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In the Comments
You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me
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June 24, 2009
Hackers Rebuke Obama Via Oregon University Computers
Instead of reaching the Oregon University System’s Web site this morning, visitors found an angry message directed at President Obama.
Diane Saunders, a university spokeswoman, said hackers had redirected the system’s home page to a site claiming to be “from Iran.” The message was up for approximately 90 minutes before an employee arrived at work and found the breach.
The Web page, which was sent to The Chronicle and the Associated Press by the university system, told “Stupid Fly Catcher Obama” to stop talking about Iran and the recent Iranian election, which has prompted protests since the June 12 vote.
“Iran’s election doesn’t have problem and Moosavi with his tiny brain will be in jail in near future, so don’t pay your time and money for him and for his fans,” the site reads. “70-80% of Iranian people hate Moosavi nowadays… We never cheated in elections and even Moosavi knows that.”
A message sent to the e-mail address listed on the Web site was not returned. Ms. Saunders said the hackers were most likely able to access the university Web page through ClickHeat, a free program that documents what areas of Web sites are being clicked most. She said the program does not automatically update solutions to problems that are found, and the university had not downloaded the most recent security update.
The university will pay more attention to updates for ClickHeat and five other third-party programs it uses that do not perform automatic updates, and Oregon State University is trying to find out exactly how someone was able to access the Web site, she said.
Ms. Saunders said she did not know why the university system’s page was targeted. “My guess is that hackers have ways of finding vulnerable entry points in Web sites,” she said. “I don’t know if this was a random or purposeful selection of going through our site.” — Marc Beja
Posted on Wednesday June 24, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [12]June 18, 2009
Millions of Dollars Later, U. of Wisconsin Still Lacks New Payroll Software
More than three years and $36-million dollars have not been enough to fix the University of Wisconsin system’s payroll computer program.
According to the Associated Press, a system budget official said the project, originally budgeted to cost $1.6-million and be finished by last fall, will now cost at least $12-million.
In February the university had accepted that the budget would need to be increased to $8-million, and the deadline was pushed back until summer. This is the second attempt at fixing the outdated system, after $28.4-million was spent through 2006.
The original system was developed in 1975, written in a computer language that is no longer used. With budget cuts, university employees will have 16 days of furloughs over the next two years. The college’s president said he doubted the old system would be able to track that information.
“The project requires much more extensive planning and analysis than we originally predicted, and we are committed to a very thorough planning process,” a university spokesman, David Giroux, told the Associated Press. “We did not have the full picture of how complex this project would be.”
This time PeopleSoft is leading the project to fix the payroll system. The same company gave North Dakota’s public colleges some difficulty in updating a course-registration system in 2006, and the University of Minnesota used PeopleSoft for a $45.7-million upgrade of its financial system in the same year. —Marc Beja
Posted on Thursday June 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [8]June 16, 2009
College Interns Develop Crime Web Site for Police
After Detective Sgt. Patrick Ryder was told it would take up to 10 months to build a continuously updated crime Web site for officers at the Nassau County Police Department in New York, he had an idea: Get the interns to do it.
“We had all this information, but we couldn’t get it out as real-time intel to the cops — the main consumer of the product,” Ryder told Newsday.
Claire Timko and Anthony Martini, criminal-justice interns who were from the State University of New York at Canton and Long Island University, respectively, were able to put together the Web site within two months. It includes outstanding warrants, the latest updates on gang activity, and safety alerts scrolling along the bottom of the site. Touch screens with access to the site have been installed throughout the county in every precinct, the district attorney’s office, and the sheriff’s office, as well as in police-vehicle laptops in two precincts.
Ryder said that approximately 40 warrant arrests have already been made based on information from the Web site, which has cost about $130,000. “It’s like we have our own news station,” he said, “pumping out continuous information bulletins for the cops.” – Marc Beja
Posted on Tuesday June 16, 2009 | Permalink | CommentJune 5, 2009
Judge Dismisses Software-Licensing Case Against George Mason U.
A Virginia Circuit Court judge dismissed a lawsuit this morning against George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media.
Thomson Reuters Inc. had sued the university in a Virginia court in September for at least $10-million in damages, claiming that Zotero, a free software tool created by the university, made improper use of the company’s EndNote citation software.
Zotero is a plug-in for the Firefox Web browser that is designed to help scholars store and organize their online research. The program, which could convert EndNote files, had been downloaded over one million times by September.
George Mason University said in November it had not renewed a site license for EndNote, and would not make any changes to its software.
A spokesman for the university confirmed the case had been dismissed but declined to comment further. Officials at Thomson Reuters were not immediately available for comment on the dismissal. — Marc Beja
Posted on Friday June 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [18]May 18, 2009
Students Take Honors in Microsoft Tech Contest
Microsoft, a company always interested in young software developers, likes to encourage them to tackle real-world problems. (They have to use Microsoft products to do so, of course.) That’s the goal of its worldwide student competition, the Imagine Cup, and the U.S. winners were announced earlier this month. The top three places went to teams with students from four different colleges and one high school.
The winner was Team MultiPoint Web, three brothers from Oregon who attend Georgia State University, Portland Community College, and Tigard High School. They built a set of free or inexpensive Web-based learning activities that allow multiple students to use one computer at the same time.
The first runner-up was also the first all-women team to reach the finals in the cup’s seven-year history. From DePauw University, Team MangoBunnies developed software that helps HIV and AIDS patients by sending medication schedules and instructions directly to their smartphones or PDA’s. It also retrieves information about user history.
Second runner-up went to a team from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. Team Special Child came up with an application that creates a centralized database to stores information about children in need of a permanent home and potential adoptive parents.
