Campus Briefs
98,000 SSNS?
Someone walked off with a notebook containing the social security numbers of thousands
of applicants and both present and past students from
UC Berkeley's
enrollment records. The computer, taken from a restricted area of the Graduate
Division offices in March, contained data from 1989 to the fall of 2004. By California
law, the university must notify all 98,369 individuals of their compromised personal
info.
FUNDING FOR FINANCIALS
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $2.5 million to the Kuali Project
(
www.kualiproject.org)
for continued development of a new open source financial system for colleges and
universities. The grant expands on Kuali's $7.2 million in aggregated resources
of founding partners
Indiana University, the
University
of Hawaii, the National Association of College and University Business
Officers (
www.nacubo.org),
and the r-smart group (
www.rsmart.com)-plus
the investments of new institutional partners
Cornell University
(NY),
San Joaquin Delta College (CA),
Michigan State
University, and the
University of Arizona.
THAT'S CLASS (ACTION)
Five million dollars paid out by Microsoft in settlement of an antitrust class-action
lawsuit brought against the tech giant by the state of Minnesota is being put
to good use at the
University of Minnesota. In March, the institution
received $2.5 million in cash plus $2.5 million in product vouchers to be used
by UMN's Institute of Technology. Combined with $5 million in matching funds from
the university itself, the settlement money will help create a new Consortium
for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CBCB).
THAT CHANGES EVERYTHING
A higher ed leadership program designed by eCornell (www.ecornell.com) and the
Institute for Community College Development (
www.iccd.cornell.edu ), a partnership
between
Cornell University (NY) and the
State University
of New York, will help organizations overcome resistance to change. The
new, four-course certificate series, Proactive Leadership in Higher Education,
launched at the end of April.
BETTER VIDEO
At
The Ohio State University, clearer Internet video means selectively
differentiating compression rates within an image. To resolve movement blur and
choppiness, for instance, researchers are working on algorithms that track hand
gestures and facial expressions, either for single or multiple speakers, and use
a higher compression on everything else.
BUREAUCRACY BUSTERS
Administrators at the
University of Alaska-Anchorage have posted
Web forms encouraging campus constituents to report on ways to streamline, or
even recommend doing away with "policies, processes, and procedures that make
life at UAA unnecessarily difficult." A model to watch.
HOUSE CALLS
The IT doctor is in at
Princeton University (NJ), and will treat
the patient at your office-if you work on campus. The IT Office program (which
sends out grad student IT consultants) is so popular that the department's itmatters
newsletter announced the program will expand.
Brian Voss leaves Indiana
for CIO post at Louisiana State.
NEW CIO FOR LSU
Brian Voss made the move to
Louisiana State University last month,
to become CIO and lead the Office of Computing Services. Voss leaves his role
of Associate VP of Telecommunications at
Indiana University.
EVER SMALLER
Florida International University is the latest to join the ever-larger
ranks of the smallest business on earth. FIU's brand-new, $15 million Motorola
Nanofabrication Research Facility will support a dozen researchers with a class-100
clean room (no more than 100 particles of dust or impurities larger than 0.5 microns,
per cubic foot of air). Their work currently focuses on bio/nano electronics and
communication.
