At a time when medical research increasingly requires collaboration by large numbers of busy people, the Indiana Clinical and Translational Science Institute HUB offers a model for using advanced information technology to link scientists, health providers, community partners and others for the purpose of accelerating clinical and translational research. The Indiana CTSI HUB is a virtual, institution-scale medical research organization for Indiana, including Indiana University, Purdue University and the University of Notre Dame. Launched in 2008 with support from the National Institutes of Health, it supports virtual clinical research teams, community engaged research, research program development, and industry and public outreach. Full Story

Indiana University's Filippo Menczer has shown how to "out" political astroturfers through his complex networks laboratory's study of information diffusion on Twitter. The research team went on to learn that while retweet networks are politically segregated between left- and right-leaners, Twitter "mentions" actually create a communication bridge between the two partisan groups. Now the Truthy team has added new features for analyzing political social media that includes the capability for citizens to interact with the data and then explore the impact, partisanship and sentiment of the users involved in the diffusion of a meme. Full Story

Civic Quotes, a new resource from the Center on Congress at Indiana University that uses notable quotations and images to teach about American government and citizenship in an engaging, interactive way, is now available as a free app for the iPad tablet computer and on the Web. "It's vital to make civics instruction interesting and relevant," Center on Congress Director Lee Hamilton said in introducing Civic Quotes. "This app, which puts the latest technology into the hands of social studies teachers and students, will help spur young people to think about what it means to be an informed, effective citizen." Full Story

Indiana University announced Feb. 8 an agreement with Harvard Business Publishing to deliver eTexts for students on all IU campuses. Harvard Business Publishing is the leading provider of teaching materials for business management education. "As a business school professor, I have long used HBP cases because they are a cornerstone of business education," said Brad Wheeler, IU vice president for information technology and CIO. "The HBP flat-rate pricing brings the next level of innovation to IU's eText program that saves students money and gives them digital access on almost any device." Full Story

The Obama administration's call on Feb. 23 for a "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights" is a noble effort, but one that will likely fail because it puts the power of consent into the hands of a public that, for the most part, doesn't know what to do with it and cannot use it effectively to protect privacy, according to Indiana University information security expert Fred H. Cate. At the core of the legislative proposal is what the Obama administration calls the "Consumer Control Principle," which would give consumers the right to exercise control over what personal data is collected and how it is used. That is typically achieved through voluntary consent. Full Story

The Feb. 6, 2012, edition of IT Matters @ IU featured a statewide announcement that Indiana would become the first state to launch a high-speed 100-gigabits-per-second network link dedicated to research and education. Also included in the newsletter was news about two doctoral candidates at Indiana University Bloomington's School of Informatics and Computing sharing a $100,000 gift from international software company Persistent Systems to support their research in cloud computing and bioinformatics; news that during the recent spring semester 5,300 IU students saved an average $25 per book or online supplement using eTexts; and results of the National Center for Women & Information Technology's second annual Indiana Aspirations in Computing Award competition. Full Story