People who prefer print books over e-books may still want extra digital material to go with them. That's the idea behind Sorin Matei's project, Ubimark, which embeds books with two-dimensional codes that work as hyperlinks when photographed.

So far there's just one book available in English, Around the World in 80 Days, with the bar-like codes. (See a YouTube demo here.) A collection of scholarly essays in Romanian, Mr. Matei's native language, will be available soon. Mr. Matei, an associate professor of communication at Purdue University, says that the initial book is just "an exercise in pushing the envelope as far as we can," and that scholarly publications will be available in the future with the embedded feature. 

When a reader of the book photographs a code accompanying a chapter, map, or illustration, a Web browser can use that image to link to a corresponding Web site. A chapter...

Ever since Mark Gasson got a virus, his cellphone won't work, and he can't unlock the door to his building on campus. But those are the kind of symptoms humans can expect when they get infected with computer viruses. 

Mr. Gasson, a research fellow at the University of Reading, in England, has a radio-frequency identification chip implanted in his hand. It's the kind of computer chip that is sometimes used to track animals, but Mr. Gasson uses it to activate his cellphone and unlock doors. He also uses it for research that explores the potential risks of implanted devices, which he expects will become more common in humans. When he infects the chip with a virus, he can then transmit that virus to another computer.

Mr. Gasson stresses that the virus in his chip is spreading from implanted technology to a computer, not from a human being to a computer. Still, he says we should consider...

Perry Samson, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, liked the concept of personal "clickers" in class, but he felt that they weren't dynamic enough for the kinds of questions he wanted to ask in his meteorology courses. So he created Web-based software that combine personal-response technology with other kinds of interactive tools that students can use on their laptops in classrooms.

Lecture Tools, the system Mr. Samson created, lets students use their computers during classes to pose anonymous questions, mark up lecture slides, and answer questions posed by the instructor in real time. For meteorology courses, students can answer questions by pinpointing a location on a weather map on their screens, and the answers all show up—anonymously—for everyone to see. He started using the system about five years ago, and now 30 other instructors at...

At the University of Florida, a Facebook application lets students be choosy when looking for tutors.

The application, Tutor Matching Service, lets students search for tutors by subject, class, or tutor name. They can see ratings and comments on tutors, when tutors are available, and how much they charge. Tutors can also post pictures and videos of themselves.

A little more than a year ago, the student-government president at the time created the application with Group Interactive Networks, a technology company, to supplement the university's on-campus tutoring center. Though the center offers free tutoring to students, it has limited hours, does not have tutors for every class, and offers no information on the quality of tutors.

More than 120 students have registered as tutors on the application, and when class is in session, 50 to 100 hours of tutoring are arranged through it each...

An ordinary person can't do much to help with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but for an ordinary person with a smartphone, it's a different story.

The Visualization Center at San Diego State University and Crisis Commons, an online community that uses technology to respond to crises, will release a free smartphone application in the next few days that people can use to document the oil spill's effects on the coastline. When users take pictures of the coast with the new application, Slick View, the photo will be sent back to San Diego with a time stamp and a GPS location attached. The center will process all the images and piece maps together of the coast along the Gulf of Mexico. The maps, which will be available to the public, will show the changes along the coast over time.

“If you took tens of thousands of pictures, especially if you took them all at once, you would have an...

Four students at Syracuse University have made a job out of helping graduating seniors there find one.

Syracuse University recently bought a six-month subscription for each of its 4,100 graduating seniors to Brand-Yourself, a Web site the students created to help customers manage their online presence.

The company was created by two Syracuse undergraduate students, a graduate student, and a recent graduate. They started the project about a year and a half ago and put the Web site up nine weeks ago. So far, they've raised $275,000 from private investors. About 150 new users sign up for the free trial on their Web site each week.

Mike Cahill, director of Syracuse's career-services office, described the contract with Brand-Yourself as a "win-win" deal: The university could encourage student entrepreneurship and provide a valuable service to graduates at the same time.

“If you’re...

With a service it started Thursday, the Internet Archive has more than doubled the number of books available to blind people and others who cannot read print books. The nonprofit organization, based in San Francisco, has made more than a million digital books available free in a format that can be downloaded to a device that reads them aloud.

The Internet Archive has been scanning books and making them available free online since 2005, and the books in the new format are part of the organization's collection of more than two million texts. To make a book accessible for those unable to read print volumes, the Internet Archive uses an automatic process to digitize it into a special format, Daisy.

The process does not work well for textbooks or other kinds of texts with complex formatting, said Brewster Kahle, the archive's founder and digital librarian. Other organizations, like

Students give the same responses on paper as on online course evaluations but are less likely to respond to online surveys, according to a recent study.

The study was conducted at Kansas State University's IDEA Center, a  nonprofit group that tries to improve how colleges use course evaluations. It examined data that the center collected from classes at nearly 300 institutions between 2002 and 2008, of which 89.9 percent used paper surveys and 10.1 percent posted surveys online. The study analyzed student ratings data from 271,727 classes that used paper surveys and 13,101 classes that used online surveys.

The only meaningful difference between student ratings completed online and on paper was that students who took online surveys gave their professors higher ratings for using educational technology to promote learning.

Seventy-eight percent of students enrolled in classes with paper ...

Washington—At the finals for Microsoft's U.S. Imagine Cup competition, which took place here today, 20 student teams displayed video-game and software projects that attempt to solve the world's greatest problems with technology. James Cameron, the Academy Award winner who most recently directed Avatar, spoke at the awards ceremony.

Some projects had a very practical use, such as software that would make medical data more available to researchers around the world. Other projects, however, were designed more for entertainment, such as a video game that lets players fight disease in the human body using tiny robots. Of the teams, which were mostly made up of college students, two were selected to represent the United States in Warsaw at the Worldwide Finals in July.

In the software-design category, three students from the University of California at Davis took the prize. The students'...

Writing a thesis about animal intentionality and tool use is totally hot right now. A thesis about Robert Louis Stevenson's use of the supernatural to symbolize evil? Not so much.

For graduate students who want to take the temperature of their dissertation's thesis statement, there's a Web site that went up earlier this week allowing students to vote on how hot each others' theses are. The site offers no criteria for judging a thesis statement, and the voter has only two choices: "hot" or "not."

The Web site, called Is My Thesis Hot or Not, is part of the online graduate student community GradShare. So far, there are about 75 theses posted and 5,000 votes. Although the site is intended for posting thesis statements, most of the current submissions are titles or research questions. And most of them are decidedly not hot.

There's also room for comments so voters can explain why a thesis...