In the early morning of July 4 2011, I caught wind of a possible hacking of Fox News’ Political Twitter account. Out of curiosity more than anything, I tried to contact the supposed hackers for what I thought would be a quick blog post. To my surprise, I was able to conduct an interview with them, which was published online at Think Magazine’s website. From there, the story was picked up everywhere. Here’s a sampling of the news organizations that picked up my reporting the next morning.

The New York Times: 

A group calling itself the Script Kiddies claimed responsibility for hacking the Fox News Twitter account, according to Adam Peck, the outgoing editor of Think, an online student magazine operated at Stony Brook University on Long Island, who said he had communicated via instant message early Monday with a member of the group.

The Guardian:

A representative of the group ‘Scriptkiddies’ said in an interview with Stony Brook University’s Think Magazine: “We are looking to find information about corporations to assist with antisec [a concerted hacker attack on corporate and government security]. Fox News was selected because we figured their security would be just as much of a joke as their reporting.”

CNN:

Adam Peck of Stony Brook University’s Think magazine reported that the hackers, calling themselves the Script Kiddies, were an offshoot of the hacker group Anonymous.

The Next Web:

Think Magazine, a campus publication from Stony Brook University, scored an interview with the attackers:

Slate:

A member of the group talked to Think Magazine, a Stony Brook University publication, and warned more attacks could be coming.

In the spring of 2010, the nation’s 300 million Americans were subjected to the country’s official census, conducted every 10 years by the federal government. The process is fairly straightforward, but complexities arise when it comes to places like universities, where large groups of people reside most of the year. The US Census Bureau has methods for dealing with colleges and similar environments, but Stony Brook University decided not to share that information with students and parents. Instead, 9,000 residents were counted in secret while they were home for Spring Break, and Stony Brook made no effort to inform them that their information had been shared. This article also ran in The Huffington Post and Campus Progress.

In early April, while students at Stony Brook University were enjoying their spring breaks with family and friends, a group of 30 census workers spent four days in a conference room in Mendelsohn Quad filling out official, constitutionally mandated census forms for the campus’ 9,000 residents.

Yet despite the massive undertaking, there was never any disclosure made to the students that the census was being filled out on their behalf. Nor does it seem there was any desire on the part of the university to engage and involve the campus community in the process at all.

Census officials from the local Ronkonkoma field office were provided with records of every student living in dormitories on campus, according to Alan DeVries, Associate Director of Residential Programs.

“They came with an authorization for specific data contained in our housing database and I provided them with rosters that did not include student ID,” he says via email.

The census, which is conducted every ten years, is a series of questions aimed at determining just how many people are currently residing in each state, as well as the demographic makeup of the nation. Figures compiled by the U.S Census Bureau dictate the distribution of over $400 billion in federal funding, as well as representation in Congress.

Traditionally, the bureau mails census forms to every home address in the country. Families then fill out one form and mail it back to their regional office. But for college students living away from home, the process is different. Instead of being counted on their parents’ census forms, students are usually counted using the census’ “group quarters operation.”

“We started the group quarters program for people who live in places not considered housing units,” says Patricia Valle, an Assistant Regional Manager at the New York regional census center. That includes places like nursing homes and prisons in addition to colleges and universities. Unlike the standard ten question census form mailed to millions of homes, the group quarters census form asks for less information and is used to gather accurate counts quickly. The form asks for name, age, date of birth, race or origin and gender.

The option of conducting a group quarters enumeration instead of door to door enumeration is left up to individual campuses, according to Valle. Since the group quarters method relies on official—and, generally, confidential—records kept by the university, they must obtain authorization from the administration. Often, universities actually prefer the group quarters method, says Valle, as the prospect of dozens of census workers patrolling dormitories for days raises concerns about security and privacy.

“We ask each administration ‘What is the best way to enumerate on a college campus?’” says Yolanda Finley, a spokeswoman for the New York regional census office. “The directive on how to enumerate would have to come from the university.”

According to university spokeswoman Lauren Sheprow, however, Stony Brook was never given any alternative to the group quarters process.

“At no time was the university offered the opportunity to use any approach other than a group census,” she says via email. “Had the option been presented to do it another way we would have implemented it, but that was not the case.”

But those claims are strongly disputed by the regional census office.

“There were many conversations,” says Valle. “We offered the option of doing this door to door.” If anything, she added, the census would have recommended direct communication with the campus community.

“We always prefer to go door to door,” she says.

