Academic Computing Blog

Tyan eyes March launch for its personal supercomputer product line
Vyacheslav Sobolev, DigiTimes.com,
Taipei [Thursday 24 November 2005]
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20051124PR200.html

Taiwan motherboard specialist Tyan Computer, which concentrates on server and workstation products, is currently developing a concept which the company calls “the personal supercomputer.” The company is aiming for an official launch of products under the concept in March-April 2006, and some form of the personal supercomputer is expected to be on display at the CeBIT 2006 trade fair in Hannover (Germany), the company indicated.

Tyan stated it will not determine any performance score as a target for its personal supercomputers, but the company will support the new HPC Challenge set of benchmarks (one in this set, the well-known Linpack, is used for the TOP500 ranking), according to Lin. Other HPC Challenge benchmarks include DGEMM (measures the floating point rate of execution of double precision real matrix-matrix multiplication), STREAM (measures sustainable memory bandwidth), PTRANS (exercises the communications where pairs of processors communicate with each other simultaneously), RandomAccess (measures the rate of integer random updates of memory), FFTE (measures the floating point rate of execution of double precision complex one-dimensional Discrete Fourier Transform) and a set of tests based on the Effective Communication Bandwidth (b_eff) benchmark to measure latency and bandwidth of a number of simultaneous communication patterns.

Keep science off web, says Royal Society
Richard Wray
Friday November 25, 2005
The Guardian
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,16781,1650370,00.html

The Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, yesterday joined the debate about so-called open access to scientific research, warning that making research freely available on the internet as it is published in scientific journals could harm scientific debate.

The Royal Society fears it could lead to the demise of journals published by not-for-profit societies, which put out about a third of all journals. “Funders should remember that the primary aims should be to improve the exchange of knowledge between researchers and wider society,” The Royal Society said.

The International Professors Project (IPP) [http://www.internationalprofs.org/]., “a global network of Professors who have begun working as academic citizens of the world” on university campuses in the developing world.

According to Gene Shackman of The Global Social Change Research Project [http://gsociology.icaap.org], “it is a team of professors, fellows, and universities working towards the goal of providing university teaching; mentoring and curriculum development; making information available for pertinent research; and providing the cultural sophistication and background needed to address global pedagogical/curriculum issues.”

Found as The Stanford University Center for Teaching and Learning [http://ctl.stanford.edu] An archive of all past postings (with a two week delay) can be found at: http://ctl.stanford.edu/Tomprof/index.shtml
http://ctl.stanford.edu/Tomprof/index.shtml

A proposal is to increase the exposure of open access materials and their references to indexing services, and to motivate new services by reducing setup costs, is contained in a report commissioned and published by the JISC Committee for the Information Environment (JCIE) Scholarly Communications Group:

Rachel Hardy, Charles Oppenheim, Tim Brody, and Steve Hitchcock
Open Access Citation Information, September 2005 (105pp)
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11536/

On the TLT-SWG@listserv.nd.edu, Steve Gilbert writes … 11/10/05 TLT-SWG #20

Last week the TLT ran its first of the series “Clothing the Emperor,” part of a Dangerous Discussions initiative.  Lisa Star of So. Dakota State U. ntroduced ideas and resources for launching educational blogs (for beginners). 

See: www.tltgroup.org/blogs.htm –
 
And we explored the challenging policy issues beginning to emerge on some campuses – e.g., at SDSU and St. Lawrence University

See: http://www.tltgroup.org/ProFacDev/DangerousDiscussions/Issues/blogs.htm

The TLT is going to extend this session to a full online workshop and is looking for examples of

1.  Good educational uses of blogs, wikis, etc..

2.  Bad experiences with educational uses of blogs, wikis, ….

3.  “Cases” where the use of blogs, wikis, … have proven controversial.

Every fall, higher education institutions host the return of thousands of students to campus. While this return is a challenge on many fronts, in recent years it has become increasingly challenging for IT staff to mitigate the threat posed by unmanaged student machines. For the 2005 back to school timeframe, Microsoft has several options for managing the patching and vulnerability assessment process, most of which are no-cost service add-ons to Windows 2003 Server.

http://www.microsoft.com/education/student_patch_management.mspx

– Geoff

For those unable to attend, the audiocast and summary is posted at http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/ about 24 hours after the event.

MIT Communications Forum

cell phone culture

Thursday, November 17, 2005 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. Bartos Theater

Abstract

No contemporary cultural artifact embodies the genius and the disruptive excess of capitalism as clearly as the cell phone. Ubiquitous in most developed societies in Europe, the Americas and Asia, the cell phone has become a laboratory some would say an asylum for testing the limits of technological convergence. Less a telephone today than a multi-purpose computer, cell phones are game consoles, still cameras, email systems, text messengers, carriers of entertainment and business data, nodes of commerce. Particular age cohorts and subcultures have begun to appropriate cell phones for idiosyncratic uses that help to define their niche or social identity. This Forum will examine the cell phone as a technological object and as a cultural form whose uses and meaning are increasingly various, an artifact uniquely of our time that is enacting, to borrow the words of a contemporary novelist, “a ceaseless spectacle of transition.”

