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Big mail on campus:

San José City College (SJCC) has embarked on a technology improvement program, and for the first time will be offering student email accounts. That’s where we come in. We’re testing a new service with the school by hosting Gmail accounts with SJCC domain addresses (like student@jaguars.sjcc.edu), plus admin tools for efficient account management. Massive storage and features that tame the most unruly inboxes, like powerful mail search, conversation view for messages, and a fast interface, make Gmail very handy for students. Together, we’re pleased to provide this channel for better communications and a stronger community for all 10,000 SJCC students.

I literally was discussing this topic with a friend of mine last week. Texas A&M has an internal team developing webmail and the user interface looks and feels like it was created in 1994. Webmail from commercial providers such as MSN, Yahoo and others has steadily advanced over the years, integrating must-have features such as spam blocking and address books. And of late, I’ve wondered why none of the big web players have teamed up with Universities or large Corporations to provide customized solutions on this matter.

This internal development of software is yet another example of how the University is superfluously involving itself in activities it is not efficient at doing. Universities by-in-large do not make their own computer chips, monitors or printers, so why do they create their own e-mail packages? Hopefully firms like Google will be able to combine the webmail service of Gmail with the college-specific features required by administrators, such as class rosters, effectively.

Update: Now Google is offering a streamlined method for hosting email services for your domain. Note: several months ago I mentioned the future direction of Google hosting services; keep in mind that their new Desktop version 3 also expands into this market by remotely hosting your files on their servers.

Update 2: Paul Kedrosky has some interesting thoughts of the privacy and legal issues surrounding off-site hosting from Google.

Scientists are split on the different ways men and women think

Peter Lawrence, a biologist and fellow of the Royal Society, accused Science of being “gutless” after it explained that its decision was because the piece did not offer “a strategy on how to deal with the gender issue”.
[...]
But Mr Lawrence dismissed “the cult of political correctness” that insists men and women are “equivalent, identical even” and argued that “men and women are born different”.
[...]
Mr Lawrence, a developmental biologist who works at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, said: “It was a lame excuse. I could not get it published for reasons that I think were political.”

Mr Lawrence’s piece - Men, Women, and Ghosts in Science - has since been published online by the Public Library of Science Biology and has become one of the most popular articles over the past few days, attracting about 60 e-mails, almost all from women.

I mentioned the PLoS in the article on the University as an alternative method for researchers to publish in. As an aside, anyone else surprised that men and women are wired differently?

Via Lew Rockwell.