Apologies for the lack of posts on Friday: We were beset by technical errors.

The Wired Campus will be on sabbatical for the next two weeks. We’ll be posting again when The Chronicle’s online Daily Report resumes, on January 3. Happy holidays.

The 751 people named in the recording industry’s December batch of antipiracy lawsuits include students at three colleges—the smallest roster since the industry, at the start of the academic year, resumed its practice of suing campus-network users. Students at Drexel University, Harvard University, and the University of Southern California were named in today’s salvo of suits, filed by the Recording Industry Association of America.

If Google is taking over the world, as some technology watchers have theorized, then it’s doing so one research lab at a time.

The company is planning to open an engineering office in Pittsburgh in 2006, and today it tabbed Andrew W. Moore, a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, to head the project. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, Google’s efforts to help create an Internet research lab appear to be moving along smoothly: The center, which will be run by the University of California at Berkeley, has secured $7.5-million in grants from Google, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems.

As art historians and Nat King Cole fans can attest, the allure of Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous portrait lies in its subject’s inscrutable smile: Is it wry? Melancholy? Reflective?

Actually, Mona Lisa was just in a pretty good mood, according to a team of researchers at the University of Amsterdam. Using computer software intended to identify people’s emotions on the basis of  photographs, the researchers determined that she was "83 percent happy."

The research does offer some support for admirers who see something more sinister in Mona Lisa’s smile: The remaining 17 percent of her emotional range was found to be divided among feelings of disgust, fear, and anger. (BBC News)

Despite losing homes and possessions in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, many students managed to keep their college studies on schedule through the Sloan Semester, a special distance-education program involving 153 colleges and universities. One educator called the program “a real breakthrough for online learning.” (The Chronicle, free link)

Ah, wintertime: when students’ fancies lightly turn to thoughts of public salaciousness. Less than two weeks after a University of Pennsylvania student got into hot water for posting online photos of a pair of classmates in flagrante delicto, officials at the University of Western Ontario have found themselves dealing with a similar scandal.

Pictures have popped up online of a female university student performing a dorm-room striptease and lap dance for several classmates. But unlike officials at Penn, who initially slapped their prurient photographer with charges of sexual harassment and misuse of electronic resources,...

Wikipedia, the online encylopedia that lets any Internet user draft and edit entries, has taken some heat recently for publishing inaccurate information. But the science journal Nature conducted an investigation and found that Wikipedia is just about as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica, at least when it comes to science articles.

The magazine had subject-matter experts review 42 pairs of entries from both encyclopedias, without letting the experts know which was which. Wikipedia averaged four mistakes per entry, and Britannica averaged three. Most of the errors were insignificant, the magazine states in an article released today, such as whether someone was the 13th or 14th child in his family. Experts found eight serious errors—four...

As more and more colleges consider experimenting with biometric security systems, it’s worth remembering that fingerprint scanners—like all security tools—are less than perfect. Researchers at Clarkson University have found that they can fool the scanners 9 times out of 10 by making fake fingerprints out of Play-Doh.

Campus officials who want to fine-tune their biometric systems can set their scanners to sense the moisture patterns of perspiration on real fingers, the researchers add. (InformationWeek)

The University of Colorado at Boulder’s beleaguered football program recently rid itself of Gary Barnett, its controversial head coach, but the university still can’t seem to escape scandal. A lineman on the team has been suspended and his girlfriend, a cross-country runner, has quit her squad after being accused of sending a racist e-mail message to a Hispanic athlete. (Associated Press)

Search engines like Google and Yahoo are testaments to the power of programs called Web crawlers—robots that scan the Internet, collect documents, and file them away in searchable indexes. The giants of the search world have typically kept their crawlers under wraps, but Alexa Internet, a subsidiary of Amazon that measures traffic on the Web, has chosen to break ranks. The company has released its crawler—which sifts through as many as five billion web pages every month—online to computer programmers.

Users will have to pay to play with the industrial-strength crawler. But technology experts say the tool could make it much easier for computer scientists and amateur enthusiasts to put new spin on...