News Update September 27, 2005
CT News Update:
An Online Newsletter from Campus Technology
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SPONSORS
* Today's Lesson from NEC: Dynamic Communication
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News for Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2005
* Stanford U. Center Will Enable Next Generation GPS Apps
* Colleges Brief Congress on Differing Tacks to File-sharing
* List Grows of Online Schools Aiding Students Hit by Katrina
* Columbia U. Names CIO, Aims to Streamline Tech Support
* Leading Higher Ed Campus Architect Joins San Francisco Firm
* New Tech: Student Team to Market Co-Curricular Software
* Georgia Tech Unveils 192 Node Supercomputing Cluster
ONLINE RESOURCES
http://www.campus-technology.com/resources/index.asp
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Stanford U. Center Will Enable Next Generation GPS Apps
Stanford University will open a research center dedicated
to advancing the Global Positioning System (GPS) to
provide position information with centimeter accuracy,
anywhere, anytime. Researchers at the new "Stanford
Center for Position, Navigation, and Time" will work
on refining GPS to enable applications such as automated
aircraft landing, location-based encryption, and
eradicating unexploded ordnance.
"Research at (SCPNT) is aimed at vastly extending
and expanding the already revolutionary benefits
of GPS in society," said Per Enge, the center's
research director and a professor of aeronautics
and astronautics in the School of Engineering.
Architects of the original GPS, Bradford Parkinson
and James Spilker, will join the Center's faculty.
The new faculty has expertise in the new technologies
that will be required to build on GPS: aeronautics
and astronautics, applied physics, electrical
engineering, mechanical engineering and physics.
The Center will also address the main current
limitations of GPS: loss of signal because of an
obstructed line of sight or malevolent jamming.
For more information visit: http://scpnt.stanford.edu
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Colleges Brief Congress on Differing Tacks to File-sharing
New anti-piracy software being used at the University
of Florida may put an end to illegal file sharing on
college campuses by stopping downloads before they
start, the Cox News Service reported last week. The
program, called Icarus, monitors computer networks
serving campus dormitories and blocks transmissions
of copyrighted files. Since installing the software
two years ago, the University of Florida has saved
about $500,000 in network expansions that would have
been needed to handle the heavy traffic caused by
illegal file sharing. The information was provided
by Norbert Dunkel, the university's director of
housing and residence education, in addressing a
hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Courts,
Internet, and Intellectual property subcommittee.
But officials at other schools consider such
software overly intrusive, and prefer more limited
anti-piracy measures.
"The university could eliminate parking violations by
banning all cars from campus, but as with illegal file
sharing, we just don't want to take enforcement
that far," Daniel A. Updegrove, vice president
for information technology at the University of
Texas at Austin, told the panel.
List Grows of Online Schools Aiding Students Hit by Katrina
UMassOnline, the University of Massachusetts's
online education division, joined a growing list
of schools offering students whose studies were
interrupted by Hurricane Katrina tuition-free,
accredited online courses. The school said it
would offer 20 online courses from four UMass
campuses, at Amherst, Boston, Dartmouth, and
Lowell. Courses range from Introduction to
Music to Sociology of the Law.
UMass joined the Sloan Consortium, a group
of organizations promoting online education,
in making the courses available for free.
According to Sloan, there are now more than
1,000 courses available for students to choose
from, offered by about 200 universities who are
waiving tuition and fees. All the courses carry
degree credit from regionally accredited colleges
and universities. Sloan Foundation director Frank
Mayadas said support is also being offered to
institutions who are not directly impacted by
the hurricane, but that are struggling to meet
the needs of students who have relocated to their
campuses.
For more information visit:
http://www.sloan-c.org
Columbia U. Names CIO, Aims to Streamline Tech Support
Columbia has merged its academic information services
and administrative services departments to form
Columbia University Information Technology. The
decision was made following a two-year "rough period,"
according the student newspaper Columbia Spectator,
characterized by "security lapses, disorganization,
server crashes, and strained communication with
students." The university named Candace Fleming as
vice president of information technology to run the
new organization. Fleming has been chief information
officer at Warner-Lambert and Pfizer, as well as a
vice president for candy company Cadbury Schweppes.
Fleming told the Spectator that one of her main
goals is to increase communication between the
campus community and technology staff.
"I'm definitely looking to and trying to figure
out the right ways to engage with the students
and talk to them more," she said.
Leading Higher Ed Campus Architect Joins San Francisco Firm
Edward Dean, a noted architect who has designed several
high-visibility campus projects, has been hired as
practice leader for higher education by the San
Francisco architectural firm of Chong Partners
Architecture. In his 20 year career, Dean has
designed Main Library Master Plan at U.C. Berkeley,
the campus library at San Francisco State University,
the Facility for Information Services Division, Santa
Clara University, the Stanford University's Denault
Laboratory at Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey,
and the Gerchke Learning Resource Center at the
University of San Francisco.
Chong Partners founder Gordon Chong said the firm
was eager to tap Dean's "breadth and depth of
experience with projects such as libraries, science
and technology buildings in higher educational
settings." Dean was a regular faculty member at
U.C. Berkeley's Department of Architecture for more
than a decade and an early participant in the green
design movement.
New Tech: Student Team to Market Co-Curricular Software
Two New England-area undergraduates have pooled their
academic capital and raw business instincts to develop
and market a software platform for a campus administrative
area they believe is w'efully underserved: student activities
administration. Friends Mark Greene, from the University of
Rochester, and Aaron Severs at Wentworth Institute of
Technology, in Boston, said they went to work on a business
plan for the software after being surprised at the lack of
tools to administer student activities they both were
interested in.
The result is SA Link, a "complete enterprise system for
student activities department administration." The software
underwent beta testing in April 2005, and after a pilot at
Wentworth, Version 1.0 will be released this fall. "We
found that there were a lot of nice products out there
for course management, career services, and alumni
relations in particular," said Severs, co founder of
CollegiateLink with Green. "What amazed us, however,
was the lack of offerings for the co-curricular side
of things. Campus unions, student leadership, and
athletics were particularly in need of quality software."
Added Greene: "In general, we also found that software
for colleges and universities was higher priced and of
lower quality than that offered to businesses. We felt
that affordable technology should be available that is
effective, easy to use, and feels like it's actually
been updated since the '90s." SA LINK will be offered
in two packages. SA LINK Enterprise can be purchased
as a customizable software application, ready to run
on any standard Windows server. SA LINK TurnKey is a
subscription service where CollegiateLink provides the
server and system administration.
Georgia Tech Unveils 192 Node Supercomputing Cluster
The College of Computing at Georgia Tech installed two
Dell high performance computing clusters (HPCC) at its
campus in Atlanta. The systems, made up of 64 and 128
Dell PowerEdge 1850 servers, respectively, can be
joined to create a 192-node supercomputing cluster
capable of processing 2.5 trillion floating point
operations per second (TFLOPS).
"Industry-standard processors and novel distributed
architectures are key to our supercomputing strategy,"
said Rich DeMillo, dean of the College of Computing at
Georgia Tech. "The clusters we have installed will
enable new scientific discoveries that would have
been impossible only five years ago." Researchers
plan to use the systems to study simulation of
aircraft designs and the design of future computer chips.
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Online Resources
Microsite:Security Solutions for the Campus Enterprise
Sponsored by CDWG
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=18260
Solution Center: Wireless Technologies for the Campus Enterprise
Sponsored by HP
http://info.101com.com/default.asp?id=18262
More Resources
http://www.campus-technology.com/resources/index.asp
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