universities

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Anthropologist says Apple is definitely a religion.

- Google brings Street View to the Grand Canyon.

- Apple now owns the trademark to The Beatles' Apple Corps Logo.

- What I learned while live-tweeting a friend's funeral.

Video voice mail: Mossimo has a positive update on a previous video voice mail.… Read more

Computer software programmed to detect and report illicit behavior could eventually replace the fallible humans who monitor surveillance cameras.

The U.S. government has funded the development of so-called automatic video surveillance technology by a pair of Carnegie Mellon University researchers who disclosed details about their work this week -- including that it has an ultimate goal of predicting what people will do in the future.

"The main applications are in video surveillance, both civil and military," Alessandro Oltramari, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon who has a Ph.D. from Italy's University of Trento, told CNET … Read more

Universal Translator is an app for the Mac that offers word and sentence translation into more than 50 languages. The Universal Translator installs in a second or two, and the interface is a model of simplicity with two panes, one for typing a word, sentence or phrase and the other for the translation. Two selectors at the top control which languages are used. Icons allow the phrases to be spoken. The software supports non-Roman alphabets and where necessary there's both the textual translation and a phonetic translation as well. There's a long list of supported languages, although not … Read more

Since the late 1800s, researchers and the curious have been trying to use photography to capture images of animals in the wild. Over the decades, the technology behind these camera traps has gone from trip-wire film cameras to sophisticated digital rigs. And these days, with the accessibility of digital video, the footage being collected is absolutely arresting. Check out the World Wildlife Fund or the Wildlife Conservation Society to see some of their videos of tigers, gorillas, and rhinos in their natural habitats.

Closer to home, we caught up with a technology specialist who works at Jasper Ridge, Stanford University'… Read more

Restricting access to Web sites such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents has been a long-standing practice for universities in both the U.S. and United Kingdom.

Suffering under the strain of heavy traffic due to students streaming films and downloading gigabytes of data via torrents, academic institutions have attempted -- often in vain -- to curb the trend.

But when the next episode of "Game of Thrones" isn't out for another week and has been broadcast already in another country, the temptation is no doubt difficult to resist.

Universities are not unaware of this and have … Read more

There's a "Battle of the Bay" going on tonight at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, and it's happening in a haze of Chinese food, juggling, music, and coding. And maybe some unicycling, if you're lucky.

The social network holds its second Stanford versus Cal (University of California at Berkeley) hackathon for budding coders to try their hands at creating new products. Nearly 200 students from both campuses sat in front of their laptops at around 5 p.m. with no intention of stopping until 3 p.m. tomorrow. That's what Facebook hackathons are … Read more

Many people would probably say their handwriting has suffered the more they use computers to communicate. But imagine trying to exercise your rusty penmanship on letters that have not 1 or 2 strokes but 5, 10, 15, or more.

The Japanese often complain that sending e-mails and texts erodes their skills in writing the thousands of kanji, or Chinese characters, they learn in school. Some are maddeningly complex and, if rarely used, easy to forget.

But brush-painting kanji calligraphy is also a centuries-old art form. Keio University engineering professor Seiichiro Katsura has a way to help preserve it with his Motion Copy System robot. … Read more

Hackers have accessed the confidential information of nearly 300,000 students, employees, and faculty in a massive security breach at a Florida college, officials said today.

The breach was first thought to have been isolated to employees at Northwest Florida State College but may involve student records from across the state, education officials said. More than 200,000 records were stolen in the breach, including the names, birth dates, and Social Security numbers of any student who was eligible for Florida's Bright Futures scholarships from 2005 to 2007.

"We speculate this was a professional, coordinated attack by one … Read more

Oregon State University researchers this week revealed details about a piece of amber from the Early Cretaceous period that contains a spider in its web attacking an intruding wasp.

The fossilized moment of doom -- the first of its kind discovered in amber -- derived from the Hukawng Valley in Myanmar, somewhere around 97 to 110 million years ago. … Read more