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October 30, 2005

Buzzworthy for this week

BREAKING BUZZ: 19 people were arrested this weekend at a party that likely included Quinnipiac University students. The party, billed as a "get drunk and wear a costume" event, is forcing local officials and university administrators to sort things out. A story is scheduled to run in this week's Quinnipiac Chronicle; when that story goes live we'll link you to it from The Buzz as well.

COLD REACTION: Otherwise, it's been a quiet week around here, but many have reacted to the recent colder weather that has moved in. Most of the reaction has come from students who have earlier classes. One student from Southern I talked to thanked me for reminding her to bring her jacket and gloves home when she visited the family this weekend. The temperatures were scheduled to moderate a bit over the next few days, but you weather freaks can stay on top of the regional conditions through the Post's Weather page (link).

JAIL TIME: The men arrested in connection with the Mark Fisher case were sentenced on Oct. 19, bringing an end to the two year investigation that we recently reported about here in The Buzz and followed carefully by Fairfield University's paper, The Mirror (link). Antonio Russo, 19, and John Giuca, 22, were both given long-term sentences for their roles in the murder, receiving 25 years to life for his murder, as well as concurrent 25 year sentences for robbing Fisher. Guico was also given time for a weapons charge.

OUTSIDE THE AREA: The Mirror also offered an interesting guide to Stamford in Thursday's issue (link). The guide is the latest in a series that began running last year, and has also covered such areas as New Haven and South Norwalk. They're all great guides to making the most of the parts of Fairfield County many don't know about.

FLU NEWS: The Southern News did its usual excellent job bringing closer to home a national story, this time on the flu vaccine, both for this winter's season and the concerns for the bird flu (link). It goes over risk groups, whether we should be concerned right now about the bird flu that's all over the news right now, and what to do to protect yourself against the flu this year.

PHISHING HITS HOME: This week in the Buzz Box, I received a pair of E-mails purporting to be from People's warning me that my card information had been compromised and to log in to the site. While the URL in the E-mail, as written out, pointed to a log-in page on the site (one that still works, but has largely been replaced with their home page log-in), the link itself takes you to another Web site altogether, and if you log in, you're giving your information away to a less than reputable source. While I've seen these many times for PayPal, eBay, and national banks like Bank of America, this is the first time I've seen one targeted for People's users. As always, if you receive one of these E-mails, discard it - no bank will lose information like this and then ask you to use an online interface to fix it.

MYSPACE HELP: Are you a user of MySpace or Facebook? Or maybe you are shunning them for a particular reason? We here at The Buzz are working on an upcoming piece about them as they relate to privacy on the Internet. But we need your help. If you'd be willing to help us on this piece, please contact me at thebuzz@ctpost.com. As always, E-mail me if you know of anything buzzworthy going on as well - we look at all tips seriously.

Posted by Josh on 9:05 PM | Comments (51)

October 22, 2005

The week in Buzz.

TECH TALK: More and more, college students are adapting to the wireless world with laptops that can connect to the Internet in such places as Starbucks or, more recently, the food court in the local malls. But Sacred Heart University apparently has not kept up with the trend, as it was recently voted 11th in the most unwired schools category conducted by Intel (link). While the survey is likely just a nudge from Intel to get schools like SHU to buy more of their products, many students interviews by The Spectrum seem to like the idea of campus-wide access to the Internet. Other colleges in the area have been working on the idea over the years. Fairfield has had Wi-Fi access in the campus center for a couple of years now, while Quinnipiac has been tucking access points into ceiling tiles to offer more broad coverage in the dorms.

DOWN THE HATCH: Citing the lack of substance to the event (and the resulting abuse of substances as well), Fairfield has pulled the plug on the annual 200 Nights event (link). For those counting: Luau, Clam Jam, Keg Races, 200 Nights - all gone. Replacing those events? There's Spam Jam in the Spring, but while the school's citing its efforts to create events that aren't alcohol fueled, even Spam Jam allows controlled drinking up at the townhouses for upperclassmen. With any luck, some sort of new traditions will eventually get established, but right now, they're falling faster than they're being created.

