College Clips
Published Nov. 27, 2007
University of Connecticut shakes it up
with co-ed experiment
Living on-campus at the University of Connecticut has always meant same-sex housing, but a pilot program introduced this year is allowing some students to live with roommates of the opposite sex.
The pilot program for gender-neutral housing consists of six students who live in a co-ed suite. The suite consists of two rooms connected by a bathroom with three women living in one room and two men and one woman occupying the other.
"One of our goals for the 2007-2008 academic year was to try to develop gender-neutral housing to meet a variety of needs," said Maureen Armstrong, coordinator of housing assignments for Residential Life.
Gender-neutral housing aims to give students an opportunity to live in the situation that is most comfortable for them without having to explain why.
In the future, Residential Life hopes to expand gender-neutral housing to include more than one suite, Armstrong said.
— The Daily Campus (University of Connecticut)
University of Minnesota researchers
work to turn algae into fuel
The University of Minnesota and the Metropolitan Council recently partnered to explore whether the large amounts of algae that come through the council's wastewater treatment plants could one day be used as a fuel source for metro buses.
Dick Hemmingsen, director of the University's Initiative for Renewable Energy and the Environment, said many concepts surfaced while the two parties were in informal talks, but the algae project was one that stood out.
In addition to potentially creating a new source of bio-oils, the process of growing algae in treated effluent could help lower carbon dioxide emissions from the wastewater treatment process, which would be an important step to help control greenhouse gases.
— The Minnesota Daily (University of Minnesota)
New search engine exists for scientific papers
In the world of online scientific research, Web giants Google and Wikipedia might not be ideal places to begin, said Helen Josephine, head librarian of the Stanford University Engineering Library.
Josephine is trying to spread the word about Scitopia.org, a new search engine that gathers its information from more than three million scholarly and government documents.
Despite Scitopia's utility, outside reviews of the site did turn up some shortcomings.
"The lack of further advanced search options, assumedly stemming from the complexities of federated searching, weakens my satisfaction with the search interface," Yale University librarian Joseph Murphy wrote in a review in The Charleston Advisor.
But overall, Murphy said he remained optimistic.
"Despite the weaknesses mentioned in this (review), it is a tool many institutions will find useful if they do not desire comprehensive searching of the literature," he said. "The responsiveness of Scitopia's creators gives reason to believe that it will continue to be improved."
— The Stanford Daily (Stanford University)
