Facebook took down the profile in April but has declined to name its creators. Impersonating someone or using a false name is banned in Facebook’s terms of use.

This is not the first Facebook impersonation case, and some have noticed a rise in the number of Facebook users who are using aliases—either original or borrowed—on their profiles. Know of any cases of hijacked profiles on your campus? —Catherine Rampell

Power Save analyzes CPU, disk, keyboard, mouse, and application activity, and then allows an IT administrator in a central location to turn off or put to sleep computers that have been sitting idle.

The product is being released later this month, according to a company spokesman.—Catherine Rampell

In a phone conversation Thursday, Mr. Blumenthal said SunGard has agreed to pay for two years of credit monitoring and $25,000 in identity-theft insurance for each of the affected students in Connecticut. However, SunGard has declined to pay for students to freeze and unfreeze their credit reports, as the attorney general requested. He said officials from his office will be meeting with those from SunGard to discuss the issue.

Meanwhile, The Chronicle has learned that two more campuses have been affected by the security lapse. About 150 students at Yeshiva University in New York City have been notified that their information was on the laptop, as have 5,400 students at Argosy University. —Andrea L. Foster

As a free article in The Chronicle today notes, college technology officials meeting at a policy conference this week described a move in several state legislatures to pass laws that would force colleges to police their networks for illegal trading of music and video files and to buy software to stem the problem. Officials said the laws were backed by the Recording Industry Association of America and other entertainment-industry groups. But a spokeswoman for the RIAA would neither confirm nor deny that the group is singling out state legislatures.

One of the laws, which was recently enacted in Tennessee, requires colleges that have received 50 or more infringement notices in the past year to “reasonably attempt” to prevent infringement over their networks.

Just as these new measures that use the number of notifications as a trigger are beginning to appear, the RIAA and other groups have suddenly increased the number of notification letters they’re sending to colleges.

In an interview with The Chronicle this week, Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, insisted there is no connection between the recent spike in notification letters and the group’s lobbying efforts.

“There’s just no connection to anything that’s happening in Congress, in the courts, or anything else,” Mr. Sherman said. He added that the increase in notifications did not mean that there had been a sudden rise in campus piracy. “We’re constantly asking our vendor to improve performance,” of its software that scans for copyright violations online, Mr. Sherman said. “They just completed work on an upgrade and, poof, it just happened.”

Some college officials remain skeptical, and are redoubling their efforts to convince state and federal lawmakers not to back the proposed legislative measures. —Andrea L. Foster and Jeffrey R. Young

You can rub a balloon on a sweater to create static electricity or “learn about the conservation of energy with a skater dude,” among other experiments. —Catherine Rampell

“In my view the academy has been blazing the trail of adoption of virtual worlds far more than gamers or industry,” said Mr. Ondrejka, who spoke at a conference at Case Western Reserve University called Collaboration Technology and Engaging the Campus 2008.

Naturally, the event was broadcast within Second Life, in Case Western’s campus in the virtual world. I attended the conference virtually, and was able to ask Mr. Ondrejka what the biggest challenge for Second Life was in being able to be more than just a passing fad in higher education.

“The challenges with Second Life is it has significant technical challenges for use,” he said, noting that it takes powerful computers and fast network connections for Second Life to function properly. “You can’t assume that your students are going to be able to run Second Life within the school’s network infrastructure.”

He argued that some form of 3-D virtual environment will catch on, though he admitted that it might not be Second Life that wins the race. The reason that the idea is powerful, he said, is that studies show that humans respond to a visual Internet, and that they express greater trust for the people they communicate with when they see a virtual representation of the person. “Learning in a place in 3-D affects us differently than text,” he said.

Mr. Ondrejka said that when professors first build a virtual campus, they usually try to exactly replicate a classroom in Second Life, with desks, chairs, and walls. But then they realize that the world allows different kinds of movement and communication than the real world. “You realize that in a world where you can fly, classrooms aren’t really that useful,” he said. So professors have built new kinds of classrooms online with no roofs. “Suddenly you see this explosion of classroom forms that matches what they’re trying to teach,” he added.

Organizers of the conference set up a booth for The Chronicle in Case Western’s Second Life campus during the event (shown below), and I manned our table between panel sessions and chatted with a couple of conference participants.

At one point my virtual avatar got stuck between a virtual chair and the wall of the booth, however, and I had to reboot my computer to get that sorted out. Luckily that’s never happened to me in real life. —Jeffrey R. Young

Dr. Jerald J. Block, a psychiatrist and professor at Oregon Health & Science University, argued that the shooters in the Columbine High School massacre “spent a significant amount of time playing first-person-shooter computer games and creating game levels for others to use,” and that they became “unable to distinguish the boundaries between their virtual lives and their real lives, in effect mixing the two,” according to a news release. His research was published last year in an article for the American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry titled “Lessons From Columbine: Virtual and Real Rage.”

“[A]s they got into trouble with school authorities, limits were put on their use of the computer. This made them react with homicidal rage and suicidal depression,” Dr. Block told WebMD of the Columbine shooters.

Dr. Block has also studied student violence at Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University, and other institutions.

Other scholars have criticized connections between violence and computer or video game use and theories relating to “Internet addiction.”—Catherine Rampell

The top-10 issues “most important for… institutions to resolve for strategic success” are:

1) Security
2) Administrative/ERP Information Systems
3) Funding IT
4) Infrastructure
5) Identity/Access Management
6) Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity
7) Governance, Organization, and Leadership
8) Change Management
9) E-Learning/Distributed Teaching and Learning
10) Staffing/HR Management/Training

Since 2003, the top three issues issues have been, in various rankings, security, administrative/ERP information systems, and funding IT. This year was the first time that “change management” appeared in the top-10 list, however.

Click here to find resources relating to each of these issues and an additional breakdown of the survey results.—Catherine Rampell

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, said she would offer an amendment to remove the bill’s “dark archive” provision before the House Judiciary Committee votes on the issue. —Andrea L. Foster

Joshua E. Blumenstock at the University of California at Berkeley analyzed articles to see if he could predict whether an article was “featured” on Wikipedia’s homepage, which would indicate that it had received extra vetting from top editors to verify its exceptional quality. He looked at 100 variables that might correlate with whether an article ended up as a feature, including number of citations, readability metrics, one-syllable words, etc.

He found that using word count alone, he could predict with 97% accuracy whether an article was featured or not. Considering the full “kitchen sink” of all 100 variables only improved his accuracy slightly to 97.99%. The magic word-count cut-off seemed to be 1,830 words, above which articles were likely to be higher-quality, featured entries. Mr. Blumenstock speculated that the collaborative nature of Wikipedia may force longer articles to be higher quality.

Still, he wrote, “[f]eatured articles are meant to be ‘the best that Wikipedia has to offer’; these results indicate that they might merely be the longest Wikipedia has to offer,” he wrote. “The high degree to which word count can approximate Wikipedia’s elaborate peer-review process is somewhat unsettling.”—Catherine Rampell