PROTEST AT YALE: Some Yale students were protesting this week the request by the school for a third-year grad student to leave for speaking less than perfect English, according to the student in question (link). The protest was over what some felt was discrimination against Chinese people, with some there stating that the student was on a scholarship there, and the scholarship terms were not breached, according to the student, who was informed it was the length of time that teachers were taking to correct the papers submitted.

WEATHER WOES: The rains had a direct effect on a few Fairfield students, who found their house uninhabitable after waves weakened the structure, which was supported on stilts (link). There is still a chance for house reconstruction, as the owner is given a grace period, but for now, the students are finding themselves without one of the best perks of being a senior: their own place to live off-campus.

SHUTTLE SCUTTLEBUTT: It seems like Quinnipiac's shuttles are frustrating some students lately (link). This isn't a new complaint, for Quinnipiac or in general; since The Buzz started an occasional complaint about campus shuttles has been their bizarre scheduling, finding themselves one behind the other instead of spaced out, etc. One thing The Buzz is learned is it's not easy to schedule shuttles, and Quinnipiac's students were encouraged by shuttle operators to just use a little patience.

REACTION OVER NOISE: Last week's item on the noise levels and parties at Fairfield Beach brought a fairly quick reaction from the U (link). Fairfield's president, Fr. Jeffrey von Arx, responded at a press conference that many at the university think beach issues have continued to decline, based on a reduced number of letters received, the overall maintenance of a lower headcount at the beach, and students in general being more behaved. In the same press conference von Arx also noted the potential for a new dorm. A new dorm has been on the 10-year Master Plan of the school for years now, but it was the opinion of many for a time that it was unlikely to be built. However, the increased population at the school may necessitate another undergrad dorm.

What's the buzz on your campus? E-mail me at thebuzz@ctpost.com

NOTE: Since we're a bit behind schedule this week, EnterTech will show up on Sunday or Monday this week.

Posted by Josh on 4:26 PM | Comments (5)

October 15, 2005

This week's Buzz

WEATHER OR NOT: Well, the sun finally came out today, but it was a dreary school week for college-goers and "real world" workers alike. This was the biggest topic of conversation for many of those interviewed this week. Of course, thankfully it wasn't January, or it would be likely impossible to see over the banks of snow that would've resulted.

STORM CLOUDS BREWING?: One student I interviewed this week, when asked if she was staying dry, responded jokingly, "Well, I'm not drinking." But many are in Fairfield, say town residents, who are concerned with the noise level and rowdiness of students in the beach area of Fairfield this year (link). This has been a scuffle for years. In 2001 an injunction was passed down days before students had their annual Clam Jam event, banning gatherings of more than 200 students at the point. While some events, such as Keg Races, lingered a few years after that, no major beach parties, whether sanctioned or unsanctioned, have happened in recent memory. Town residents seemed comfortable with the calming of the town-gown conflict in recent years, but recently concern has risen over whether this year's group of beach residents, along with students who head down to the beach to see their friends, has gotten worse, and one resident reported that party nights seem to be expanding into every night of the week. Still, it's already October, and the beach tends to quiet down more once the temperatures start getting colder - more than one beach house was known to be less than comfortable when lows were hitting single digits last year.

USE YOUR HEAD(SET): Are local college-goers obeying the new headset law? Southern News did a little research, and it doesn't seem that way (link). However, many don't seem to think it'll help much. Students may want to consider the fact though that a $30 headset will help avoid a ticket of $100 or more, depending on driving conditions and whether it's a construction zone or not.

SEX!: Southern News also took a look at the continuing problem of STDs (link). College students are most at risk, as far as the rates of spreading are concerned, and much of that is attributed to unsafe behavior spurned on by drinking and drugs.

VIOLENCE!: Another fun pasttime, video games, was looked at by the Sacred Heart Spectrum (link). Dopamine apparently is produced when video games are played, and video game addiction is an issue some are concerned with. Yale's Daily News looked at this topic from another aspect: the addiction of Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Games (greatfully abbreviated these days down to MMRPGs) (link). Maybe that's why I can't get enough Ms. Pac-Man, but Yale's article is pretty tounge-in-cheek - look no further than the headline: "Super-nerds score on Web".

