundwork for the development of the modern search engine, Ms. Liskov was instrumental in demonstrating how “data abstraction,” a method for organizing complex programs, could make software more accessible and reliable, the statement said.

Ms. Liskov earned her doctorate from Stanford University’s computer-science department in...

Faculty opposition has forced the University of Toledo to scrap talks with a private company to develop graduate online programs, The Blade, a newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, reported yesterday.

Higher Ed Holdings, a Texas-based company, approached the university to discuss developing two master’s degree programs for its College of Education. But faculty resistance prompted the company to pull out of the discussions earlier this week, leading Rosemary Haggett, the university’s provost, to send an e-mail message to the college expressing her disappointment.

“What could have been a truly compelling dialogue about opportunities to broaden the number of graduate education students benefiting from the expertise of College of Education faculty was...

Duke University has become the latest institution to join the mobile-application arms race, announcing today the release of “DukeMobile,” a suite of programs for students who use the iPhone and iPod Touch. The applications weren’t actually designed by Duke students, though—they were developed by a company run by students at Stanford University.

Among other functions, the software allows users to watch Duke content on YouTube and iTunes, look through the university’s course catalog, and pinpoint the location of campus events on a searchable map. By March 30, those using Blackberrys with multi-touch capabilities will also be able to use the software.

Similar software bundles have been developed at other campuses, including the University of Cincinnati and University of...