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It’s noon and you’ve still got 1,000 words to type. That might not seem like much, but it’s been months since you’ve last worked on your dissertation and distractions are plentiful. To make matters worse, your girlfriend, Violet, says she’s out the door and flying back to Australia if you don’t finish the paper by the end of the day.

What’s your next move?

This is the premise for Violet, a text-based computer game where a graduate student is the main character. As the student, you must fight through countless distractions and solve a number of puzzles to finish the paper in time to save your relationship. The game is told through Violet, who allows you to examine objects in your office and ask for hints.

Created by Jeremy Freese, a sociologist at Northwestern University, Violet recently won the fourteenth annual Interactive Fiction Competition.

This reporter, who Violet nicknamed her vegemite, her muttonplum and her mintchip, could not get past Chapter 3. The noisy neighbor, Julia, and my character’s exhaustion prevented me from getting any work done. Which is too bad, I guess, because I’ll never know what surprise Violet said she had in store for her “randy little wildebeest” if he finished his paper in time. —David DeBolt

Colleges have taken different approaches to the recording industry’s anti-piracy campaign: quickly erasing network-access logs, not forwarding settlement letters to students, fighting subpoenas. Or, to try to deter students from illegal file sharing: limiting their bandwidth, barring peer-to-peer programs from campus networks, stepping up education programs, promoting legal options like Napster or Ruckus, seeking out pirates and blocking their Internet connections.

But students still pay to settle would-be lawsuits by the Recording Industry Association of America, and that financial hit may mean they have to drop out of college, said Jodi Thesing-Ritter, associate dean of student development at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.

Ms. Thesing-Ritter mentioned dropouts in a recent article in The Spectator, Eau Claire’s campus newspaper.

Twenty-six students there got subpoenas from the RIAA in the spring of 2007, Ms. Thesing-Ritter told The Chronicle, and two “did not return to school because of their fees.” Each student had to pay at least $3,000, she said.

The file-sharing blog at ZeroPaid.com had something to say about that. Ms. Thesing-Ritter’s revelation “confirms our worst fears about the RIAA’s college campus piracy crackdown,” it says. “How many student dropouts are we willing to tolerate? Surely this toll on society is much greater than the sharing of a few albums.” —Sara Lipka

Henry Jenkins III, co-director of the comparative-media-studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has turned himself into something of an online celebrity by studying online celebrities, and now he’s headed to Hollywood. Today Mr. Jenkins announced on his popular blog that he plans to leave MIT after this academic year to take a position at the University of Southern California.

Mr. Jenkins was one of the first scholars to write about Star Trek fans and about video games, and his work on the intersection of old and new pop-culture media has lead some to call him the the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century. Mr. Jenkins has spent his whole career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he has helped build a number of unique programs there, including the Center for Future Civic Media, the Convergence Culture Consortium, a video-game lab in Singapore that is co-sponsored by MIT, and Project New Media Literacies.

It’s not clear what will become of all of those efforts, though in his blog post Mr. Jenkins says that “some of them will gradually move towards the west coast with me while others are deeply rooted at MIT and will continue to operate under different leadership.”

Mr. Jenkins says that he is leaving in part out of exhaustion — he had been running all of those programs with the help of only two full-time faculty members (along with the help of students). “I’m often asked how I manage to do everything I do and now you know the sad answer: I can’t — at least not year after year,” he wrote on the blog. “Even Green Lantern needs to recharge his ring now and again.”

He also said that the University of Southern California had “offered me a truly interdisciplinary position, one which straddles the Communications and Cinema Schools and which is designed to encourage collaboration and conversation between their diverse faculty.”

I spent a day with Mr. Jenkins last year while researching a Chronicle profile of him (and I accidentally broke his collectible wax cylinder). I was struck by the juggling act he was doing — and his tireless commitment to the programs and his students. He seemed like the busiest person on campus, but he also seemed to love all the facets of his job. It will be interesting to see whether he actually slows down in his new position or if he simply uses new resources to further extend his personal academic brand. —Jeffrey R. Young

What’s the best argument against those who say video games are destroying society? That’s the first discussion topic fielded by a new online center about the intersection of video games and “human values.”

