San Francisco - Google is giving people influence over what information turns up during online searches on their names. The California Internet search king began on Tuesday featuring voluntarily created Google profiles at the bottoms of US “name-query” pages.
Full details here.
[source: The Chronicle of Higher Education]
The Walt Disney Company announced late last week that it has endowed the creation of two graduate fellowships at Carnegie Mellon University in honor of Randy Pausch, the late computer-science professor who delivered an inspiring “last lecture” at the university about making dreams come true.
Mr. Pausch died of pancreatic cancer last summer, but in his final year he became a media sensation after his final lecture at the university became a hit on YouTube (and was later turned into a best-selling book). The professor had worked for Disney’s Imagineer group during a sabbatical in 1995 and continued as a consultant for the company after that.
One of the three-year Disney Memorial Pausch Fellowships will go to a computer-science student and the other to a student in the fine arts. Mr. Pausch was known for uniting science and the arts in his teaching and research.
Disney officials also plan to place a medallion commemorating Mr. Pausch at the Disney World amusement park. The medallion will include words from the professor’s last lecture: “Be good at something; it makes you valuable. Have something to bring to the table, because that will make you more welcome.” —Jeffrey R. Young
[source: The Chronicle of Higher Education]
A delegation of Iraqi university presidents visiting the United States this month has a message for their American colleagues: We’re ready to do business.
The seven presidents, who represent universities from across Iraq, are meeting with higher-education officials as part of a trip sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. They will attend the American Council on Education’s annual conference here next week.
The purpose of the visit is to expose the university heads to the newest developments in pedagogy, technology, and administration in the United States. But the presidents arrived this week eager to set up partnerships and sign exchange agreements with American colleges.
During a meeting with reporters at the offices of the American Council on Education, the Iraqis said that what they need most are opportunities for their students and faculty members to receive training and conduct research in the United States.
[source: The Chronicle of Higher Education]
Google today unveiled what could be the largest collection of digital books formatted for cellphones. The company took 1.5 million of the books it has scanned through its partnership with several major college libraries and prepped them for the small screen of iPhones or phones using Google’s Android operating system.
The collection only includes books that are in the public domain, so it highlights classics like Emma and This Side of Paradise.
Developers spent about a year working on the cellphone format, said Frances Haugen, a product manager for Google, in an interview today. One key innovation: When users click on any paragraph of the text, they call up a picture of that paragraph from the original scan of the library book. That’s important for times when Google’s software goofed in turning the picture of the text into a digital file. (Such imperfections are common in any book-scanning effort.)
Ms. Haugen said she reread a favorite book, Wuthering Heights, on her cellphone and had no problem reading for long periods on the small screen. It is hard to imagine students doing their English homework curled up with their cellphones, though. —Jeffrey R. Young
[source: The Chronicle of Higher Education]
In order to be free, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed, humans must sometimes surrender a measure of freedom.
Fred Stutzman, a Ph.D. student and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science, may not have had Rousseau in mind when he created the “Freedom” application. But he does believe that to escape the siren song of social media, scholars might need to freely impose restrictions on themselves. “When there’s wireless everywhere,” he told The Chronicle, “how do we really escape the Internet?”
Mr. Stutzman’s answer is to relinquish one’s right to surf the Web to the supervision of a sort of robotic schoolmarm. Freedom is a shareware application that users instruct to disable their computers’ network adapters for a fixed period of time, leaving them unable to browse the Internet for up to eight hours.