“A recommendation was made by administrators to conduct a group quarters enumeration and not go door to door,” adds Finley.

Valle says that conversations were held with Alan DeVries on multiple occasions, dating back to last year.

“In September ’09 we began identifying natural targets for group quarters operations,” says Valle. From there, advance units were dispatched to begin laying out the framework at each group quarters location. At Stony Brook, a coordinator was dispatched to campus in February to prepare for the census.

DeVries was the point of contact for the census this year, but it was unclear whether the decision to use the group quarters method came from him or someone else at the university.

The biggest question remains why the enumeration process was kept a secret. There appears to have been no significant effort made by the university to inform students that they were being counted. After speaking with roughly 100 students who reside in the dorms, exactly zero knew that the census was ever here.

According to Sheprow, a flyer was circulated to each quad back in February, but it seems to have done no good. Even Resident Assistants and Residence Hall Directors seem to have been left out of the loop.

“Since the project was a group enumeration and not a door to door canvas, most RHDs and RAs would be unaware that the enumerators were here,” says Sheprow.

Again, though, that appears to have been a choice made by Stony Brook officials. At Binghamton and Albany, officials opted for the group quarters method as well, but both campuses made sure that students were aware that the process was ongoing, and even got students involved.

At Binghamton, census workers filled out basic information for each student on separate individual census reports, then turned to the residents to fill out the rest of the form.

“We then gave the forms to our RAs who went door-to-door over a 5 day period and had their residents complete the rest of the form, place it back in the envelope, seal the envelope, and give it back to the RA,” says Ryan Yarosh, the assistant Director of Media Relations at Binghamton.

Albany went even further, training their RA staff on how to properly administer the census themselves.

“We went to our students and conducted interviews with them,” says Karl Luntta, Director of Media Relations at the University at Albany. “We worked with the local census offices. It was a partnership.”

That idea of partnership seems to have been the norm across the country. At the University of Indiana, students participated in specialized programming conducted on campus. There’s even a student organization, Count Us In, that seeks to increase census participation rates on campus.

At Vanderbilt University, the census got help from campus clubs too.

“Student organizations like the Lambda Association and the Black Student Alliance had informational meetings to describe the Census process to their members,” says Erika Hyde, Editor in Chief at the Vanderbilt Orbis, a fellow Campus Progress-affiliated publication.

Even at nursing homes, residents get involved in the process.

“Residents filled out their census forms as an activity at the nursing home,” says Patricia Valle. “They had fun with that.”

These are the types of partnerships that the census welcomes, and that Stony Brook ignored.

“We welcome the support and help of any organization,” says Valle. “The census never turns anyone down.”

A lack of transparency here at Stony Brook has also led to some confusion. Some students who were at home during spring break said they filled out their parents’ census questionnaire, having no idea that they were being counted elsewhere.

“That’s a viable problem,” says Valle. But the task of informing students is strictly left up to the university.

“The only thing we are there to do is to count students,” she says. “Getting word to the students, that’s up to the college itself.”

During the 2010 midterm elections, Republican challenger Randy Altschuler came thisclose to upending Congressman Tim Bishop. The election went unresolved for weeks, as both candidates exchanged leads in a hand recount of the district’s votes. During the recount, Altschuler issued hundreds of challenges to absentee and affidavit ballots, including every single affidavit ballot cast by students at Stony Brook University. I got wind of this through a source at the Suffolk County Board of Elections, and Think Magazine broke the story. The Huffington Post and several other news sites picked up our story.

In the spring of 2011, I was made aware of a lawsuit being brought against Stony Brook University’s food service provider, Lackmann Culinary Group. After digging around for a few weeks, we learned that the union that covers most of the workers on campus were reporting being mistreated, intimated and made to acquiesce to the wishes of Lackmann management. This article was the result of weeks worth of dogged reporting on the story. It appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Think Magazine.

That was a question I asked in the weeks following the release of the first iPad. I spoke with representatives from Barnes & Noble’s College Bookstore program and the Chief Information Officer at Stony Brook University, among others, to get a sense of how big an impact the emerging tablet/ereader market could have on the college bookstore model. This article appeared in Campus Progress in April of 2010 as well as in Think Magazine’s Spring 2010 issue.

There’s a futuristic scene in the movie The Time Machine in which an elementary school, circa 2030, is on a field trip to the New York Public Library. The students aren’t carrying pad and paper though, or even one of those audio devices for guided tours. Instead, each has what looks like a glass pane (we’re told later it’s really a “microscanner”) strapped over his or her shoulder roughly the same size of…well, of an iPad.

