Web Watch

Mental Floss’ tag line is “Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix.”

The website an offers a mix of:

Techy: Revenge of the Nerds: Low-Tech Crooks vs. High-Tech Gadgets

Funny: 8 Odd and Awesome Musical Instruments

Newsy: Tonight on NOVA: “Japan’s Killer Quake”

So, if your mind is going to wander……

Web Bits

Google's Gadfly: “Uncomfortably familial.” That is how Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, describes the relationship between higher education and Google — a company that has, in a little more than a decade, evolved from pet project of Stanford doctoral students to chief usher of the information age. Read more ...

When students' controversial words go viral, what is the university's role? The Web never stops and it never forgets. On a recent Friday night, a UCLA student posted a video on YouTube. The young woman made the video, in which she complained about and mocked Asian students at UCLA, the day after the Japan earthquake. She took down the clip within hours of posting it. She was too late. By then it was being reposted and remixed, taking on a life of its own. Read more ...

'Academic Freedom' Offers Little Protection Against New Efforts to Obtain Professors' E-Mails: Recent efforts by conservative-leaning groups to obtain the e-mails of Michigan and Wisconsin public-university professors have shed light on this much: Citing a need to protect "academic freedom" is, in itself, unlikely to help the universities avoid complying with requests for e-mails under state open-records laws. Read more ...

A Call to Shun: Let's say there is a scholar in your field who is known to harass women. Maybe you witnessed an incident. Maybe you heard from friends who were his victims. Maybe you heard from friends of friends. …That is the question being debated this week by philosophers as a series of blogs and websites have responded to an online project in which women in philosophy have shared stories of the bias and harassment they have experienced. The stories are anonymous, but the philosophers who have taken up the cause say that the accounts ring true, and that they personally know of many similar cases. Read more ...