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QuickWire: Law School Admission Council to Make Site More Accessible to Blind Applicants

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The council that administers the Law School Admission Test has agreed to make its entire Web site accessible to blind law-school applicants who use screen-reader software, the association announced on Monday. That move is part of a settlement of a lawsuit filed in 2009 by the National Federation of the Blind. Three blind students also joined in suing the association and four law schools that either encouraged or required applicants to apply through the admission council’s Web site. The council says its technology updates should help resolve those lawsuits as well.

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Fake Web Site Pretends to Be Youngstown State U.’s

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Youngstown State University has been plagued by a Web mimic. Officials alerted the campus community last week to a Web site that appeared to be masquerading as the official university Web site, according to the Youngstown State student newspaper The Jambar.

The administration was alerted to the Web site ysu.com, whose content has since been deleted, when a Youngstown State student unsuccessfully tried to log in, according to the student paper. The official university site is ysu.edu.

Officials at Youngstown State speculated to The Jambar that the site owners might be looking to obtain the log-in credentials for any students, faculty, or staff fooled into thinking they were on the official site. If that strategy worked, the site’s owner could have gained access to user accounts on the actual Youngstown Web site. Another possibility, officials said, is that the site could have been a scheme to get the university to buy the domain name, to end the confusion. It’s listed for sale for $…

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QuickWire: German Students Start DNA Dating Site

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Students at the Technical University of Munich are turning to DNA to improve people’s dating lives.

A new dating site, Gmatch.org, uses DNA taken from the cheek swabs of users to suggest other users with whom they might have good chemistry, according to the site’s founder, Sarah A. Port. The service costs approximately $ 200 per use, according to The Telegraph.

The student-run site isn’t the first DNA-based dating service. Boston-based ScientificMatch.com began offering similar services in 2007 for about $ 2,000 per year, according to CNET News.

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Stanford Students Start Their Own Course-Management Web Site

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A student-run Web site at Stanford University seeks to convince students to input their class assignments to keep themselves—and their classmates—more organized. It could, founders hope, grow into a student-run course-management system.

ClassOwl launched this week and has 750 members, according to Sam Purtill, its founder, who is a sophomore majoring in philosophy. The site allows students to “follow” their classes and input class assignments and due dates, which then trigger notifications as deadlines near.

Students already keep track of their class schedules and assignments in applications like Google Calendar, Mr. Purtill says, but ClassOwl would allow others to benefit from this behavior. Once one student adds an assignment in a class, everyone else in the class has it added to their calendars, as well. Ultimately, he’d like to expand the site to include social events on campus, to help students better plan every aspect of their lives. He also plans to allow students to flag…

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Reed College Seeks to Stop Copycat Web Site

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A Reed College professor made an unusual discovery in October when searching for himself on Google. A Web site for an unaccredited college called the University of Redwood appeared to have repurposed much of the material from Reed’s Web site. For example, the list of faculty Web sites on Redwood’s site is identical to the list of faculty Web sites on Reed’s site.

Officials at the Portland, Ore., college say their investigation into the Web site leads them to suspect that its purpose could be to solicit application fees from foreign students seeking to study in the United States. The site’s authors could not be reached for comment.

But the site says, on an “About Redwood” page, that it is a liberal-arts college founded in 1908 (the same year Reed was founded) that offers “a world class intellectually rigorous academic program” and has a “huge team of 135 faculty members.” It says it is named after “the Oregon pioneers Simeon and Amanda Redwood.” (Reed is named for the Oregon…

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