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Recent Posts
Turn Your Laptop Into an Earthquake Sensor | Comment
Writing Students and Professors Fight to Keep Theses From Being Freely Available Online | Comment [4]
Educause Issues Statement on RIAA's Methods of Catching Music Pirates | Comment
ABC News to Open 5 University News Bureaus | Comment [10]
How a Lawsuit Over Electronic Reserves Could Affect Colleges | Comment [5]
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May 13, 2008
Turn Your Laptop Into an Earthquake Sensor
If Monday’s earthquake in China has sparked an interest in seismology, and you happen to own a Mac laptop, you can transform your computer into your own personal seismic station. A free program from SeisMac takes advantage of the acceleration sensor inside you computer to register when it gets the shakes. The program was developed with support from the National Science Foundation and from the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, a consortium of nearly 100 universities.
In the near future, you may be able to participate in earthquake science through a new project called the Quake-Catcher Network. Researchers from several California universities have created the network to use the distributed power of people’s laptops to provide quick data about the strength of shaking during earthquakes. The program works with many kinds of laptops. Because wireless networks send signals faster than vibrations can spread through the Earth, data from laptops in theory can speed ahead of the shaking and provide advance warning before harmful seismic waves strike regions that are more distant from a quake’s epicenter.—Richard Monastersky
Posted on Tuesday May 13, 2008 | Permalink | CommentMay 12, 2008
Researchers Create Sailing Robots
Researchers at Aberystwyth University have created a sailing robot that may become the first unmanned boat to cross an ocean using wind power, the Times of London reports.
In October the researchers’ boat, named Pinta, will race against seven other robotic crafts also attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean. If any of the boats are successful, they could “open up all the oceans to environmental monitoring by robots,” Mark Neal, an Aberystwyth computer-science professor, told the Times.
The Pinta’s competitors include entries from several other universities and private teams.
There have been other unmanned transportation craft competitions that have excited academics, such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s driverless car contest. —Catherine Rampell
Posted on Monday May 12, 2008 | Permalink | CommentMay 8, 2008
Research on Connections Between Computer Use and School Violence
A psychiatrist presented research on connections between excessive computer use and school shootings at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual summit on Tuesday.
Dr. Jerald J. Block, a psychiatrist and professor at Oregon Health & Science University, argued that the shooters in the Columbine High School massacre “spent a significant amount of time playing first-person-shooter computer games and creating game levels for others to use,” and that they became “unable to distinguish the boundaries between their virtual lives and their real lives, in effect mixing the two,” according to a news release. His research was published last year in an article for the American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry titled “Lessons From Columbine: Virtual and Real Rage.”
“[A]s they got into trouble with school authorities, limits were put on their use of the computer. This made them react with homicidal rage and suicidal depression,” Dr. Block told WebMD of the Columbine shooters.
Dr. Block has also studied student violence at Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University, and other institutions.
Other scholars have criticized connections between violence and computer or video game use and theories relating to “Internet addiction.”—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Thursday May 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [7]May 7, 2008
In Wikipedia, Length Matters
A new study found that in Wikipedia, word count can be used to predict article quality.
Joshua E. Blumenstock at the University of California at Berkeley analyzed articles to see if he could predict whether an article was “featured” on Wikipedia’s homepage, which would indicate that it had received extra vetting from top editors to verify its exceptional quality. He looked at 100 variables that might correlate with whether an article ended up as a feature, including number of citations, readability metrics, one-syllable words, etc.
He found that using word count alone, he could predict with 97% accuracy whether an article was featured or not. Considering the full “kitchen sink” of all 100 variables only improved his accuracy slightly to 97.99%. The magic word-count cut-off seemed to be 1,830 words, above which articles were likely to be higher-quality, featured entries. Mr. Blumenstock speculated that the collaborative nature of Wikipedia may force longer articles to be higher quality.
Still, he wrote, “[f]eatured articles are meant to be ‘the best that Wikipedia has to offer’; these results indicate that they might merely be the longest Wikipedia has to offer,” he wrote. “The high degree to which word count can approximate Wikipedia’s elaborate peer-review process is somewhat unsettling.”—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Wednesday May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [7]May 6, 2008
You Say It's Your Birthday
Robert Brauneis at George Washington University Law School has written a paper on the history of what may be the world’s most oft-infringed piece of music. No, it’s not a Britney Spears ditty or a LimeWire hit. It’s “Happy Birthday,” which was originally written with different lyrics as “Good Morning to All.”
