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Two years ago in my doctorate program I had to buy a $120 dollar book on affordability and the rising cost of higher education. Anyone else see the irony there? Apparently the publisher didn’t. --John who is not an expert on anything

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Man vs. Machine II: Poker-Playing Software Program Will Try to Avenge Last Year's Loss | Comment

6 American Teams Make It to Finals of Microsoft's Imagine Cup | Comment [1]

Playing the Science Game | Comment [1]

Stolen Tapes Containing Health Data on 1.5 Million U. of Utah Patients Recovered | Comment

Happy 20th Birthday, Modern Internet! | Comment [5]

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July 3, 2008

Man vs. Machine II: Poker-Playing Software Program Will Try to Avenge Last Year's Loss

A poker-playing software program developed by researchers at the University of Alberta is competing against some of the world’s best poker players in a man-machine showdown in Las Vegas that started today and runs parallel with the 2008 World Series of Poker.

The program, dubbed Polaris, will play a game of limit Texas Hold ‘Em poker against human players who are professional poker coaches. Last year, an earlier version of Polaris competed with professional poker players in Vancouver, British Columbia. The humans won with a final score of two wins, one loss, and one tie.

“We’re still quite far from the necessary computing power for perfect play,” said associate professor Michael Bowling, leader of the university’s computer-poker research group in a press release. “However, we’ve been able to take what we learned last year and apply it to improving this year’s program.” —Maria José Viñas

6 American Teams Make It to Finals of Microsoft's Imagine Cup

An interface that allows blind people to access the Web, a photo essay on tropical-rain-forest sustainability, and a system that saves energy by automatically adjusting the power usage of appliances are among the six projects from American students that have made it to the finals of Microsoft’s sixth annual Imagine Cup.

The international competition, which kicked off today in Paris, comes with a cash award of $240,000. This year’s edition challenges students to find new ways to use technology to help sustain the environment.

In the interface-design category, a duo from Indiana University designed a Web site that allowed students who were participating in a campus energy challenge to compare their dorm’s consumption with other dorms’, and also suggested conservation actions. Another student, from Arizona State University, has developed a user interface to teach people to be sustainable in their homes.

A team from California State University at Long Beach has designed an embedded system that adjusts the power consumption of home appliances, and a group from the Rochester Institute of Technology has created a software program that allows mobile-phone users to access and control environment data collected from a network of sensors.

Two students from Wayne State University are competing in the photography category with a photo essay that portrays a global movement that wants to slow the effects of global warming and deforestation.

A Ph.D. candidate in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington has won the Interface Design Technology Award for a screen-reading interface that allows blind people to access the Internet.

More than 200,000 students from all over the world registered in the Imagine Cup and 370 of them, from 61 countries, have made it to the weeklong finals. The winners will be announced on July 8. More information is available on the Imagine Cup Finals Web site. —Maria José Viñas

Playing the Science Game

Could the person who finds the cure for cancer be a gamer? The creators of an online game that allows players to help scientists design new proteins with therapeutic properties hope so.

A protein has an elaborate, three-dimensional structure, and scientists who want to design new proteins from scratch face extremely complicated puzzles with only one correct answer. David Baker, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington, uses a computer algorithm based on trial and error to find new proteins’ structures. The program requires enormous computer power, so Mr. Baker invented a screen saver that uses the combined spare energy of multiple computers, or “distributed computing,” to endlessly fold proteins. When some users of the program told Mr. Baker they wanted to help design proteins, he created Foldit (http://fold.it/portal/adobe_main), a game that would allow them to do that.

“Computers try all possible positions randomly until something falls into place, like monkeys banging typewriters until they write all of Shakespeare’s works,” says Zoran Popovi´c, a computer scientist at the university who helped Mr. Baker create Foldit.

To engage players in a game that has nothing to do with racing cars or killing zombies, the team made it a competition between players and offered them the chance to share scientific glory: Gamers who come up with winning structures will be named in research papers. And Mr. Popovi´c says Foldit will let computers learn from the folding techniques of the most talented players and become more efficient in searching for new proteins.

