News Update April 19, 2005
CT News Update:
An Online Newsletter from Campus Technology
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SPONSORS
* Author and Deliver Online Assessments with Questionmark
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* Center for Intellectual Property's 5th Annual Symposium
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=14297
* Growing, Maintaining and Securing Wireless Networks:
Two Schools Meet the Challenge
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=14298
* Syllabus2005 Keynotes Span Technology Issues
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=14299
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News for Tuesday, April 19, 2005
* Record, Movie Industries to Sue Student Internet2
File Sharers
* Blackboard’s "Caliper" Will Harvest CMS Data
for Assessments
* Dell Hands Out Higher Ed Computer Spring Cleaning
Grants
* U. Texas, Dell, Benchmark Standards-Based
Supercomputers
* Firm to Offer "Affordable" 3-D Desktop Printer
at $22,900
* MIT Pranksters Fob Computer Gibberish on
Tech Conference
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Record, Movie Industries to Sue Student Internet2
File Sharers
The movie and recording industries last week filed
lawsuits against hundreds of college students across
the U.S. who they claim illegally downloaded music or
movies on their school's Internet2 network by using
the i2hub file-swapping service.
The Recording Industry Association of America said it
would sue more than 400 students at 18 schools,
including Harvard University. Through the i2hub,
Internet2 is rapidly becoming the network of choice
for students seeking to dowload copyrighted songs
and other works on a massive scale, the RIAA and
MPAA said in announcing the suits.
"This next generation of the Internet is an
extraordinarily exciting tool for researchers,
technologists and many others with valuable legitimate
uses," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement.
"Yet, we cannot let this high-speed network become a
zone of lawlessness where the normal rules don't
apply."
The Motion Picture Association of America did not
disclose how many students it will sue but said seven
universities, including the University of California,
San Diego, are involved. The MPAA will also send
warning letters to the presidents of 141 other
schools where the activity is allegedly occurring.
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Center for Intellectual Property's 5th Annual Symposium
Pirates, Thieves and Innocents: Perceptions of Copyright
Infringement in the Digital Age. June 16-17, 2005.
Explore stakeholders' views and discuss possible solutions.
Focusing on higher education issues.
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=14297
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Blackboard’s "Caliper" Will Harvest CMS Data for
Assessments
Blackboard Inc. unveiled a new product development
effort -- codenamed "Caliper” – that will harness
data culled from course management systems to
address assessment and evaluation goals in
traditional and e-learning programs. The effort
was announced last week by Blackboard chairman
Matthew Pittinsky at the company’s annual user
conference.
"Caliper spawned from an obvious need across the
educational spectrum to streamline the process of
measuring course, program, and institutional
effectiveness," said Pittinsky. "With policymakers
and accreditation boards mandating the measurement
of student outcomes, the time is ripe for a system
like Caliper. We have a unique opportunity to
translate the data tracked in course management
systems and other technologies into a useful
framework for all stakeholders in the education
community."
Blackboard said it surveyed higher education
institutions and found that 90 percent of
administrators are interested in using Web-based
technology to support program assessment. While
development on Caliper is underway, Blackboard
said it is working with clients to prioritize the
tools which best meet their needs. These include
how technology can help schools with program
assessment, curriculum planning, benchmark testing,
course evaluations, student outcome tracking and
institutional research.
Dell Hands Out Higher Ed Computer Spring
Cleaning Grants
Dell named three U.S. college and universities
recipients of $10,000 grants to be used for computer
recycling this spring. The grants are called the Dell
Higher Education Recycling Leadership Awards, a
pilot program to recognize leadership in campus
community recycling. The awards went to the
University of California-San Francisco, University
of Colorado-Boulder and Miami Dade College-Kendall
Campus. Each of the selected higher education
institutions will conduct a computer collection
event at the end of the academic calendar year,
to coincide with student move-outs.
The award winners received technical assistance
in planning their recycling events in a series
of educational forums held in March and led by
the National Recycling Coalition (NRC). The
purpose of the program was to provide opportunities
for sharing best practices and lessons learned
among the participating college and university
recycling coordinators.
