OPINION

How IT Provisions a Student’s Home Away from Home

By Terry Calhoun

BASED ON PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE OUR COLUMNIST ARGUES STUDENTS NEED ‘LOTS AND LOTS OF VERY FAST BANDWIDTH’

When this week’s column is posted to the Internet, I will be in Manhattan, celebrating my oldest daughter’s graduation, with lots of honors, from a metropolitan-area college. We moved her in eight days before 9/11 and her exit from New York City has also been marred by violence, as she now lives about 200 feet from where those poorly-made ‘grenades’ exploded in front of the British Consulate last week. (And she arrived home from a late-night study session that morning within 30 minutes of the explosions.)

I spend a lot of time scanning the higher education environment on various issues and one has been the move from dormitory to residence hall-–driven by student expectations. During Ruthy’s matriculation at college my family personally experienced the demands and needs of students and the sometimes ineffective response by the college administration. So, whenever we can give students what they want without a huge expense, we should give it to them-–and that includes unlimited bandwidth!
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IT NEWS

OSU Adopts New Student ID System After Laptop Theft

After the theft of a laptop with sensitive data in it, Oklahoma State University is speeding up its plans for replacement of social security numbers as identifiers; and alerting staff that it will discipline those who are careless with sensitive information. (Channel 5 Oklahoma)
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MPAA and EFF Face Off at Princeton

What is the future of online file-sharing. Both sides agreed that copyright protection is important, but appeared during this debate to be on opposite sides of a chasm. (Linux Electrons)
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Machine Learning Summer School

The school is a two-week crash course for approximately 100 students. "Machine learning is a growing segment of artificial intelligence that involves teaching a computer to learn from experience to perform tasks that a human could not do, or that a human could do, but it would be less expensive to let a machine do the work,” according to school officials. “A typical example from the business world would be teaching a computer to detect credit card fraud." The key phrase there is "learn from experience." (Ascribe)
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Wyden-Talent Bill Focuses on More and Better e-Cycling

Not everyone agrees about how dire the 'crisis of e-waste is, but a bill jointly introduced in Congress recently would start with the federal government and insist on more recycling, plus offer tax credit incentives to consumers and companies. (USA Today)
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RESOURCES

Commercial Publishers Are NOT Amused

"The €2m DARE programme - a joint initiative by all the Dutch universities, the National Library of the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) - harvests all digital available material from local repositories, making it fully searchable. Aside from bibliographical information, the content can be full text, or even audio and video files." (The Register)

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DEALS, CONTRACTS, AWARDS

IBM Moves Its Employees to FireFox

IBM, which has a history of supporting open source software, is urging its 300,000 employees to move to FireFox, and providing training and incentives for that move. (CNET)
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