September 24, 2008

Monster, the Job-Search Behemoth, Enters the Admissions Game

Monster Worldwide Inc. is delving into the admissions game with its newest Web site, Admissions.com. The job-search company announced the site’s arrival today at the annual conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, in Seattle.

The new Web site includes an “ask an expert” feature where high schoolers and their parents can pose questions to a panel including Andrew Flagel, George Mason University’s dean of admissions, and Mark Kantrowitz, founder of FinAid, a popular financial-aid Web site that is also part of the Monster network.

Beginning in November, the new site will also run top-10 lists of colleges for different majors, based on input from users of Admissions.com and other Monster Web sites. —Beckie Supiano

September 20, 2008

Start-Up of European Collider Will Be Delayed 2 Months

Research at the Large Hadron Collider, a vast particle-physics project in Europe that scientists hope will answer fundamental questions about the universe, will be delayed at least two months after an accident during start-up procedures this week that resulted in a large leak of helium, according to a statement released today by the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, which is operating the experiment.

No one was injured in the incident, but the statement said an electrical connection between two magnets was likely to have melted. That failure allowed helium to leak into a race-track-like tunnel in which protons will be accelerated to high speeds and then crashed into one another. Physicists, including some working from the United States, hope the resulting shower of particles will help answer complex questions involving extra dimensions, unseen “dark” matter, and how particles obtain their mass, among other things.

Keeping the magnets chilled with helium to just above absolute zero is key to the operation of the collider. The helium leak means that a part of the tunnel will need to be warmed up in order to make repairs, then cooled down once again. —Andrew Mytelka

September 18, 2008

Admissions Officers Peek at Applicants' Facebook Profiles

College seniors know that prospective employers check their Facebook and MySpace pages; now high-school seniors have evidence that college admissions officers browse them as well.

One in 10 admissions officers has looked at an applicant’s social-networking profile, according to a report released today by the test-prep company Kaplan Inc. Of those who peeked, 38 percent said what they saw had a negative effect on their evaluation of the student. Fewer — a quarter — said the effect was positive.

Admissions officers’ decisions to look or not are mostly up to them, Kaplan said. “The vast majority of schools we surveyed said they have no official policies or guidelines in place regarding visiting applicants’ social-networking Web sites — nor are they considering plans to develop them,” Jeff Olson, executive director of research for Kaplan’s test-prep and admissions division, said in a written statement.

The company surveyed 320 institutions among U.S. News & World Report’s and Barron’s top 500. It also polled admissions officers at professional schools, finding that 9 percent in business, 14 percent in medicine, and 15 percent in law looked at applicants’ social-networking sites when making admissions decisions.

Some students are crying foul. In a poll on Kaplan’s Web site — “Do you think it’s fair for colleges and universities to look at social-networking sites when evaluating applicants?” — 54 percent of respondents said no. —Sara Lipka

September 9, 2008

GMAT Scores Canceled for 84 Students Who Cheated on Entrance Exam

The Graduate Management Admission Council has canceled the scores of 84 people who paid to get a sneak peek at questions on a standardized test for admission to graduate business schools, the council announced today.

The council, which owns and administers the Graduate Management Admission Test, found that 12 people had posted live questions from the test on a Web site called ScoreTop.com. Those students will be barred from taking the test for at least three years.

The other 72 posted messages on the now-defunct ScoreTop Web site that confirmed that their tests had included questions they had seen in advance on the site. Those students will be allowed to retake the test. The council also notified the business schools to which the students had applied.

In June the council was awarded $2.3-million in damages, plus other fees, after suing ScoreTop for copyright infringement. That judgment also gave the council ownership of the ScoreTop domain name and a computer hard drive that it scoured as part of its investigation.

“We take the action of canceling scores very seriously, with a full understanding of our ethical responsibility to both students and schools to protect the integrity of the test and the application process,” said David A. Wilson, president of the council. —Katherine Mangan

Company Unveils Wind-Powered Instant-Messaging System

Ever worry about the carbon footprint you leave behind when you fire off an instant message to your professor or student? Probably not, but, in case you did worry, a company called Wimba Pronto has retooled its instant-messaging platform to put your mind at ease. It’s now powered by wind, the company announced today.

The education-technology company has purchased renewable energy credits from a wind-power supplier called Community Energy to subsidize the electricity its servers and routers consume.