The center is led by Roger Travis, an associate professor of modern and classical languages at the University of Connecticut. He kicks off the discussion with his own take, which basically defends the cultural value of digital amusements:

“The best argument (in my classicist’s opinion) is that if the Iliad and the Odyssey didn’t destroy society, but instead made Western Civilization great, video games are quite possibly doing the same thing right now,” he writes. “Even if Plato thought Homer should be thrown out of the ideal state, it’s turned out, 2500 years later, that we can have our Plato, and our Homer too, and still do some pretty cool stuff, culture-wise.”

Michael Abbott, an associate professor of theater at Wabash College who is also working with the new online center, describes the project as an “online nexus for courses and scholarship to advance our understanding of how video games and their culture can constructively shape our values and enrich society.” —Jeffrey R. Young

A hacked server at the University of Florida’s College of Dentistry has exposed data on more than 330,000 current and former patients there. They were informed of the breach last week.

The data included Social Security numbers and dental procedure information for patients dating back to 1990. “There is no evidence that the intruder viewed or downloaded any of this information,” according to the university’s statement about the incident. “However, it is a possibility the data was obtained.”

No credit card or banking information was divulged, according to the university. The F.B.I. and campus police department are investigating when the hacker gained access to the server and how.

This is one of seven incidents reported at a college or university this month, according to Educational Security Incidents, which has been tracking security problems in higher education since 2006. The number of incidents this fall has not been particularly unusual – especially compared to the high point of January 2008, when 23 reports were added to the list. But most problems involve data on hundreds or thousands of people, not hundreds of thousands as is the case with this breach.

Charles E. Frazier, the university’s interim chief information officer, said in the statement that the breach is another example of the “never-ending ‘cat and mouse’ battle” that hackers are waging with institutions.

The University of Florida has an extensive privacy Web site for information about reporting incidents and filing complaints, and the institution also has a chief privacy officer – a rarity in higher education, as noted in this week’s Chronicle.

Still, “sometimes the mouse wins,” Mr. Frazier said. — Lisa Guernsey

Stir-crazy doctoral students who want diversions from their dissertations have a new option: “Dance Your Ph.D.”

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is sponsoring the project, a contest inspired by a wildly successful one last year at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, in Vienna.

“The human body is an excellent medium for communicating science — perhaps not as data-rich as a peer-reviewed article, but far more exciting,” says the contest’s Web site. This year’s “Dance Your Ph.D.” is open to anyone with or in pursuit of a Ph.D. in science or related fields, according to the AAAS.

All contestants must upload to YouTube a video of a dance performance depicting their research. So far, there’s some stellar lindy hop and elegant ballet. In one video, a woman in fringed bell-bottoms hula-hoops with fire to Dead or Alive’s “You Spin Me Round.” It’s a fresh take on “Hydrodynamic Trail Detection in Marine Organisms,” Christin Murphy’s dissertation at the University of South Florida.

Lara Park, of Tufts University, was delighted to choreograph her research on “the role of folate in epigenetic regulation of colon carcinogenesis.” Once she heard about the contest, Ms. Park, a lifelong dancer and nutritional biochemist, says she “didn’t stop thinking about it.”

In her number, dancers representing DNA unwind their bodies to be transcribed. But alas, a diet deficient in folate — a vitamin found in leafy greens — inhibits that process, as dancers hold tight back bends over those in the role of DNA. In the end, the chaotic crowd congeals into a large tumor.

Ms. Park, who made the video in two hours, says dance can “improve how people understand some of these concepts.” The idea is similar to the choreographer Liz Lerman’s “nonfiction dancing” and the explanation of research at the Large Hadron Collider, set to a rap beat, that was posted last summer on YouTube.