The international finals will be held in July in Cairo, Egypt, where winners in nine categories will share $180,000. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Monday May 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [1]March 30, 2009
New Program at Georgia Tech Pairs Computing With Public Service
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 to manage occupancy levels and Internet access for low-income Atlanta residents.
Mr. Vempala said the course, which is offered to both undergraduate and graduate students, was started in the hope of giving students and professors a chance to work on real-world problems. The work also provides specific research challenges: Unlike some of the more theoretical problems that computer scientists often deal with, those designing solutions for nonprofit groups must often deal with resource constraints and make sure customers are seeing tangible results from the programs, he said.
Stefany Wilson, a spokeswoman for the College of Computing, said the C4G is also exploring industry partnerships and expanded faculty research efforts.—David Shieh
Posted on Monday March 30, 2009 | Permalink | CommentMarch 17, 2009
Computer-Science Enrollment Rises for the First Time in Six Years
The number of students enrolled in computer-science programs rose for the first time in six years, says a new report.
Data from the Taulbee Survey, an annual poll by the Computing Research Association, reveals that enrollment jumped 6.2 percent this year among students majoring or intending to major in computer science in the United States and Canada. The data include candidates for bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees.
Top programs, like the ones at the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University, have been reporting increases in enrollments in recent years, but this report makes it official: The computer science major is back.
“It definitely appears that U.S. computer-science departments are replenishing the freshman and sophomore ranks with larger groups than they are graduating as seniors,” researchers wrote in the report.
While the enrollment bump is an encouraging sign to those who believe producing more computer-science experts will help the United States stay competitive in the global economy, the discouraging lack of racial and ethnic diversity among computer-science students persists. Nearly two-thirds of students who received bachelor’s degrees in the field last year were white (Asians came in second, at 15. 5 percent), and more than 88 percent were male. –Steve Kolowich
Posted on Tuesday March 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [12]February 13, 2009
How's Your Date Going? Ask the Artificially Intelligent Table
Computers have already relieved their human creators of plenty of mental chores, such as doing their taxes and keeping track of their appointments. But what about reading a date’s signals at dinner?
Now, just in time for Valentine’s Day, three undergraduates at Carnegie Mellon University have applied computer technology to the science of romance with their EyeTable, an artificially intelligent dinner table that reads physical gestures and speech patterns and lets the participants know how the date is going—in real time.
Here’s how it works: EyeTable’s centerpiece is a pair of motion sensors that communicate with sensors attached to a headset worn by each participant. The table analyzes the movements and orientation of the participants’ heads—sensing whether they are making eye contact or glancing restlessly around the room, whether they’re drifting into more intimate proximity with one another or leaning apart. The headsets are also equipped with microphones that register levels of enthusiasm in the couple’s dialogue, as well as the frequency and length of awkward silences.
“We just kind of took simple elements that seemed likely to indicate the tone of the conversation and used the available technology to try to detect when those gestures were occurring,” said Dan Eisenberg, one of the machine’s creators. Mr. Eisenberg and his classmates Kevin Li and Ilya Brin invented the EyeTable for a lab course in applied computational intelligence.
But the EyeTable isn’t just an armchair analyst; it’s also a wingman. If it senses a date is going well, it might suggest an index of post-dinner activities, or tip off the waiter that the table might enjoy another bottle of wine. If it senses the date is doomed, it conveniently lists the numbers for local cab companies.
Amusing as it is in concept, Mr. Eisenberg acknowledged the practical applications of the EyeTable prototype are limited. After all, live feedback could easily have the effect of making a bad date worse—or derailing a potentially good one, since subjects behave differently when they know they are being studied. Also, headsets with motion sensors and microphones? Not sexy.
But revolutionizing the dating scene wasn’t the students’ goal. “It’s a proof-of-concept that we hope will inspire others to think about how computers can understand human emotions,” Mr. Eisenberg said. –Steve Kolowich
Posted on Friday February 13, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [7]January 26, 2009
IBM Moves to Help Overseas Universities Improve Research Capacities
A new effort to increase several overseas universities’ access to cloud computing, or using Web-based resources to execute computationally intense tasks, could allow researchers there to use more sophisticated tools for field study.
IBM announced today that it had selected three universities in Qatar — Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, Texas A&M University at Qatar, and Qatar University — as collaborators for its cloud-computing software. In a news release, IBM said it hoped the technology would aid in the universities’ advanced research into the region’s oil and gas exploration and production. Other uses of the technology may include the development of Arabic-language search engines.
The company also said it would be working with the University of Pretoria, in South Africa, and the Health Alliance, a consortium of seven universities in East Africa, to use cloud computing to enhance public-health research. —Steve Kolowich
Posted on Monday January 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [1]January 23, 2009
3-Year Study Affirms Value of Better Information Technology
Washington — Many industries would like increased federal support and freedom from government regulation.
After three years of study, a panel appointed by the National Academy of Sciences has concluded that the nation’s information-technology industry is no different.
The academy’s National Research Council commissioned the study, beginning in 2006, to look at how U.S. leadership in information technology — from the development of the Internet to the expansion of broadband phone service — has fueled the growth of the overall economy, and what should be done to sustain that growth.
The council formed the 12-member panel of industry and academic leaders — including experts from the University of California, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Washington — that today issued a 166-page report on its findings.
Their recommendations: Increase government spending on educational opportunities and on research and development in the field of information technology; consider easing regulations affecting information technology; and grant more visas to foreign students entering the field.
“The globalization of the world’s economy,” the panel of august experts warns, “is a fact that cannot be ignored.” —Paul Basken
Posted on Friday January 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comment [4]