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The article presents information according to which Ed Brent, a professor of sociology at the University of Missouri in Columbia has developed a computer program that not only grades his students' essays but also gives feedback on how they can improve their work. The program simply runs through the students' papers to see if those elements are thoroughly presented, analyzing the semantics and assessing the writer's understanding of the topic. If a student leaves something out or gets something wrong, the program will flag those mistakes, to help the student improve the next draft.

The article reports that three graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attracted a flurry of attention in April after an academic conference accepted their randomly generated, nonsensical paper. Now the students are stars of a lighthearted video they made when they went to the conference even though their invitations had been withdrawn. The three, Jeremy A. Stribling, Maxwell Krohn, and Daniel Aguayo, are computer-science students studying parallel and distributed operating systems. The students were nevertheless able to raise enough money online to travel to the meeting, held in July at an Orlando hotel.

The article discusses the use of the Internet by college students for academic purposes. While almost all college students use the Internet on a regular basis, very few distinguish between peer-reviewed, scholarly sources, and any random Internet page. This can cause problems when students use improper sources for their academic research, which has a side effect of lowering the quality of papers as a whole. Accrediting agencies are now considering information-literacy programs as measures of an institution's performance to encourage education in the use of academic resources.

The article presents the discussion on tenuring-track job in computer science being more interested in teaching than in research including annual contracts for teaching classes as a lecturer.

The article reports that Mozilla, maker of the popular Firefox Web browser, released Firefox Campus Edition for free download in September 2007. A key feature of the new browser is the Zotero citation system developed by George Mason University's Center for History and New Media. The system is designed to help students and scholars mark and manage information on the Web that they want to cite in research papers. It also includes a plug-in that allows users to listen to music and manage playlists.

The article reports on the use of social networking technology to help foreign scholars in oppressive governments bypass federal Web filters. Software like Psiphon and Tor allows Internet users from countries like China to reroute their Internet traffic through foreign connections and gain access to blocked content. The software can also be used in more liberal countries, like the United States, where some colleges and businesses block Internet access to prevent users from accessing illegal or inappropriate content.

Profiles computer scientist Ken Goldberg of the University of California at Berkeley. His development of projects involving both computer science and art; Creation of online artwork, including a virtual garden that users tend with a robotic arm; Development of `Ouija 2000,' an online Ouija board that allows users to act simultaneously; Goldberg's career background.

The article discusses Captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), which are traditionally used to protect Web sites from malevolent programs. The technique, which requires users to translate garbled text to prove that they are humans, is now being used to help preserve the texts of thousands of important books. Luis von Ahn, the scientist who invented Captchas, is taking book words that are hard to capture through scanning and allowing random Internet users to translate the text.

The article profiles Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government who believes that computers should be trained to forget things in the same way as the human brain. The eternal memory of computers is profoundly influencing how people view the world and behave in it, and could lead people to speak less freely and openly in the future. Mayer-Schoenberger suggests that laws should require software to forget information after some period unless specifically requested by users.

The article reports that programs and clubs for women in computer science have recently cropped up at colleges across the U.S. These initiatives have been taken by Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, to provide social support for women in the discipline. A report from the National Center for Education Statistics shows that the proportion of women in computer and information sciences has dwindled in the past 20 years, especially compared with other fields in mathematics and sciences.

The article presents several deadlines related to higher education. The abstracts of papers for possible presentations at the conference on International Congress for Individualized Instruction will end on Sept 20, 1977. The deadline of grants for handicapped will be on October 14, 1977. The deadline for computer science program proposals will be on November 1, 1977.

Recounts the efforts of Northwestern University students and professors to trace the development of Chicago, Illinois through the use of urban history and computer science. Specific goal of the project; Use of the book "Plan of Chicago" to track Chicago's development; Approaches used in the research; Outcome of the research project; Academic achievements of the research.

Profiles professor of computer-science at University of California at Los Angeles, Leonard Kleinrock. Love for teaching and inventing, especially anything having to do with the Internet; Reasons he loves being a professor; First to describe queuing principles used in designing every type of computer network.

Reports on the computer forensics courses offered at U.S. universities and colleges as of April 2004. Impact of legal issues on the courses; Overview of the course offered at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Presents information on a course in computer programming and ethics for students who are not majoring in computer science offered by professor Richard Weiss at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Aim of the course; Comments from professor Weiss; Book that must be read for students of the course; View of students on the course.

Introduces the pocket-sized World-Wide Web server, created by computer science professor Vaughan Pratt of Stanford University. Embedded systems versus general-purpose computers; The single circuit board.