"We're seeing more colleges and universities that
recognize the need to provide recycling options to
students moving out of their dorms and apartments
at the end of the school year," said Kate Krebs,
executive director of the National Recycling Coalition.
"From textbooks to computers to couches, these materials
can often be recycled or reused, as long as they are
kept out of landfills in the first place."
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Growing, Maintaining and Securing Wireless Networks:
Two Schools Meet the Challenge
Whether a campus has 2,900 or 29,000 students, when
it comes to wireless solutions both schools have
something in common: implementing wireless networks
that attract students while being affordable and
secure. In this exclusive white paper sponsored by
Proxim, you'll learn how two schools worked
through the challenges of cost, implementation,
maintenance, and security.
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=14298
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U. Texas, Dell, Team Benchmark Standards-Based
Supercomputers
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the
University of Texas at Austin and Dell Computer have
teamed to benchmark high-performance computing (HPC)
applications on standards-based computer hardware.
The organizations' goal is to understand the
performance and to enhance the scalability of
applications run on the cost-effective
supercomputers.
TACC will work with Dell's HPC group to enhance
TACC's testing of the performance and scalability
of processors and interconnects on HPC applications.
The team is initially focused on benchmarking and
performance analysis of hardware technologies, but
it will eventually expand to include evaluation of
HPC software technologies; testing of grid-computing
technologies; and options for clusters devoted to
visualization and data analysis applications.
Last year, TACC deployed Lonestar, one of the world's
most powerful computers. Lonestar is built with a Dell
HPC cluster based on the Intel Xeon processor. TACC
recently upgraded the technology powering Lonestar
and installed a second Dell cluster, Wrangler, with
64-bit Intel Xeon processors, Myrinet and InfiniBand
switches.
Firm to Offer "Affordable" 3-D Desktop Printer
at $22,000
3D Systems Corp., a provider of rapid 3-D printing,
prototyping and manufacturing solutions, said it
would unveil a new "affordable" desktop 3-D printer.
The company is offering its InVisioni LD printer at
$22,900, describing it as an affordable, simple and
compact desktop 3-D printer with the simplicity and
functionality of a 2-D printer.
The InVision LD printer builds complex geometrical
shapes from 3-D CAD drawings one slice thickness at
a time by fusing, masking and trimming layers of
plastic into solid parts. The system is office
friendly, delivers dry parts and requires no post
processing, 3-D said. The InVision LD printer is
designed for applications specifically for designers,
engineers and marketers. It is also ideal as an
educational tool for university, technical college
and high school engineering and industrial design
departments.
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Syllabus2005 Keynotes Span Technology Issues
Four of the leading thinkers in higher education
technology--Tracy Futhey, Duke University; Diana
Oblinger, Educause; Lev Gonick, Case Western Reserve
University, and Barbara White, University of Georgia
--kick-off each day's sessions at Syllabus2005 with
keynote presentations covering significant technology
issues facing institutions today. Hearing their
insights is just one of the reasons to attend this
year's conference, July 24-28 in Los Angeles. Join
your peers and learn from best practices, networking,
expert panels, and sessions.
For more information and to register, click here.
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=14299
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MIT Pranksters Fob Computer Gibberish on Tech Conference
Pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
successfully submitted a research paper written
entirely by computer to scientific conference, according
to the Reuters news agency. Jeremy Stribling told Reusters
last week that he and two fellow MIT graduate students,
in questioning the standards of some academic conferences,
wrote a computer program to generate research papers
complete with "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.
The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers
to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics
and Informatics, scheduled to be held July 10-13 in
Orlando, Fla. To their surprise, one of the papers--
"Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of
Access Points and Redundancy"--was accepted for
presentation. The Rooter paper contains such verbiage
as, "the model for our heuristic consists of four
independent components: simulated annealing, active
networks, flexible modalities, and the study of
reinforcement learning," and, "We implemented our
scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented
with opportunistically pipelined extensions."
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