As a result, the company says, it now offers the world’s first wind-powered instant-messaging system for education.

Wimba Pronto says the wind-power switch reflects the company’s commitment to sustainability. More than 200 academic institutions use the company’s instant-messaging products, many of them for distance education.

The company says one user, the University of Georgia Cooperative Extension, saved 2,328 gallons of gas and cut carbon emissions by 5.7 tons in one semester by teaching 35 sessions online using Wimba. —Katherine Mangan

August 19, 2008

Fewer University-Based Researchers Appear on 2008 List of Young Innovators

The proportion of inventors and researchers who are at universities in the annual “Young Innovators Under 35” list, compiled by Technology Review, has shrunk, from 22 out of 35 in 2007 to 17 out of 35 this year.

Every year since 1999, the editors of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology magazine create this list to praise young innovators whose inventions and research the editors find “most exciting” in fields such as medicine, electronics, and nanotechnology, among others.

The institution with the most researchers on the 2008 list is Harvard University, with four (plus a joint representative with MIT). The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California at Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology have two each. Researchers at three foreign universities, in Britain, Canada, and Israel, also appear on the list.

Some of the university-based projects that caught the attention of the editors at Technology Review include a quest to design microbes to make fuels and drugs, a miniature robotic fly, and an electronic nose that can diagnose cancer by sniffing the patient’s breath. —Maria José Viñas

August 11, 2008

Audio Interview: Making Sense of the 'Digital Explosion'

A new book, Blown to Bits, offers engineer’s-eye views on copyright infringement, digital censorship, and “why we lost our privacy, or gave it away.” Two of the book’s authors — Hal Abelson, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harry Lewis, a professor of computer science at Harvard University — weigh in on what they call “the digital explosion.” —Andrea L. Foster

Pollster's New Book Likens Online Universities to Zip Cars in Their Growing Appeal

National surveys show that a majority of Americans think online universities offer a lower quality of education than do traditional institutions. But a prominent pollster, John Zogby, says in a book being released on Tuesday that it won’t be long before American society takes to distance education as warmly as it has embraced game-changing innovations like microbrewed beers, Flexcars, and “the simple miracle of Netflix.”

The factor that will close that “enthusiasm gap” is the growing use of distance education by well-respected universities, Mr. Zogby predicts in the book, The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream (Random House).

The book, which is based on Zogby International polls and other studies, also touches on public attitudes toward politics, consumer habits, spirituality, and international affairs, and on what men and women really want from each other. Mr. Zogby says polls detect signs of society’s emerging resistance to big institutions, and its de-emphasis on things and places. “We’re redefining geography and space,” he says — and a widening acceptance of online education is part of that trend.

Today there is still a “cultural lag” between the public’s desire for flexible ways to take college courses and what the most-established players offer, Mr. Zogby said in an interview with The Chronicle. “There’s a sense that those who define the standard haven’t caught on yet,” he said.

But Mr. Zogby writes that polling by his organization shows that attitudes about online education are changing fast. His polling also points to other challenges that colleges will face as they race to serve a worldwise generation of 18-to-29-year-olds that Mr. Zogby calls “First Globals.”

In one 2007 poll of more 5,000 adults, Zogby International found that 30 percent of respondents were taking or had taken an online course, and an additional 50 percent said they would consider taking one. Those numbers might skew a little high, he said, because the poll was conducted online and the definition of an online course was broad, including certificate programs or training modules offered by employers.

Only 27 percent of respondents agreed that “online universities and colleges provide the same quality of education” as traditional institutions. Among those 18 to 24 years old, only 23 percent agreed.

An even greater proportion of those polled said it was their perception that employers and academic professionals thought more highly of traditional institutions than online ones.

Rapid Shift in Attitude

Yet in another national poll in December 2007, conducted for Excelsior College, 45 percent of the 1,004 adults surveyed believed “an online class carries the same value as a traditional-classroom class,” and 43 percent of 1,545 chief executives and small-business owners agreed that a degree earned by distance learning “is as credible” as one from a traditional campus-based program.

Differing attitudes in two polls taken within a year, Mr. Zogby said, show that “the gap was closing” — and he said that wasn’t as surprising as it might seem. As with changing perceptions about other cultural phenomena, “these paradigm shifts really are moving at lightning speed.”

