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The University of Hawaii at Manoa is examining an upgrade for its 36-person security force. Six members are on patrol at all times, according to the Honolulu Advertiser.
They’re unarmed. All they carry are radios.

Many state universities have armed police forces, including Virginia Tech.

While UH has no plan for dealing with a roving gunman, it appears their administration is putting together something quickly, including an armed police force.

Facebook and other social networking sites are getting more attention as the media examines how Virginia Tech implemented its crisis communication plan yesterday.

The New York Times interviewed to several people who used blogs, profiles and other tools to get information about friends and family members.

There are now over 500 memorial groups listed on Facebook, including an HPU group. BoingBoing noted that at least one TV news program (Dateline NBC) set up a Facebook group to find members who knew Seung Hui-Cho. CNN interviewed two of Cho’s former roommates today.

Virgina Tech has canceled classes for the remainder of the week, and Norris Hall has been closed for the rest of the academic year. The entire building is a crime scene. It really should be torn down and replaced with a memorial.

One last update: it now appears that 5 faculty members and 25 students were killed in Norris Hall. I neglected to mention in my last post Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, a Canadian instructor who taught French, and Christopher James Bishop, who was teaching an introductory German class when he was killed at his podium.

Chris Bishop was an Atlanta Braves fan who earned two degrees at the University of Georgia, where I earned my Ph.D. in strategic management.

I’m blogging about this situation because it hits too close to home. I earned my undergraduate degree at the College of William and Mary, which is located across the state in Williamsburg. I’ve met many people who studied or taught in Blacksburg, and my heart is heavy as I think about what happened there yesterday. There are days when it’s hard for me to walk down Fort Street Mall and feel safe. I can only hope some good comes out of all this suffering.

Business Week reported yesterday that mobile phone carriers are desperately looking for new business models that will help these companies mantain control of their networks.

Mobile data services remain focused on market niches, and investors have seem little evidence that the mobile carriers can deliver compelling content. The carriers are more focused on maintaining control of their network, so the carriers miss ipportunities to be a vital connection point between media sites and users.

Except for a few offerings, such as Sprint’s aggressively marketed mobile data card, most mobile carriers offer customers access to a limited set of Internet resources. For example, MySpace offers mobile versions of its site to Helio and Cingular/AT&T customers. Facebook had an exclusive mobile deal with Cingular until recently. Now that service supports several different carriers, with the notable exception of T-Mobile. Seems like Facebook would work well on a Sidekick.

Author Robert Clark also offers this startling tidbit: YouTube generated more Internet traffic in 2006 than the ENTIRE Internet did in 2000.

Some quick Googling led to another interesting fact: Photobucket handled 2% of US Internet traffic at this time last year.

The mobile Internet has nothing close to either site in terms of popularity, functions or content. Even the mobile versions of established webmail systems like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail have failed to capture the imagination of mobile users. Yahoo offers multiple branded versions of its mobile interface (Go, Mobile and Mobile Web), which just adds to users’ confusion.

Both Google and Yahoo are offering mobile web services for the Apple iPhone, which may miss its June 11 ship date because of quality issues with the phone’s complex operating system. Stephen Wellman of Information Week reports that Apple and AT&T will be offering rebates to iPhone buyers, and AT&T may pay Apple for every customer that buys an iPhone through an Apple storefront. There’s no such thing as a “sure thing” in the mobile communications industry these days.

As a professor, I’m very concerned that little attention was paid to campus security before this incident. I haven’t seen any announcements from Oahu’s other universities or on HPU Pipeline. Readers can email me the URL if they read anything about the island’s private universities.

Are there any universities on Oahu with a lockdown plan ready to implement when their campus facilities are threatened? A Google search on lockdown at the University of Hawaii yields procedures for locking a network user’s account if they violate acceptable user practices. There’s one PDF file from an emergency planning subcommittee meeting from December 1, 2006. that meeting focused on how UH staff could handle a natural disaster like a flood or earthquake.

In the aftermath of the Virgina Tech shootings, the University of Hawaii at Manoa announced that they have had three different notificiation methods to tell students, staff and faculty about campus security issues:

1. E-mail announcements
2. Phone trees, in which UH employees are assigned to call a specific list of UH employees
3. The public address system in the Campus Center

According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, officials are also considering sending emergency announcements to local radio and television stations. Of course, the stations would have to be ready to receive the announcements and break into their programming schedule.

The list doesn’t include an SMS announcement system like Mobile Campus. A text messaging system might be more effective, as all subscribed users who have their mobile phones powered on would receive the same message at approximately the same time. The three methods that UH uses require people to be online, on a calling list, or at a specific location on campus.

Liviu Lebrescu survived the Holocaust, emigrated to the United States, and taught engineering at Tech. Lebrescu tried to block the door of his classroom while his students jumped from the windows. He was shot to death by VT senior Cho Seung-Hui yesterday, along with engineering professors G.V. Loganathan, Kevin Garanta and 27 students attending classes in Norris Hall.

All they wanted to do was learn. Virginia Tech’s lackadaisical security response let a gunman who had already killed a freshman and a senior RA two hours earlier walk into a classroom building, lock the front doors, and start shooting. The chair of the English department had been told about the gunman’s disturbing submissions in creative writing courses. Cho was an English major.

The courts may end up deciding if Tech’s response was negligent, criminal or a horrible mistake.

But no one can bring the 32 victims back.

Previous posts:

April 16:

4:20 pm HT: Virginia tech releases warning e-mails

12:51 pm HT: Virginia Tech waited 2 hours before notifying campus of initial shootings

9:45 am HT: Virginia Tech shootings highlight the need for campus emergency notification system

April 11: University of Florida and Mobile Campus

Virginia Tech released the text of its emails sent to students during this morning’s rampage. These were published by the Associated Press.

Here’s the third e-mail sent at 4:17 am HT, which was 3 hours after the first shooting.

Subject: All Classes Canceled; Stay where you are

“Virginia Tech has canceled all classes. Those on campus are asked to remain where there are, lock their doors and stay away from windows. Persons off campus are asked not to come to campus.”

Previous posts:

12:51 pm HT: Virginia Tech waited 2 hours before notifying campus of initial shootings

9:45 am HT: Virginia Tech shootings highlight the need for campus emergency notification system

April 11: University of Florida and Mobile Campus