The impact that Apple’s latest gizmo will have on education is yet to be seen. But barely two weeks since its release, it’s clear that the iPad has the potential to fundamentally change how students attend college.

The concept behind the device has been tried before, with little to no success. Other computer companies introduced swiveling tablet PCs years ago, targeting the college market with features meant to make note taking and other academic endeavors easier. But none of them took hold.

Apple’s foray into the market is different. For starters, it’s Apple. The company’s younger, loyal fan base and aggressive marketing of college students is what led to their line of laptops becoming as omnipresent as Frisbees and Obama stickers on our nation’s quads.

The iPad also benefits from incredible technology. I don’t know enough about microprocessors and megawatts and gigawhatevers to speak authoritatively about the technical aspects of the iPad, but had firsthand experience with one for weeks now, I can report that it feels fast, is easy to use and can do just about everything I need it to do in a classroom.

Universities are quickly adjusting to the new market of tablet devices as well, and they are taking a wide range of approaches. Princeton made headlines when it publically banned the iPad within its ivy gates, citing potential issues with their wireless network. Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania will be handing out iPads to their entire incoming freshman class this fall, and George Fox University will give students an option between a Macbook and an iPad for their freshmen.

Both schools express hope that devices like the iPad will reduce the number of textbooks needed by students and make other common academic necessities—PDF files, PowerPoint presentations, online components like Blackboard—available all in one place.

The textbook question is probably the most uncertain. If there is going to be a killer app on collegiate iPads, it is going to be whether the largest producers of textbooks embrace the new format.

So far, the process has been slow. Barnes & Noble, the biggest seller of textbooks in the world, runs many of the nation’s largest university bookstores on college campuses, including here at Stony Brook. They have offered digital textbooks since before the rise of digital eReaders like Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony eReader.

“We have sold digital textbooks since the early 2000s,” says Jade Roth, the vice president of books at Barnes & Noble College Booksellers. “But there has not been a great deal of sales.”

The percentage of digital sales in the textbook arena is still in the low single digits, according to Roth. With the growing number of devices capable of displaying digital books though, that number could shoot up.

“[Digital sales] has been growing each term, but remains a small percentage of total sales,” adds Roth.

And total sales are doing quite well. According to the National Association of Collegiate Stores, students spent over $5 billion on textbooks in the last academic year alone.

The annual cost of textbooks for an individual student can easily top $1000, especially at a school like Stony Brook University, where the hard sciences are among the most popular majors. Multiply that by four years and suddenly even the books necessary to succeed in college are financially unrealistic for millions of families, never mind tuition costs.

But at a base price of $500, the iPad has the potential to reduce that figure substantially. Yes, many digital textbooks can run for a pretty penny as well, but the rise of digital readers coincides with the emergence of the open-source market for books. Google is undergoing an ambitious project of digitizing millions of books, WikiMedia has Wikibooks, and even the biggest textbook companies are beginning to embrace much cheaper digital versions of some popular titles.

Exactly how, or even if, the textbook industry will be impacted by the iPad and its spinoffs is hard to predict this early, says Richard Reeder, the Chief Information Officer at Stony Brook University.

“It’s still too early to see just how the iPad will change anything,” he says.

Others think that the potential for change rests not in the device itself but in its software.

Take the iPod, argues David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas-Dallas.

“Where the real revolution took place was at the level of the iTunes store,” he writes in a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Imagine, he continues, if the iTunes model for music were applied to textbooks. Students buying individual chapters at a time rather than the full book. Students renting textbooks for a few weeks as necessary. Those innovations were what revolutionized the music industry in iTunes. Can the same be done for textbooks?

For its part, Barnes & Noble is planning to launch its own iPad app in early May, according to Roth.

“We believe the role of the bookseller is to provide books…to go onto whatever device that students choose to use,” she says.

For the meantime, Stony Brook University is prepared for an influx of mobile devices. According to Reeder, the recent introduction of WolfieNet, the wireless network available in most of the residential buildings on campus, gives Stony Brook one of the best campus broadband networks in the country. The upgrade cost $2 million, and plans are to expand it even further by having it replace the outdated AirNet system currently available throughout the rest of the campus.

iPad sales have been robust since its April 3 release. Reviews have been mostly stellar. But on college campuses, at least for now, it remains much more bells and whistles and much less pomp and circumstance.