That, said Mr. Zogby, is why he writes about online universities in a chapter — “Dematerializing the Paradigm” — that discusses the rise of car-sharing companies like Flexcar (now merged with Zipcar), the emergence of Internet blogs as a source of news and information, and the popularity of microbrewed beer.

And while it may be true that microbrews and Zipcars, at least, are still very much niche products, Mr. Zogby says they are signs of transcendent change — just like the distance-education courses that are being offered by more and more institutions across the country. “When you add up all the niche products, it’s a market unto itself,” he said.

In the book, Mr. Zogby also highlights the emerging influence of the First Globals, whom his book calls “the most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history.” First Globals, he says, are more socially tolerant and internationally aware.

It is these First Globals, he writes, who are shaping what he says is nothing short of a “fundamental reorientation of the American character away from wanton consumption and toward a new global citizenry in an age of limited resources.”

Higher education, he said in the interview, needs to take notice and adapt. These days, he said, students are much more likely to have experienced other cultures firsthand, either as tourists or because they have immigrated from someplace else. Whether college for them is a traditional complex of buildings or an interactive online message board, said Mr. Zogby, “there is a different student on campus.” —Goldie Blumenstyk

August 10, 2008

Court Orders MIT Students Not to Present Findings on Flaws in Fare Cards

A court order has prohibited three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who discovered a potentially costly flaw with subway fare cards from presenting their research at a hacker convention this weekend, and the three are facing a lawsuit filed by the Boston transit agency.

According to The Tech, a student newspaper at MIT, the students were surprised when the lawsuit was filed on Friday because they had already discussed their findings with the agency, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. Their research, for a class project at MIT, demonstrated that the magnetic fare cards could be reprogrammed to show a balance of more than $600, allowing people to ride the subway free.

In a news release, an official of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that is advising the students, called the court order “an illegal prior restraint on legitimate academic research.”

The student newspaper pointed out that much of the information the order sought to suppress was already available online, in part through the transit agency’s court filing. Copies of the court order and other documents in the case have been posted on the newspaper’s Web site.

In a similar case in the Netherlands this year, a chip manufacturer sued researchers who found that transit-system cards could be cloned, but a court ruled in the researchers’ favor, allowing them to proceed with plans to publish their results. —Charles Huckabee

July 25, 2008

Randy Pausch, Computer Scientist Famed for His 'Last Lecture,' Dies

More than a year after he was given six months to live, and after 10 months during which he touched millions over the Internet with his last lecture and helped write a best-selling book about life, illness, and hope, Randy Pausch died today, the Associated Press reported. Mr. Pausch, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, was 47.

In September 2006, Mr. Pausch was told that he had incurable pancreatic cancer. His last lecture, at Carnegie Mellon in September 2007, about achieving childhood dreams, drew international attention and was viewed by millions on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet.

It also spawned the book The Last Lecture, written with Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Last month Mr. Zaslow told an audience of college officials at The Chronicle’s Executive Leadership Forum that Mr. Pausch had given him information for the book while riding his bicycle. Mr. Pausch donned a headset and spoke to Mr. Zaslow over a couple of months in sessions that totaled 53 hours. He also revealed that Mr. Pausch’s health had deteriorated sharply in recent months.

Mr. Pausch said he felt awkward about his fame, but he did use his influence to lobby Congress for more federal support for pancreatic-cancer research. He also appeared on Oprah and other TV shows. He even got a small role as an extra in a new Star Trek movie.

In his lecture and book, Mr. Pausch talked a lot about the need to have fun in life. “I mean I don’t know how to not have fun. I’m dying and I’m having fun. And I’m going to keep having fun every day I have left. Because there’s no other way to play it,” he said in his Carnegie Mellon lecture. “You just have to decide if you’re a Tigger or an Eeyore. I think I’m clear where I stand on the great Tigger/Eeyore debate.”

In honor of Mr. Pausch, Carnegie Mellon plans to name a footbridge after him. The bridge will connect the university’s Gates Center for Computer Science with the Purnell Center for the Arts. Hilary Robinson, a university dean, told The Chronicle that the bridge symbolizes Mr. Pausch’s commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to computer-science education.

Today Mr. Pausch’s home page at Carnegie Mellon could not be opened, probably because it was overwhelmed with traffic from all over the Internet. —Josh Fischman