Today a panel of judges will name four winners of “Dance Your Ph.D.” Each will have the chance to work with professional dancers to present an original work at the AAAS’s annual meeting, in February. —Sara Lipka

A report of what sounded like gunshots prompted Virginia Tech to use its text-message emergency-alert system on Thursday for the first time, but the system failed to deliver all of the messages.

The sounds turned out to have come from cartridges from a nail gun, which campus police suspect someone exploded manually by slamming a dumpster lid on them. Echoes of the explosions were amplified because the incident occurred between two high-rise dormitories. But until officials determined the cause, the university police secured the entrances of the buildings and searched them extensively, even using a dog trained to sniff out explosives.

While that investigation was under way, the university used a multipronged emergency-alert system that it set up in the aftermath of a massacre on the campus in April 2007, when a gunman killed 32 people and then himself.

Officials say that most of the new alert systems worked well. Messages were successfully sent to students, professors, and staff members via university e-mail, on LED display boards in some classrooms, and on university Web sites. But a system designed to send messages to cellphones and other mobile devices, which relies on a product from a company called 3n, failed to deliver to all of the people who had signed up for it, according to university officials.

The 3n system, which is known on the campus as VT Alerts, is designed to send warnings by text message, by voice message, or to non-university e-mail accounts, depending on which method users have chosen. More than 30,000 people affiliated with Virginia Tech have signed up for VT Alerts.

“The system froze up,” Larry Hincker, associate vice president for university relations at Virginia Tech, said in an interview today. “We’re very disappointed, and I am not happy in the slightest at this level of service.”

At about 1:40 p.m. on Thursday, Virginia Tech sent the following message via all of its alert systems:

“Police are investigating reported sounds of gunshots in Pritchard Hall. Building is secured. No access in or out. Police searching room by room. Virginia Tech PD and BlacsburgPD are investigating reported sounds of gunshots in Pritchard Hall. Building is secured. No access in or out. Police searching room by room. Two people reported hearing sounds like gunfire at about 1 pm.”

But as the system was sending out the text messages, the status display on a Web page the university uses to monitor the VT Alerts system stopped working. “Their system hung up — it crashed,” said Mr. Hincker.

The university sent two other messages with updates on the incident later in the afternoon, but the VT Alerts system failed to deliver any of those messages, said Mr. Hincker.

The alert company, 3n, said in a statement that a problem with its Oracle database “initially slowed down the system’s performance,” but that the system was fully restored by 4:25 p.m.

“Fine, thanks, but I was all through by then,” said Mr. Hincker, when hearing the 3n statement. “By then our event was over.” —Jeffrey R. Young

The Times Record News reports that a software glitch led Midwestern State University to give out too much money to students during course registration. The university is asking for its money back.

To make things worse, the students most affected by the glitch were “three-peats,” or students who were taking a course again because they had already failed it twice. (Ah, just when you thought things were going your way. …) The paper reports that glitch affected 183 students at about $300 apiece. The students were refunded money from a credit balance they had after they paid their fees, but the charge for repeating a course a third time wasn’t included. Some students were able to register for courses at $50 a credit instead of $150.

The university says that it will let the students pay back the money over time, but they will have to pay it back. The story says that the program occurred in a program called Banner, by Sungard Higher Education. —Scott Carlson

With the latest episode of Tech Therapy, Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast had to revisit the topic of sex, secrets, and technology because so many controversies and scandals had occurred since the episode about privacy, “The Trouble With Online Sex,” ran months ago.

There was the Sarah Palin e-mail break-in, allegedly perpetrated by a college student. There was the porn scandal at New Mexico State University. There were the gay porn pictures featuring Nebraska wrestlers. There was a community-college president, a woman in a bikini, a mini-keg of Coors Light — and a digital camera.

Repeat after the Tech Therapists: “Your technology is not your technology.” People can break in to your e-mail account, steal your private information, and watch your surfing habits. No matter how lonely you might feel surfing the Web, you might not be as alone as you think you are.

Snow World, a virtual-reality game that has been helping victims of fires cope with painful physical therapy for nearly a decade, is now part of a military study to examine whether or not virtual reality could provide relief for soldiers burned in combat.

