CMU, UC Berkeley Comp Scientists Win Genius Awards

Two campus information technology thinkers were recipients of the MacArthur Foundation “genius” awards last week. These are $500,000, no-strings-attached fellowships designed to help them only “to reflect, explore, and create.” Luis von Ahn, a 28-year-old professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and Claire Tomlin, a UC Berkeley associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, were among 25 winners named...

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Campus Disaster Planners Study Web, eLearning Responses

Officials from Gulf Coast higher education institutions and leading experts in emergency preparedness in higher education gathered in New Orleans last week to discuss the uses of online education during emergencies like Katrina. One case study being dissected will be the Sloan Semester, a project funded by a $1.1 million grant from the Sloan Foundation that that created a functioning virtual university in 21 days for the Gulf region during the Katrina disaster...

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Santa Clara U. Hosts Summit on Municipal Wireless Divide

Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society will host a public hearing next month on how to make free municipal Wi-Fi more effective in helping to close the digital divide. SCU officials, who will host the meeting with the Broadband Institute of California, said the meeting is part of a project to educate people from the region’s underserved groups so that they can make better-informed policy recommendations about commissioning their own broadband networks...

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W3C to Pursue Better Mobile Web Access in Poor Countries

MIT’s World Wide Web Consortium will host a December workshop in Bangalore, India, to help drive the expansion of mobile Web access in developing countries. The public workshop, to be held Dec. 5-6, is part of W3C’s mobile Web project to identify and resolve barriers to accessing the Web in countries without a mature communications infrastructure...

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Stanford Study: MMORPGS No Longer Adolescent Fortress

A study by a Stanford University graduate student has debunked the belief that most denizens of the world of Massively Multi-User Online Role- Playing Games (MMORPGs) are adolescent or college-aged men. In fact, the new study by Nick Yee, a doctoral candidate in the Stanford Department of Communications, shows that of 30,000 users studied, the median age was 27, ranging from 11 to 68...

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Cal State Fullerton, KCET, to Create 24/7 Digital TV Channel

California State University, Fullerton, and KCET, the West Coast flagship station of PBS, said they would jointly create a digital television channel for Orange County, which will be named KCET Orange...

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Brazilian Universities, U.S. Firms, Team on Digital Makeover

Brazil’s Amazonas State University, Amazonas Federal University and Sao Paulo University are collaborating with the Intel Corp. and Cicso Systems, Inc. to build a wireless, high-speed Internet network for residents of the Amazon basin...

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