SPEEDY SPIRITUALITY: Forget speed-dating, that 20th-century hook-up relic. Dominican University, outside Chicago, is pioneering the practice of “speed faithing,” a meet-up opportunity for students who want answers to deeper questions than “What’s your sign?” and “What’s your major?” As part of a yearlong partner­ship with the Interfaith Youth Core, a national organization promoting ecumenism on college campuses, Dominican staged its first speed-faithing event last fall. Students, faculty members, and staff members from a varietyof faiths sat down with strangersfor five-minute conversations about their religious beliefs. This Valentine’s Day, the university is reprising the event for students only. “Being a Catholic institution, we’re already gearing up for future weddings, babies—lots of babies—and christenings,” says Jessica Mackinnon, a spokes­woman for the university.

A PROFESSOR’S PLUNGE: Eric Pierson (left), an associate professor of communication studies at the University of San Diego, took a shot at winning $1-million on the January 30 episode of the television game show Who’s Still Standing? Contestants vie to be the last person to correctly answer a set of trivia questions. A wrong answer triggers a trap door, dropping the losing contestant through the stage floor. The show’s stylists had outfitted Mr. Pierson in stereo­typical professorial garb: bright shirt, red neckerchief, blazer with elbow patches, and a classy beret. He nailed eight correct answers before dropping eight feet into a pile of foam on the question “What stand-up comic voiced Remy the rat chef in Ratatouille?” Mr. Pierson’s game-show luck has been better: He won more than $15,000 in a five-day run in 1987 on High Rollers, with the host Wink Martin­dale. Mr. Pierson and his wife, Shirley—newlyweds at the time—used the money for a down payment on a house. And the voice of the rat? That would be Patton Oswalt.

GENIUSES AND CADETS: Each fall the MacArthur Foundation announces, with great fanfare, the winners of its $500,000, no-strings-attached grants for “exceptional creativity.” Chronicle editors did a double take this month when an “unclassified” memo announcing the winners of another MacArthur Awards program arrived by e-mail. The General Douglas Mac­Arthur Foundation and the U.S. Army Cadet Command named the top Army ROTC programs for each of the nation’s eight brigades. The winning programs were the Citadel, Northeastern University, Iowa State University, the University of Maryland at College Park, the University of Utah, the University of Mississippi, the University of Notre Dame, and Santa Clara University. The awards recognize General Mac­Arthur’s ideals of duty, honor, and country. Unlike the “genius grant” MacArthurs, these carry no cash.

APPETITE FOR PARODY: Forty years elapsed between the Harvard Lampoon’s Bored of the Rings and its 2009 novel Nightlight, a spoof of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight vampire-romance series. The undergrad parody-novel business must be lucrative. Last week, the Harvard humor club released The Hunger Pains, a sendup of Suzanne Collins’s dystopian story of teens who are forced to fight to the death in a grim reality-television show staged by the government. In the spoof, Kantkiss Neverclean must outwit her opponents if she hopes to make it back to her family in the telemarketing district’s worst neighborhood, the Crack. The Hunger Pains is not high art, but we know a 12-year-old who loved it.—Don Troop

get upCYCLED | Hampshire College from DART Program on Vimeo.

The University of Alberta reclaimed the world dodge ball record last week from the University of California at Irvine. A Guinness World Records adjudicator confirmed that 4,979 players turned out to pummel one another.

Students at the University of Bayreuth, in Bavaria, stage a flash mob with beer during an engineering lecture.

A compilation of machine-vision footage explores how robots see the world.

Robot readable world from Timo on Vimeo.

Via MetaFilter

First, West Kentucky Community and Technical College produced this lively video to the tune of J.Lo’s “Let’s Get Loud” to celebrate being recognized by the Aspen Institute as one of America’s top five community colleges.

Then the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering sent us this clip of what may be the world’s fastest-ever campus tour. Our only complaint comes at the 26-second mark when we’re introduced to the “world’s fastest running robot” — which we never actually get to see running. (Tweed has a thing for robots, in case you hadn’t noticed.)

Finally, if your students (or their professors) are suddenly unable to marshal their facts in the classroom, it might have something to do with the today’s SOPA Blackout. Wikipedia, Reddit and other sites are going dark for 12 to 24 hours to show their opposition to the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act. The always entertaining NMA.tv offers its animated take on the protest.