Speakers

James Katz is professor of communication and director of Rutgers University’s Center for Mobile Communications Studies, which he founded in 2004. Katz’ research focuses on how personal communication technologies, such as mobile phones and the Internet, affect social relationships and how cultural values influence usage patterns of these technologies. His books include Machines That Become Us: The Social Context of Personal Communication Technology (Transaction, 2003, editor) and Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk and Public Performance (Cambridge, 2002, co-edited with Mark Aakhus). He is also the author of Social Consequences of Internet Use: Access, Involvement and Expression (MIT Press, 2002, with Ron Rice).

Jing Wang is professor of Chinese cultural studies, and the head of Foreign Languages & Literatures at MIT. Her research interests are focused on contemporary Chinese popular culture and its relationship to marketing and advertising. She worked at Ogilvy in Beijing for two summers as a consultant for the planning department, and is currently finishing up a book manuscript [Brand New China: Advertising, Media and Commercial Culture]. Wang’s presentation on cell phone branding and youth culture in China is based on some of her work at Ogilvy.

Moderator: Henry Jenkins is the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities and director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. He is the author of a forthcoming book on convergence culture.

Free and open to the public.

See http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum

Brad Seawell, program coordinator
MIT Communications Forum
http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum
14N-430
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139
voice 617-253-3521
fax 617-253-6105

Infobits, October 2005. (http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/text/oct05.txt)

Surveys of Campus IT Practices

EDUCAUSE has announced the release of the “EDUCAUSE Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2004 Summary Report,” which summarizes data from 908 colleges and universities about their campus IT environments and practices. Some of the findings from the survey include:

• an across-the-board increase among all institutions in offering many kinds of support to faculty in the use of IT in teaching and learning
• a significant increase in student computer ownership
• a striking growth in wireless network access
• significant increases in the use of voice-over-IP, video-over-IP, enterprise directory, smart card, and Web services technologies

The report is available in PDF format at http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/pub8002.pdf.

EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. The current membership comprises more than 1,900 colleges, universities, and educational organizations, including 200 corporations, with 15,000 active members. EDUCAUSE has offices in Boulder, CO and Washington, DC. Learn more about EDUCAUSE at http://www.educause.edu.

—

The Campus Computing Project’s “2005 Campus Computing Survey” summary is now available online. Begun in 1990, and now in its 16th year, the project surveys “some 600 two-and four-year public and private colleges and universities in the United States . . . [focusing] on campus planning and policy issues affecting the role of information technology in teaching, learning, and scholarship.” Some of the findings of this year’s survey include:

• Network and data security are the “single most important IT issue,”
• Wireless networks (WiFi) continue to expand across all sectors of higher education, but there is “evidence of a backlash against wireless from some faculty who would prefer that students not hide behind their computer screens during class.”
• While campuses are still affected by past years’ IT budget cuts, there is evidence that major improvements and much-needed stabilization in campus IT funding have taken place.

The summary of the survey is available at http://campuscomputing.net/.

.LRN provides a comprehensive suite of collaboration tools, a flexible toolset for innovation, and an enterprise-class infrastructure for scalable deployment. [Gustaf Neumann, Wirtschaftsuniversitåt Wien]

Originally developed at MIT, .LRN is used worldwide by over half a million users in higher education, government, non-profit, and K-12.

http://www.dotlrn.org/

Features summary

• Instructors can administer “classes” or “communities”, customising the layout, choosing the language, and setting the timezone for their class, as well as adding custom portlets if desired.
• Classes and Communities can be created by administrators who can select whether the policy to join them is closed, open or requires approval.
• Different roles are supported for .LRN Classes, such as students, professors and administrative staff.
• Different roles are supported for .LRN Communities, such as administrators and members
• Individual users can personalize their own personal portal layout, customising the layout, choosing their preferred language and chaning their current timezone as required (useful for users who travel and want to keep their schedule to date).
• .LRN provides a variety of default applications that can be used in Classes and Communities, such as: attachments, bulk-mail, calendar, faq, file-storage, forums, general-comments and news.

Internationalization

• .LRN has been internationalized to support multiple languages, dialects and timezones. Languages are constantly being added and you can view the current list of supported languages.
• If your language (or the language you are teaching) is not offered, why not add it yourself using a simple online distributed translation interface built into .LRN.

Open University going Moodle
Published Tuesday, 8 November, 2005 – 11:16
http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/3460

The Open University’s Learning and Teaching Office has started a new programme worth nearly £5 million to build a comprehensive online student learning environment for the 21st century.

The development, which will first appear in May of 2006, and be fully operational for February 2007 courses, will see the largest use of Moodle in the world. Moodle is a free, Open Source software package course management system used by educators to create effective online learning communities.

http://www.open.ac.uk/pdg/lto/
http://moodle.org/