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Now that a judge has rejected the Google Books settlement, one of the unanswered questions is what will happen to universities dreams’ of conducting research on the huge archive that Google has created.

For humanists and others interested in such “Big Data” research, the answer got a little clearer this week. Several of Google’s university book-digitization partners announced plans to build a new center for computational research on millions of digitized texts, many of them scanned by Google.

The Google Books settlement, scuttled last month, would have permitted the use of millions of in-copyright works owned by universities for “nonconsumptive” computational research, meaning large-scale data analysis that is not focused on reading texts. For example, researchers can mine such databases to study how the English language has grown or how rapidly humanity is forgetting its history. Under the legal settlement, Google had pledged to invest $ 5-million on one or two centers created for…

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Organizers of Internet2, the high-speed research network that connects more than 150 colleges, blew out virtual candles and celebrated their 15th birthday this week, leading Network World to reflect on whether the superfast system has lived up to its promise. It has, the magazine concludes, noting such achievements as linking researchers in the United States to the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, which requires quicker connections than the standard Internet can provide. The new leader of Internet2 outlined his vision for the organization’s future recently on The Chronicle‘s Tech Therapy podcast. Meanwhile a project called Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI, hopes to come up with the next generation of networking technology for researchers.

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Some professors complained in recent weeks after Twitter began enforcing a policy that made it more difficult for researchers to collect large volumes of messages to analyze. But just last week Twitter slightly revised its rules, and at least one site popular with researchers has restored some of its archiving functions.

Earlier this year, Twitter officials sent notices to several services that archived Tweets and exported batches of them, arguing that redistributing large numbers of Tweets violated the company’s terms of service. That led Twapper Keeper, used by many professors and graduate students to organize digitized chatter for analysis, to remove many of its main archiving functions.

Until today, when Twapper Keeper announced that it has restored the option to download customized Tweet archives as Excel files, arguing that new rules Twitter released last week appear to allow that function.

“It will give you the ability to download smaller data sets, which is very useful for…

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That scourge of all in boxes, the anonymous e-mail, might have met its match.

Researchers at Concordia University in Montreal have developed a technique to determine the origins of anonymous e-mails by analyzing the sender’s writing style. The result is a unique “write-print” that’s like a fingerprint for prose, identifying an author through a collection of writing characteristics. The method isn’t intended to reveal the spam authors who clutter your in box, but to aid law-enforcement officials in investigating crimes involving e-mail.

“Some people like to write their e-mails in all lowercase; some people like to use lots of commas,” says Benjamin C. M. Fung, an assistant professor in information-systems engineering at Concordia, who helped develop the approach. It will be published in a forthcoming issue of Information Sciences.

The Concordia researchers tested their technique on a trove of internal Enron e-mails, a byproduct of court cases against executives of the infamous…

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A particularly appropriate post, given SIGCSE this week:

Professors have two primary charges: generate new knowledge and educate students. The reward systems at research universities heavily weight efforts of many professors toward research at the expense of teaching, particularly in disciplines supported extensively by extramural funding ( 1). Although education and lifelong learning skills are of utmost importance in our rapidly changing, technologically dependent world ( 2), teaching responsibilities in many STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines have long had the derogatory label “teaching load” ( 3,  4). Some institutions even award professors “teaching release” as an acknowledgment of their research accomplishments and success at raising outside research funds.

via an article from Jan 14, 2011 Science Magazine.

Computing Education Blog

The developers of Mendeley, a research-management tool that has more than a million users, want to put more than 70 million academic papers, reader recommendations, and social-networking tags to new and innovative uses. The company announced Tuesday its “Binary Battle,” a contest for outside developers to build applications drawing from Mendeley’s collected information, with a $ 10,001 grand prize for the best new application.

“If you’ve ever thought, ‘You know, I really wish I could search the literature better’ or ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if I could see how this idea evolved over time?’ or just ‘I wish I had $ 10,001 dollars,’ well, now’s your chance,” says the company blog.

Mendeley is looking for applications that “increase scientific collaboration, mash up research data with social media in novel ways, or simply wow the judges by being awesome,” the company says in a release. Entries will be accepted until August 31.

As our colleagues at ProfHacker have noted, Mendeley has…

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I strongly agree with this.  Certainly, we can show learning in short-term studies.  But the most important issues in education (e.g., motivation, attitudes, broadening participation, success in later academic career, success after graduation) can’t be studied in the standard three years of an NSF grant.

A group of education researchers and representatives of private philanthropies argued on Monday for more money for long-term studies of education. Such studies, they said, are often harder to find money to support but tend to be more effective than shorter-term projects at decisively answering key research and policy questions.

The researchers and philanthropists made their case at a gathering on Capitol Hill, titled “Payoffs of Long-Term Investment in Education Research,” that was organized by the American Educational Research Association, the Education Deans Alliance, and the National Academy of Education.

via Researchers and Grant Makers Call for More Long-Term Education…

Computing Education Blog

Cellphone dead zones might soon become a thing of the past.

Technology developed by three graduate students in engineering at Stanford University could allow wireless systems, including telephone and WiFi networks, to simultaneously send and receive information, doubling their speed and improving their performance—and keeping them from deafening themselves.

As it is, a signal transmitted on a network to the other is stronger at its point of origin than incoming signals are. In essence, each end of a network is talking so loudly it can’t hear what the other end is saying.

Philip Levis, an assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering who oversaw the project, says that can create problems for cellphone transmission towers, particularly in remote areas. Companies use cellphone repeaters to extend the range of networks, and often transmit and receive on different channels, but the new technology could be cheaper and more effective, the professor says, reducing…

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