Berkeley laptop thief is scared out of his wits by professor

Boing Boing: Berkeley laptop thief is scared out of his wits by professor, or as the fark headline ran: "[Video] Bad: Stealing your professor's laptop to get exam data. Worse: Being hunted down by the FBI and U.S. Marshals because your professor had "Top Secret Trial and Industrial Information" on it from his consulting career."

Average starting salaries for college grads

Average starting salaries for college grads are up from last year.

SciGen - An Automated Paper Generator

Some smarties at MIT wrote a random Computer Science paper generator called SCIgen... and they had a paper accepted to a conference. They are now taking donations so that they can attend the conference and deliver a randomly-generated talk at the conference.

I just adore geek pranks. I donated $5.

media winners and losers

Here is an excerpt from a post over at The Long Tail about winners and losers in media:

Flat to Down to Way Down:

• Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999


• Television: network TV's audience share has fallen by a third since 1985


• Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low


• Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating


• Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!)


• Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole

Up:

• Movies: 2004 was another record year, both for theaters and DVDs


• Videogames: even in the last year of this generation of consoles, sales hit a new record


• Web: online ads will grow 30% this year, breaking $10 billion (5.4% of all advertising)
  

The Long Tail is a great blog by the way. They have all sorts of things related to "The Long Tail", a concept I've worked on a bit (especially last summer w.r.t open source). His main interest centers around the way technology is changing business so that niche markets are viable.

Don't let this happen to you..

Wisconsin State Journal has an article about this guy Johnny Lechner who is a 12th year senior:

"I could have - should have - graduated many years ago, but I keep passing on the real world's invitation," said Lechner, 28, who is in his 11th year as a student in the University of Wisconsin System, the last 10 at UW-Whitewater. He's taken a full course load every semester except the current one, in which he's taking seven credits."

Wired: Second Life & Elon

Wired News: Second Life Teaches Life Lessons has a brief mention of Elon using Second Life:

"Werbach [Wharton School] isn't the only business school professor employing Second Life. Elon University in North Carolina also plans to take students into the game as a way of building and testing entrepreneurial skills. This comes on the heels of Linden Lab's efforts to make the game attractive to all kinds of schools as a learning environment."

I have to assume this is in reference to my Winter Term course, but it might also be in reference to some of the fallout (unintentionally negative! whoops) great results from the seminars I've had around campus trying to evangelize about what a great teaching tool this game/simulation/virtual world is. Anyway, how cool is that - Elon mentioned in the same sentence as The Wharton School...