Researchers in Bournemouth University, in England, have literalized a retronym: They’ve created real snail mail.

In a project that combines technical prowess with art and whimsy, the researchers have designed a system for delivering messages by using actual snails. An e-mail is sent to a tank containing snails fitted with RFID chips. If and when a snail wanders by the e-mail collection site, its RFID chip will pick up the message. Then, if and when that snail wanders by the drop-off point in another area of the tank, the e-mail will be delivered (at that point, via the Internet, of course).

RealSnailMail’s creators apparently intended to comment on the role that speed and efficiency play in modern lives.

“Culturally, we seem obsessed with immediacy. Time is not to be...

The Chronicle recently profiled a Carnegie Mellon University researcher who advises on projects to adapt cell phones as assistive technologies for the blind and deaf.

One of her students’ projects—a gesture-recognition glove that translates American Sign Language into spoken words through a cell phone—has another, potentially more lucrative use: football training. The same sensor-embedded glove technology can help identify whether a ball is being handled, caught, and thrown properly. The students are also developing a “smart” football that would contain a tracking device. This would allow coaches to plot the path of each throw and referees to make more accurate calls. Priya Narasimhan, the professor advising the team,...

Want your man to open up and share? Get him a broadband connection.

A new survey says men are more likely than women to share their creative works online, even though both sexes participate in creative activities at roughly equal rates.

Researchers at Northwestern University surveyed 1,060 freshmen from the University of Illinois at Chicago. They found that, on average, two out of three men and two out of three women engage in creative writing, art photography, music, or film/video generally. But while almost two-thirds of men reported posting these types of creative works online, only half of women reported doing so.

“Because sharing information on the Internet today is a form of participating in public culture and contributing to public discourse, that tells us men’s voices are being disproportionately heard,” Eszter Hargittai, a...

Ten American law professors have filed a brief in support of Jammie Thomas, the first and only defendant to go to trial in a music-sharing case brought by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Last October a jury ruled that Jammie Thomas owed Capitol Records $222,000 for sharing music on her computer. Then, last month the judge in the case said he may have “committed a manifest error of law” when he instructed the jury to consider the act of making copyrighted songs available for download equivalent to infringement, whether or not the songs were actually downloaded.

The 10 law scholars argued in their brief that the judge had indeed made an error, and that making a song available when there was no evidence that the...

A new Harvard Business Review paper argues that women leave science and technology careers in droves because of “hostile macho cultures” and risk-taking incentives, among other reasons.

The paper, produced by the Center for Work-Life Policy, found that more than half of women who enter science, engineering, and technology careers drop out. The paper’s authors identified several “antigens” in corporate sci/tech cultures that force women out: macho work environments, feelings of isolation or career stagnation, cultures that encourage risk-taking, and time-intensive positions that compromise family responsibilities. The study also analyzes 13 company initiatives that try to combat these pressures.

Studies...

A new study from the University of Hertfordshire, in England, found that most young music pirates say they’re willing to pay for legal file-sharing services.

The survey, conducted on behalf of British Music Rights (a music-writing and publishing-industry group), found that 63 percent of respondents age 14 to 24 copped to illegally downloading music. Of those who share music illegally, 80 percent say they would use a legal file-sharing service, such as an unlimited download service for which they paid a monthly fee.

Among other interesting findings, the survey also showed that less than half of all respondents had learned about copyright. Those who knew about copyright were more likely to have learned about the concept from “informal...

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created software that helps identify where in the world a photo was taken.

The software matches a given photo against six million geo-tagged photos available on Flickr. (Many of the online photo-sharing service’s users elect to identify where in the world their photos were taken.) By finding similarly-composed shots on Flickr—such as those containing narrow streets or tall cathedrals—the software can figure out where an image was likely to have been taken.

In experiments, the software geo-located 16% of test images to within 200 kilometers of where each photo was snapped, and the biggest challenge is often distinguishing between similar visual arrangements found in different places. “The world is...

Things get dangerous when tech meets tennis.

A new study from two Cardiff University researchers attacks the accuracy of a “sports decision aid”—a technology used to supplement or replace referee and umpire calls—used at Wimbledon.

Hawk-Eye, which makes calls in tennis, was previously questioned in last year’s Wimbledon tennis championship. In the final match, Roger Federer believed that a ball hit by his opponent Rafael Nadal landed well behind the baseline. But the umpire, who had initially called the ball out, deferred to Hawk-Eye’s judgment that the ball was in.

This new study indicates Federer may have been right. The researchers argue that the average error of the machine is greater...

If only the metadata accompanying e-texts were as interesting as that found in used books!

Online bookseller AbeBooks.com recently asked its vendors about the strangest things they’ve found in used books. The list will surprise you: a Christmas card from L. Frank Baum, a Mickey Mantle rookie card, a diamond ring, a strip of bacon, $40,000, a World War II U.S. ration book, and even “a holographic image of a lady who sheds her clothing,” among other items.

Surely similar items have turned up in collections bequeathed to academic libraries around the country. What strange things have you found in your library’s old books?—Catherine Rampell

In the wake of a devastating fire at Our Lady of the Lake University last month, university officials didn’t rely on phone calls or e-mail to keep the university community connected. They couldn’t. The fire was in the campus’s main building and had knocked the entire e-mail and phone networks out for about three days. Instead, the community relied on an instant-messaging service.

Shortly before the fire, the university had integrated an IM platform into their campus IT structure. The university had not invited students and faculty to use the service yet. When a massive fire blazed through the main campus building on May 6, though, the institution’s IT administrators began updating the community through Blackboard and urging students and instructors to download the IM client (Pronto, a platform...