Speaking of the Web, coming up here soon I'll have some notes on the social networking sites of choice for college students, the ins and outs of them, and the pitfalls to be wary of.

What's the buzz on your campus? E-mail Josh at thebuzz@ctpost.com

Posted by Josh on 10:48 PM | Comments (2)

October 13, 2005

EnterTech: Video iPod

I couldn't wait until Friday to post about this, because I've been waiting for it forever. Apple has released the video iPod. A 2.5 inch screen, 20-hour battery life (a third better than previous models), and your choice of 30GB or 60GB, for the same prices ($299 and $399, respectively) of the previous versions. Something different: you can now choose between black or white as your color of choice, just like the recently introduced Nano.

Want video content to load it up with? Thousands of music videos are available, and you can also download 5 different TV shows. Each video, including the TV programs, are $1.99 each, so when you do the math it's $45 for a season of Desperate Housewives or Lost, approximately what a DVD set would cost, but you can take it anywhere with you. Yes, they're commercial free, and yes, they're probably a monster download. But you've got all that space to fill now, don't you?

I apologize to my readers for what may seem like an Apple Worship entry, but I've been an iPod lover for quite some time now. When a major new version comes out, I hock my old one off on a friend who's been wanting one to cover part of the cost of the new one. While I'm not an early adopter by any means, I live by my iPod, and jump at each new improvement. It's sad when I already have a buyer lined up for my old one and they just introduced it today! :)

Check it out here (link).

Posted by Josh on 12:17 AM | Comments (5)

October 7, 2005

EnterTech: Scrobble Scrobble

Entertainment and technology are two areas where college students generally take the lead. Now that we've got a whole blog's worth of space to play with, I'm going to take a look at some of the trends in this space that college students are going for, with a new entry hopefully posted every Friday. If you know of any cool sites or products out there that college students would crave, E-mail me at thebuzz@ctpost.com

College students are addicted to music. Roaming the halls of a residence hall, you can hear the bass thumping on an Eminem track or the classic sounds of Pink Floyd blasting from the room next door. So it's not surprising that when MP3s became big, college students were there.

The original Napster was the first way to get music online. Although it's shut down, the other peer-to-peer sites that popped up never really had the same allure of Napster, despite them offering access to more.

With legal options abound, one of the things I missed most about the old Napster was the ability to see a person's entire collection. You found songs that you liked, realized that person had really similar tastes to you, but then there's songs there that you had never heard of. You download them, and suddenly that band's made a new fan. Many times, that would result in a CD sale. It hasn't been lost on some researchers that CD sales began a general decline around the same time Napster was shut down. It's just very hard, with an increasingly cluttered landscape, to discover new music based on the taste of others with like interests.

Enter Audioscrobbler and last.fm (link). The technology runs through a plug-in you download that tracks what you're listening to in such software as iTunes, WinAmp, and Windows Media Player. Like many of these programs, it tracks how many times you listen to a song. But it also mines this data in so many other ways.

The site gives you a weekly breakdown of what tracks you listened to, so you can see trends over time. The new Fiona Apple CD came out and now you've become an addict to her music again? You can see that trend through the data. It also groups not only by track, but by artist, so you can see which artists are most popular with a user.

The site will calculate "neighbors" after you've listened to a certain number of tracks. Neighbors are people with similar musical interests, and brings back that cool idea of being able to discover music based on people with similar taste to yours. Along with neighbors, the site has a "Recommendations" feature that gives you a weighting based on the community as a whole, to tell you artists you're missing that you would probably like.

There's other interesting features too, including thousands of message boards, a radio stream based on your musical tastes, and (like every other site in the universe these days) a blog feature. You can also friend people a la MySpace or Facebook.

Based on my experience with the site, it's pretty dead on in determining like-minded users, as well as the recommendations it's making. I've noticed many of the recommendations it makes are of artists I've liked along the line, but my iPod's fully loaded, so I tend to drift around musical styles with the changing seasons.

To get a peek at what it's all about, check out my personal profile (link). You can register for the site by clicking in the upper right-hand corner.

Posted by Josh on 3:57 PM | Comments (4)