The United States Army Institute of Surgical Research is seeking participants to join a study that is being conducted at Fort Sam in Houston, according to ScienCentral.

The project is a collaboration between Christopher Maani, chief of anesthesia at the USAISR, and Hunter Hoffman, one of the creators of Snow World and the director of the University of Washington’s Virtual Reality Analgesia Research Center. Mr. Hoffman developed the icy 3-D world with David Patterson, chief of rehabilitation medicine at the university’s Harborview Burn Center.

While inside Snow World, patients can fly about tossing snowballs at penguins and snowmen, helping to distract them from painful wound care and physical therapy, the creators say. “Snow is the opposite of fire,” Mr. Hoffman told ScienCentral, and it distracts them “from remembering their original injury.”

Last summer Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Maani were on a team that published a paper focusing on the effects that virtual reality had on two combat burn victims undergoing rehabilitation. The soldiers found the game fun and reported reduced pain, the researchers told ScienCentral.

The new study is projected to be completed in October 2009.

Below is a video from ScienCentral on how Snow World has helped Sam Brown, a soldier who suffered burns during combat in Afghanistan on September 4. —David DeBolt

When Karen McDowell dressed up in a purple fish costume and walked around the University of Virginia’s campus last month, she got plenty of attention for her cause, even though she had to explain the meaning of her outfit. Ms. McDowell is a security analyst for the university, and her goal was to raise awareness about e-mail phishing schemes, in which con artists send e-mail messages hoping to lure people into giving out their passwords or other personal information.

“Sometimes I introduced myself as a fraudulent e-mail because many people don’t know what a phish is,” said Ms. McDowell (pictured in costume, at right).

In fact, pulling off her plan of dressing up as a “phish” for Cybersecurity Awareness Month was more difficult than she had expected. She could not find a fish costume online, for instance, so she commissioned a local seamstress to make one by hand (setting the university back about $60).

On several days in October, Ms. McDowell visited busy parts of the University of Virginia’s campus and handed out fliers about how to recognize scam e-mails.

Why the costume? “Phsihing is not a humorous subject, but there’s some humor to someone dressed as a purple fish, and it lightens the mood,” she said. In the past, university officials — without flashy costumes — had set up tables around campus to spread the word about phishing, and students rarely showed any interest. But Ms. McDowell said she was approached by curious students who asked her what she was up to, and most would listen to her spiel.

“I wanted to appeal to their imaginations — like, a fraudulent e-mail could come to your computer looking like me, and you don’t want that,” she quipped. “So hopefully when they get e-mails, they’ll think, Oh what was that lady in the fish talking about?”

She said college students are particularly susceptible to computer phishing scams because they are generally more trusting than older users. “Students don’t think they’re going to hit by a virus or trojan,” she said. “They think they’re invincible.”

The costumed campaign was just one aspect of the university’s outreach efforts concerning computer security. It also formed a partnership with local schools and organizations to create an information Web site with a series of short online brochures and daily cybersecurity tips. —Jeffrey R. Young

When the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced this week that it would ramp up its grant-making to increase college graduation rates, community-college officials applauded the news. An infusion of new money? Hallelujah.

Campus-technology experts may have even more reason to get excited. That’s because innovative uses of technology will be one of the focuses of the grant-making, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy,

The foundation says it will look for new technology products that produce large improvements in learning and completion rates. It is also seeking to finance “student-centric” learning platforms.

The foundation’s goal is to double the number of low-income people earning post-secondary degrees. Community colleges are a target of its efforts, part of a larger plan to spend $3-billion on education over the next five years.

Rio Salado College, in Arizona, was singled out by the foundation this week during a presentation about its new strategy. The college has a comprehensive online course catalog as well as online English-as-a-second-language classes that cost $71 per credit for in-state students and start every Monday. —Lisa Guernsey

Universities in Japan and Canada unveiled courses by cellphone last year, and now, in the midst of National Distance Learning Week, the United States has too.