We’re just wondering why Dave Spence, a Republican candidate for governor of Missouri, seems embarrassed about his own bachelor of science degree in that field. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Mr. Spence, who majored in family economics and management, claims on his campaign Web site that he holds a degree in economics.

According to the University of Missouri at Columbia, Mr. Spence earned his bachelor of science degree in home economics in 1981. Mr. Spence told the paper on Monday that he chose home economics because his grades did not permit him to enter the business school. “I’ll make fun of myself,” he said. “I was a 60-watt bulb in a 100-watt society.”

We’re sincerely hoping that this gaffe doesn’t disqualify Mr. Spence from holding office. If nothing else, he’d have a strong domestic policy.

—Don Troop

A couple reveals what happens in bookstores in the middle of the night.

A short and sweet history lesson for the History Channel.

And finally, another football bowl-game video, in which the Orange Bowl mascot gets creamed (juiced?), then gamely plays along by feigning illness afterward.

Also out of Canada, a student at the University of Western Ontario and a friend have created a comedy series about group of fictional students at the institution. Macleans reports that real-life university administrators are less than thrilled about the raunchy humor and depictions of excessive drinking at the institution. Caution: The trailer for 3 Audrey (below) includes gratuitous profanities. (This is supposed to be college, after all.)

In college football news, a remote-control television camera hits the field in the fourth quarter of last Friday’s Insight Bowl.

Happy holidays from Tweed!

Occupy Harvard delivers lumps of coal to Harvey Mansfield, Niall Ferguson, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin, among others.

We liked the University of Oregon’s video greeting card because it was short and to the point.

Macalester College President Brian Rosenberg, in real life a Dickens scholar, experiences his own “Scrooge” moment this holiday season.

Eckerd College’s holiday card tackles the debate over the value of a liberal-arts education.

American University’s holiday card features individual holiday wishes.

Towson University offers its own twist on “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.”

The unwitting adviser, Jürgen Schmidhuber, director of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or IDSIA, in Switzerland, was initially “panicked,” says Mr. Schaul, the paper’s lead author. “He thought it was some outside force that had corrupted our paper.”

The only outside force involved was the shadowy group behind the annual Ph.D. Challenge, an irreverent contest that encourages grad students to insert a pre-established name or phrase into the final version of a peer-reviewed journal article or conference paper as a scholarly prank. Last year participants were asked to slip the phrase “I smoke crack rocks” into a paper, and the winner’s adviser was also unpleasantly surprised.  This year grad students had to list either “Dirty Old Man” or “Crazy Cat Lady” as the nickname of one of the co-authors.

Mr. Schaul, who collected his doctorate in machine learning this year from IDSIA and the Technical Institute of Munich, contributed the lone legitimate entry, a paper titled ”Coherence Progress: A Measure of Interestingness Based on Fixed Compressors.” The version that Mr. Schaul submitted to the Fourth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence this past August in Mountain View, Calif., listed “Muammar ‘Dirty Old Man’ Gaddafi” among the co-authors. A footnote explained that the Libyan dictator had “contributed to this paper through his inspirational level of lived coherence.” The contest’s only other submission was a fake.

“It was just at the same time that this whole thing in Libya was going on, with Muammar el-Qaddafi cracking down on his people,” says Mr. Schaul. “We thought he might be an appropriate target for this kind of thing.”

The “we” to whom Mr. Schaul refers did not include Mr. Schmidhuber.

“The first reaction was very bad,” says Mr. Schaul, who happened to be out of town when his adviser learned of the prank. “When I came back he had kind of quieted down, and then we could laugh about it.”

Two months later, Colonel Qaddafi would be dead, and Mr. Schaul would be doing a postdoc in computer science at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

As the winner of the challenge, Mr. Schaul receives the following:

• an official 2011 Ph.D. Challenge paper award certificate
• a Meerschaum calabash professor’s pipe
• a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style (4th Edition)

The anonymous organizers of the Ph.D. Challenge promised via e-mail that next year’s contest would push the boundaries of taste and propriety.

