FAST FIVE for the week of February 16, 2013

News:

Faculty of Medicine Eduroam:

The Faculty of Medicine at UBC is implementing Eduroam at clinical sites. Meeting accreditation standards is a top priority for the Faculty and enabling wireless access to educational resources in clinical sites supports this vision. Clinical Eduroam

Free Microsoft Office:

Dalhousie University is now offering Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus for free for students. Current Dal students can download Office on up to five desktop or laptop computers.  Office 2013 for students

Data privacy day:

Dalhousie University is also hosting its annual data privacy day this week. Independent speakers such as David Fraser (privacy lawyer) are featured, as well as vendor representatives such as the Chief Scientist from Dell. Privacy conference 

Research software investments:

CANARIE announced the award of $4M in research software investments. The winners of the Research Software Call for Proposals from 2013 include projects supporting disciplines ranging from high energy physics to brain research. Research tools

Valentine's Day IT Humour:

The University of British Columbia published some Valentines Day computer humour last week ... UBC IT tweet

Question:

As a result of a recent class action law suit in California, Google's lawyers now admit Google does data mine student emails for ad-targeting purposes outside of school, even when ad serving in school is turned off. The attached post from SafeGov.org provides more details on the issue and cites several university examples. Given this revelation, as well as other recent NSA revelations, are you planning to be more cautious about moving your users an data to cloud-based services? Do you feel these services are trustworthy? Is "free" worth the cost to your institution? Google data mining

Please email your responses to mprroman@gmail.com (notice the irony?) for publication next week.