The Louisiana Community and Technical College System yesterday announced the creation of LCTCSOnline, a new program built in collaboration with AT&T and Pearson Custom Solutions, a branch of the publishing and education company.

Beginning in January, students can register on a single Web site for online courses offered — at $63 per credit hour — by any community college in Louisiana. And they’ll be able to complete their coursework on desktops, laptops, or mobile phones.

“The top barriers for students in obtaining their degrees are geographic access, cost of higher education, and scheduling conflicts,” said Joe D. May, the college system’s president, in a written statement. “We’re excited to be able to bring a greater level of access to potential students.”

Louisiana ranks last among the 50 states in adults with an associates’ degrees, according to the college system, which hopes to solve workforce shortages by enrolling nearly three times as many students as it does now.

“This initiative embodies the type of thinking we need,” Sally Clausen, Louisiana’s commissioner of higher education, said in a written statement.

A $500,000 grant from the Louisiana Board of Regents financed the program, which the college system developed in nine months with AT&T and Pearson, The Town Talk, a local newspaper, reported. —Sara Lipka

Online enrollment at universities nationwide increased more than 12 percent in 2007 over the previous year, and the majority of college officials agree that competition for online students is increasing, according to the 2008 Sloan Survey of Online Learning.

According to the report, which included responses from more than 2,500 colleges, approximately 3.94-million students, a little more than 20 percent of the total student population in higher education, enrolled in at least one online course in the fall of 2007. Nearly 70 percent of the institutions surveyed acknowledged that they are competing for online students.

The worsening economy was one reason given for the increase in online enrollment.

“In these tough economic times, with unemployment up and higher costs for heating and transportation, we will inevitably see the appeal of online education grow,” Frank Mayadas, program director for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, said in a news release.

The survey was conducted by the Babson Survey Research Group, the College Board, and the Sloan Consortium.—David DeBolt

Yesterday Google unveiled three new services — two that may make campus-network administrators groan and one that could prove to be a boon to researchers in a number of disciplines.

The search giant’s voice- and video-chat offerings could encourage more campus-network users to switch from low-bandwidth communication technologies — instant messaging, e-mail, social networks — to chat applications that consume considerably more network resources. Voice and video chatting have been available for some time, of course, through Skype, Apple’s iChat, and other applications. But Google’s search and e-mail functions are widely used, and the software is easy to install and use, so more people may be drawn in.

That’s the bad news, at least as far as overtaxed campus networks are concerned. The good news is a new flu-tracking service called Google Flu Trends, which the company says “may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.” The tracking service compiles a daily tally of flu-related search queries, which comparisons have shown to correlate closely with actual flu trends reported by the federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The big advantage of the Google offering is that the information is available almost instantly, while the CDC’s reporting system lags a week or two behind the sore throats and stuffy noses.

The search company has offered a tool called Google Trends for some time now, and some researchers have used it to track other trends. But the flu-tracking service would seem to offer proof that measuring search activity can be an important, real-time tool for scholars. Are you using it? What for? Do you see possibilities for trend searches with potential benefits that could match those of Google Flu Trends?

Incidentally, today’s “Hot Trends” — searches that are experiencing sudden spikes in popularity — include “ACT scores” and “Lebanon Valley,” the latter apparently because of an increase in searches related to Lebanon Valley College. —Lawrence Biemiller

To comply with the newly reauthorized Higher Education Act, colleges have to verify the identity of each of their online students. Several tools can help them do that, including the Securexam Remote Proctor, which scans fingerprints and captures a 360-degree view around students, and Kryterion’s Webassessor, which lets human proctors watch students on Web cameras and listen to their keystrokes.

Now colleges have a new option to show the government that they’ll catch cheating in distance education. Acxiom Corporation and Moodlerooms announced this month that they have integrated the former’s identity-verification system, called FactCheck-X, into the latter’s free, open-source course-management system, known as Moodle.

“The need to know that the student taking a test online is in fact the actual one enrolled in the class continues to be a concern for all distance-education programs,” Martin Knott, chief executive of Moodlerooms, said in a written statement.