Mr. Brauneis has also created a vast online repository of documents and sound recordings related to legal disputes over the song.—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Tuesday May 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [7]Mountain State U. Researchers Develop Fingerprinting Technology
Researchers at Mountain State University in Beckley, West Virginia, have developed a new crime-fighting tool that will soon be featured on popular TV show “CSI:New York,” according to the State Journal.
The technology allows law enforcement to easily find fingerprints on surfaces at crime scenes. A special device called a Fuma-Dome releases a vapor of superglue and fluorescent dye. When the dome is placed over an area that has fingerprints, the vapor coats the prints and hardens. Investigators can then shine a black light onto those surfaces to find the fingerprints, which will glow.
The fingerprint-detection technology will be featured on “CSI:New York” on an episode slated to air May 14. The product will become available in August, the State Journal reports.—Catherine Rampell
(Photo by Chris Dorst of the Sunday Gazette-Mail)
Posted on Tuesday May 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [3]May 5, 2008
Using Leisure Activities in Education Corrupts Learning Process, Paper Argues
A new paper argues that introducing activities associated with leisure—such as iPods and online discussion forums—into education corrupts the learning process.
The paper, “Learning to Leisure? Failure, Flame, Blame, Shame, Homophobia and Other Everyday Practices in Online Education” by Juliet Eve and Tara Brabazon at the University of Brighton, argues that the “blurring of leisure and learning has corroded the respect that is necessary to commence a scholarly journey.”
Much of the research is drawn from Ms. Eve’s instruction of a virtual seminar course, where she struggled to control students who mocked the lesson plans, “flamed” each other in online discussions, and drew pictures of male genitalia on the site’s virtual blackboard.
“The normative behavior of the group was dictated by their self-characterisation as socializing students rather than learning students,” the authors write.
The paper was published in the Journal of Literacy and Technology.—Catherine Rampell
Posted on Monday May 5, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [13]May 1, 2008
New Study Debunks Myth That Most Tech Entrepreneurs Are College Kids
A new study from researchers at Duke University and Harvard University challenges the popular assumption that most technology entrepreneurs are twee college kids launching businesses from their dorm rooms.
The research, sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, studied U.S. engineering and technology companies founded between 1995 and 2005. It found that the median and average age at which U.S.-born entrepreneurs founded their technology and engineering companies was 39. There were twice as many entrepreneurs older than fifty than those who were younger than twenty-five, and 1 percent of U.S.-born founders of tech companies were teenagers.
The study also analyzed these entrepreneurs’ educational backgrounds.
The top ten schools awarding these entrepreneurs’ most advanced degrees were Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Missouri, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, and the University of Virginia. Graduates from Ivy League schools represented 8 percent of the founders whose companies had, on average, higher average sales and employment than their counterparts. —Catherine Rampell
Posted on Thursday May 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [14]Xerox Creates Self-Erasing Paper
Feeling guilty about handing out so many syllabus updates in class, but still addicted to paper? Xerox recently announced a reusable, self-erasing paper that can help relieve your conscience.
Text printed on this paper automatically deletes itself in 16 to 24 hours, according to a Xerox news release. The paper can then be reused.—Catherine Rampell
Berkeley Researchers Develop Technology for Sending Medical Images Via Cellphones
Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley have developed a way to transmit medical images such as X-rays and ultrasounds via cellphones.
The technology involves reducing large, complicated medical images to six kilobytes (“A one sentence, text-only e-mail message is bigger than that,” one of the researchers commented in a university news release.) A cellphone transmits raw data to an offsite location. There the data is processed into an image and sent back to the cellphone’s screen. This technique is intended to bring sophisticated medical-imaging technology to developing countries, where expensive medical-imaging equipment is often out of reach.
The research was published in the April 30 issue of Public Library of Science’s PLoS ONE, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal. —Catherine Rampell
Posted on Thursday May 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comment