Getting GENI out of the bottle
The National Science Foundation is underwriting a $300 million project to study ways to revamp the Internet, which is coming up on its 30th birthday. The project is called GENI—or the Global Environment for Network Innovations (www.geni.net). GENI is a research community that brings together the best and the brightest minds from the worlds of communications and networking, distributed systems, and cybersecurity. Together they can create solutions to some of the problems the Internet is facing and try out their ideas in a no-risk environment.

Serious games
Computer games are finding a place way beyond the entertainment niche. According to a USA Today story, the U.S. Army kicked things off with the release of “America’s Army” (www.americasarmy.com) in 2002. Then, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars created the “Serious Games Initiative” (www.seriousgames.org/index2.html) to encourage the development of games that address policy and management issues. Since then, the concept of merging video games with educational software for other-than-playful purposes has caught on like wildfire, with applications in the education, health, military and training worlds. Universities are awarding college students credit for game design. The Liemandt Foundation sponsors the Hidden Agenda Game Contest, where college students compete for $25,000 by creating educational games for the middle school set. And if you want to get scholarly about it, Michigan State University just started offering a master’s program in gaming (see www.seriousgames.msu.edu/).

Cheating the market
Blackboard announced this summer that it is offering a free plagiarism detection program to the 2,200 institutions that subscribe to Blackboard’s course management software—an offer similar to Windows providing Internet Explorer free of charge. The program is called SafeAssign and promises to give the leading plagiarism detection program, Turnitin.com, a run for its money. Besides being free to Blackboard users, SafeAssign addresses a problem critics of Turnitin have been complaining about: copyright infringement. It does not enter any papers into its database without permission of the student authors (which it secures by asking the students at the time they submit a paper to their teachers through Blackboard). Turnitin touts a much larger database—49 million student papers from 9,000 academic institutions in more than 80 countries, according to a July 10 story in Inside Higher Ed. Turnitin’s Web site says that 29 percent of students’ submitted papers show significant plagiarism (70 percent show none), but that number goes down when faculty use the program.