FactCheck-X, which authenticates many online-banking transactions, requires test takers to answer detailed, personal “challenge” questions. The information comes from a variety of databases, and the company uses it to ask for old addresses, for example, or previous employers.

The new tool requires no hardware and operates within the Moodle environment. Colleges themselves control how frequently students are asked to verify their identities, Acxiom says, and because institutions don’t have to release information about students, the system fully complies with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. —Sara Lipka

A sophomore on the University of Texas football team was dismissed from the squad last week after posting a racially charged comment about President-elect Barack Obama on his Facebook page, The Houston Chronicle reports.

Buck Burnette, a center for the Longhorns, posted the comment on Election Night and was released from the team on November 5. Mr. Burnette said the comment was sent to him from a friend via text message and that he made a poor decision in posting the remark to his Web page.

It appeared under the “update status” on his Facebook page and read, “All the hunters gather up, we have a [racial slur] in the White House,” referring to Mr. Obama, the nation’s first black president. Mr. Burnette has since apologized and, in a written statement, called his action a “terrible decision.”

Longhorn coach Mack Brown said he had warned his players about the dangers of posting personal information on the Internet and called Facebook and other social networking websites “really dangerous.”

During a Big 12 coaches’ conference call Monday, a survey found many other coaches share Mr. Brown’s concerns. Some universities go as far as to monitor their athletes’ pages, the newspaper reported. At the University of Oklahoma, for instance, the college’s compliance office routinely checks their athlete’s personal profiles.—David DeBolt

Large-scale attacks on computer networks are growing significantly, according to Arbor Networks’ Fourth Annual Worldwide Infrastructure Security Report, released this morning. At the same time, the types of attacks are becoming more diverse and more sophisticated, the report says.

The report, which can be downloaded free from the company’s Web site, is based on a survey of network operators that included a number of academic organizations. Almost a third of those surveyed said that fighting spam consumes the most resources, followed by preventing threats from “constant background activity” (such as worms and scans) and avoiding distributed denial-of-service attacks. Looking ahead to the next 12 months, the network operators said they were most worried about attacks from bots and botnets and from DNS-cache poisoning.

The increasing scale of distributed denial-of-service attacks is particularly noteworthy, the report says. “From relatively humble megabit beginnings in 2000, the largest DDoS attacks have now grown a hundredfold to break the 40-gigabit barrier this year,” the report says. “The growth in attack size continues to significantly outpace the corresponding increase in underlying transmission speed and ISP-infrastructure investment.”

Five percent of network operaters surveyed said they had experienced attacks over 10 gigabits per second, and 30 percent said they had suffered attacks in the 1-to-4-gigabit-per-second range. —Lawrence Biemiller

Ecology and evolutionary biology can lead graduate students to far-off places: Alaska, Mexico, northern Michigan. But qualifying exams — the dreaded “prelims” — happen just the same.

To prepare, seven doctoral students at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor held weekly study sessions on Skype, the Internet calling service.

“Without this technology, we could not have bridged the geographical gaps,” Liz Wason, a student who spent the summer at the university’s biological station in Pellston, Mich., said in a written statement. She called Skype “an exciting, real-time way of staying connected and preparing for this important step in our graduate careers.” —Sara Lipka

Thousands of teaching assistants, contract faculty members, and graduate assistants at York University, in Toronto, have gone on strike, bringing classes and other campus activities to a halt. Now students — some of whom worry that the school year will eventually be extended into the summer term — are taking to Facebook to complain.

The York University Anti-Strike group, which now boasts just over 800 members, is circulating a position statement urging that the labor dispute be resolved through binding arbitration. And the group’s message board — where people who support the strike have sparred with group members — has actually hosted some interesting debate. For every sophomoric comment (“hey everyone! im a striker… and im LAMEEEEEEE!!!”), there’s one focusing on how the strike is affecting local businesses, say, or on international students concerned about visa restrictions and travel plans. —Brock Read