More than 40,000 people have downloaded the game. It is still being tested and limits players to finding answers only to known protein puzzles, so that scientists can analyze how good people are at folding proteins. In a few months, the game will allow players to create brand-new proteins. But since the “right” solutions to those puzzles will be unknown, even stable-looking structures proposed by the gamers will have to be created in the lab to see if they really work. —Maria José Viñas

Stolen Tapes Containing Health Data on 1.5 Million U. of Utah Patients Recovered

Backup tapes of patient billing records from the University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics were recovered this week by the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office. The tapes, containing data on 1.5 million patients, were stolen from a car this month.

The tapes were recovered in their original condition and do not appear as if anyone culled data from them, the medical center announced on its Web page. In addition to billing records, the tapes contained patient names, demographic data, diagnostic information, and in some cases Social Security numbers.

Three people have been identified as suspects in the case, one of whom has been arrested, according to an article Wednesday in The Salt Lake Tribune. The article quotes the county sheriff, James Winder, as saying it is unlikely the suspects viewed any information on the tapes. “They’re not techies,” he said. “I don’t know if they could find their rear end with both hands.” —Andrea L. Foster

July 2, 2008

Happy 20th Birthday, Modern Internet!

“The NSFNet Backbone has reached a state where we would like to more officially let operational traffic on.” Twenty years ago, on the evening of June 30th, a network engineer named Hans-Werner Braun sent that text in an an e-mail message to users of the National Science Foundation’s fledgling NSFNet project. The network’s main lines, or backbone, had been upgraded, he said.

And that, according to Supercomputing Online today, was the birth of the modern Internet. In the early 1980s, NSF put together NSFNet as a network connecting regional computer networks around the country. The Department of Defense had already created the Arpanet network, which gave birth to many of the tools and techniques used on the modern Internet, but Arpanet traffic was limited to Defense-sponsored research. NSFNet was designed to be open to all users.

The design of NSFNet was awarded to a team made of MCI, IBM, and a computer-networking-technology consortium of Michigan universities called Merit Networks. Their main challenge: the network’s backbone ran at 56-kilobits per second. (That’s the old connection speed of a dial-up telephone modem.)

According to Supercomputing Online, George Strawn, who was in charge of the campus network at Iowa State University at the time, says that network users, frustrated by the clogged system, would “bang on my desk, ‘the network is too slow. I can’t use the thing.’”

The NSFNet supervisors upgraded to a 1.5 megabit-per-second capacity in 1988. Strawn said that people stopped banging on his desk.

For a while, at least. Network traffic from universities, commercial companies and individual users skyrocketed. And in 1995, NSFNet was decommissioned, replaced by robust backbones provided by commercial telecom companies. But without its demonstration of open access at high speeds, the modern Internet would not have lured millions of users. —Josh Fischman

British Researcher Seeks Scholarly Input for Virtual-Worlds Think Tank

Ren Reynolds, a British-based technology researcher, has recently formed a think tank on virtual worlds, called the Virtual Policy Network, or tVPN. The goal of the group, he says, is to get scholars, industry officials, and policy makers talking about virtual worlds. The group is expected to have a presence in Europe, Asia, and North America.

One of the group’s projects will be an annual report that takes stock of public policies around the world relating to virtual worlds. The think tank is asking colleges, businesses, and governments to provide financial support for the project. —Andrea L. Foster

Founder of Textbook-Download Site Says Offering Free Copyrighted Textbooks Is Act of 'Civil Disobedience'

Publishers see Web sites like Textbook Torrents, which offer free downloads of textbooks without authorization, as part of a growing problem of piracy that could potentially threaten their industry. But the founder of Textbook Torrents calls his actions “civil disobedience” against “the monopolistic business practices” of textbook publishers.

The site’s founder, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of legal action against him, talked to The Chronicle over an Internet phone call last night and defended his creation, though he described it as operating in a “legal gray area.” He said he is an undergraduate at a college outside of the United States, though he would not name the institution or country, and that he operates the Web site from there.