“We’re going to try to get somebody to give a new discovery in a paper (e.g., a new bacteria, a new theorem, a new celestial body, etc.) the name ‘Cleveland Steamer,’” a reference to a bizarre sexual fetish.

“It’s a bit of a disappointment that there were not more competitors,” Mr. Schaul says of the 2011 challenge.

Next year’s contest could be the loneliest one yet.

—Don Troop

Chemistry students at Stanford University must’ve taken more than just a study break to choreograph this racy parody of LMFAO’s Sexy and I Know It.

Benjamin Hershey, a student at Ohio State University, won a $1,000 travel voucher for producing the video below in the Student Diplomat Video Contest sponsored by Nafsa: Association of International Educators, and STA Travel. Mr. Hershey portrayed his story of learning and personal growth while studying abroad in Germany as part of a city planning exchange program. Videos by the other finalists can be seen here.

Images courtesy of Paul Studtmann

A few months ago, Mr. Studtmann acquired an acrylic-on-wood painting called “Falling Down Man,” which depicts a disheveled marionette lying on a city street. The artist, Charlie Spear, mailed it from Indianapolis to North Carolina, where Mr. Studtmann lives. But when the professor went to the post office to retrieve it, he was handed a package that seemed to have been abused.

“I took it out of the box and thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” Mr. Studtmann recalls. The painting’s steel frame was severely bent, and part of the wood beneath the paint had cracked.

He called Mr. Spear and e-mailed him photos of the damaged artwork. It was insured, but neither of them thought they would be compensated for the painting’s full worth. After their initial disappointment had subsided, the two men stumbled onto an idea: Maybe “Falling Down Man” would actually be worth more, thanks to its damage. The painting—created as a statement about the abuse of homeless people—had, itself, been abused during transit. Wasn’t this the type of plot twist that art connoisseurs love?

“Eventually we decided that it somehow improved the painting,” says Mr. Studtmann. “We thought, oddly enough, that it made it that much more potent, symbolically.” After pondering the idea, he decided that the only way to test their theory would be through an art auction. If the painting sells for more than its original $1,200 value, it will join a small group of artworks whose prices have actually increased after being damaged.

The armless sculpture of the Venus de Milo, Marcel Duchamp’s “The Large Glass” (whose glass is cracked), and the noseless Sphinx in Egypt are all examples of artworks whose damage is intrinsic to their identity. Earlier this year an Andy Warhol painting of Mao sold for $302,500—roughly 10 times its estimated value—because the late actor Dennis Hopper once shot two bullets through it, reportedly after a wild night of partying.

“Collectors don’t simply covet works of art, they love a good narrative,” Cathy Elkies, Christie’s director of iconic collections, told the New York Post. She called the damaged Mao painting “a unique, one-of-a-kind piece that will never be replicated.”

The story of “Falling Down Man” may not involve movie stars or firearms, but Mr. Studtmann says the painting is still a great example of this “very peculiar category” of art. “I would love for it to go for $2,400, which is twice its original value,” he says. Mr. Studtmann admits he has no idea what will happen at the auction, which will take place at a coffee shop in downtown Davidson, N.C.

As a philosophy professor, Mr. Studtmann has never staged an art auction before, but says he has always been interested in art. His hobby became more serious after purchasing a house in 2009, when it occurred to him that he needed to acquire more artwork to decorate his walls. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Van Gogh in here?’”

Mr. Studtmann once heard of a man who made a series of strategic trades that began with a paperclip and ended with an exchange for a three-bedroom house. Why couldn’t he land a Van Gogh the same way? So he created a blog and offered his first trade—a drawing by his girlfriend’s 8-year-old nephew. Nine trades and one year later, “Falling Down Man” arrived. Looking at the broken artwork, Mr. Studtmann began to have doubts about his project.

After taking the painting to a local art appraiser who told him the damage rendered it “basically worthless,” he became more interested in auctioning off the artwork than trying to trade it on his quest for a Van Gogh. Now his plan is to donate all the proceeds from the sale of the painting to a program called ArtWorks945, which is based out of Charlotte and helps homeless people find shelter.

“I like ending it on this nice, experimental note,” he says.

The auction will take place tonight at 8 p.m. at Summit Coffee in Davidson. For those curious about how it turned out, the results will be posted on Mr. Studtmann’s blog.

— Lacey Johnson