His biggest complaint: that textbooks are just too expensive, and that prices climb each year. “We’re showing both students and textbook publishers that this isn’t acceptable anymore,” he said. “A lot of users are absolutely fed up with the system.” He said he views the 64,000 registered users of his textbook-download site as votes against that system.

The site started last January, but except for an author or two writing to ask that their books be removed, no one had complained until recently, he said. Last Friday, after The Chronicle began asking publishers about the site, Pearson Education sent the site a note demanding that 78 of its titles be removed. The site quickly complied. “We don’t have the legal muscle to fight them,” the founder said. But he added that he will press on with the site, even if such takedown requests continue. “I certainly have no intention of going anywhere.”

The site takes in some money through banner advertising, and some users have made donations, but he said Textbook Torrents is not profitable, and that the goal is simply to break even rather than to benefit financially.

The Chronicle requested an interview with officials at Pearson to talk about the site. In response, they issued the following statement by LaShonda Morris, a Web security specialist: “Pearson does monitor this and other potentially infringing websites. We have contacted this particular site and they have complied with our request to remove our copyrighted material.”

Reactions to the Web site in a Wired Campus discussion this week have been mixed.

“Perhaps if the textbooks were not $120 for mediocrity, there would be no need” for the site, said one commenter.

Others, however, called downloading textbooks theft, plain and simple. “Let’s just have anarchy where nobody pays for anything they deem ‘too expensive’ priced by the ‘rapacious textbook publishing [or any other] industry,’” said one participant in the discussion. —Jeffrey R. Young

California Community Colleges Promote Videos on iTunesU

Intelecom, a nonprofit consortium of 31 California community colleges that develops distance-education courses, announced today that it has made 10 video lectures freely available on iTunesU, the educational section of Apple Computer’s popular music store.

Among Intelecom’s offerings: a movie that teaches the English language, a video clip about global warming, and one about nutrition. Intelecom also plans to post study guides, audio clips, and interviews with scholars.

“We see iTunesU as an excellent example of technology in support of lifelong learning and a natural extension of our core mission of making education available anytime and anywhere,” Cameron Cox, Intelecom’s vice president of marketing and members services, said in a prepared statement. —Andrea L. Foster

U.'s of Pennsylvania and Miami Rank Among the Top IT Workplaces

The Universities of Pennsylvania and Miami are among the top 10 best places to work in information technology, according to an annual report by Computerworld magazine. The report was based on salaries and turnover rates for IT employees, among other measurements, as well as 31,317 IT employees’ responses to a variety of workplace questions.

Computerworld cites Penn’s cultural activities and its contributions to the Philadelphia community. The magazine ranks the university six out of 100 attractive workplaces. Miami is ranked number 10, in part because it offers employees a wide array of technical- and managerial-training opportunities.

Other universities who made it to the best 100 places to work are: Cornell, George Washington, and Temple Universities, and Duke University Health System and Duke University Medical Center. —Andrea L. Foster

July 1, 2008

Point-and-Click Archaeology

Armchair archaeologists will have ringside, or dig-side, seats this month at university explorations of the world’s richest collection of rock art and the ruins of a Panamanian village that may once have been spotted by Christopher Columbus’s son, among other expeditions. Instead of swatting mosquitos, all they will have to do is click a mouse.

During July, undergraduates from the University of California at Los Angeles will write blogs from seven locations where they are taking part in archaeological digs. The countries include Albania, Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and the U.S.

The blogs are for public consumption. “We want to create the next generation of archaeology fans,” Ran Boytner, director of international research at UCLA’s Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and head of the field studies program, said in a prepared statement.

The blogs will be written by students in UCLA’s field studies program. They will describe work at the largest group of pre-Columbian forts in the New World, in Ecuador; a 19th-century village in British Columbia that shows contact between newly arrived Europeans and indigenous peoples; remains of a Native American culture on Catalina Island, off the California coast; and a Peruvian valley lived in first by Inca emperors and later by Spanish conquistadors. —Josh Fischman

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