Your daily dose of news, notes and links from around Kansas University.

• Halfway through the first year with new mo-ped parking spots on campus, KU’s parking department is ready to make a few changes.

I’ve heard a little grumbling about the mo-ped stalls not being used very often, especially during the winter.

The always-helpful Donna Hultine, KU’s director of parking and transit, went through the changes with me Monday afternoon. KU enforcement employees and design and construction management folks have been watching the mo-ped stalls to see how they are used.

Based on those observations, KU is making a few changes, mostly removing stalls that aren’t being used and converting them back to car parking.

Typically, two mo-ped stalls take up the space for one car stall, Hultine said. So, without further ado, here are the changes. Some of these have already taken place, and others will be done as soon as weather permits.

• In Lot 90, a large yellow parking pass lot across Naismith Drive from Allen Fieldhouse, 30 mo-ped spots have already been converted to 15 car stalls.

• In Lot 52, a red and yellow parking pass lot behind Carruth-O’Leary and Joseph R. Pearson halls, 10 mo-ped stalls will be converted to five car stalls.

• In Lot 72, the yellow parking lot west of Allen Fieldhouse and next to the Burge Union, 14 mo-ped spots have already been turned into seven car spots.

• In Lot 94, a large yellow parking lot between Memorial Stadium and Mississippi Street, 16 mo-ped spots will be turned into eight car stalls.

• In Lot 35, a blue parking lot next to the Military Science building, eight mo-ped spots will be turned into two car stalls. (Here, the deeper-than-usual car stalls can hold four mo-ped parking spots each). Hultine said this lot seemed to draw a lot of complaints.

•In Lot 16, a gold parking lot across Jayhawk Boulevard from the Kansas Union, there are two mo-ped areas. One that faces east will stay, but will allow motorcycle parking, as well. A second mo-ped area in that lot that faces north will be cut in half, creating two more car stalls.

• In Lot 224, on KU’s West Campus near the Higuchi Biosciences Center, two mo-ped stalls will be added after people in the area inquired about it.

• KU will examine ways to add mo-ped parking to Alumni Place, where many of KU’s scholarship halls are located, after students there asked if it would be possible to add some there.

• KU will examine possible ways to add mo-ped parking near Learned Hall, possibly in a lot on the east side of the building. It might be possible to add mo-ped parking without taking out any spaces for cars in that area, Hultine said.

The parking department will continue to monitor the usage of the spaces, and will make further changes as necessary. Hultine said the mo-ped parking areas were designed such that they could easily be changed back into car parking if need be.

In the winter, KU’s parking department is using some of the mo-ped spots to dump the voluminous amounts of snow from KU lots, Hultine said.

With more snow in the forecast, she said she’s beginning to worry about where the department would be able to put it all.

• Apparently, that trying to talk to aliens thing? Yeah, we’re doing that wrong.

At least that’s what a team of researchers — including one from KU — is telling us.

Dimitra Atri, a PhD candidate in astrophysics from KU, joined Julia DeMarines from the International Space University in France, and Jacob Haqq-Misra from Pennsylvania State University to bring us the details, published in the journal Space Policy.

We should follow specific protocols in sending messages, they argued, including standardizing message length and content. They even suggested a website by which people across the world could develop messages using the protocol “in order to discover the types of messages better suited for cross-cultural communication.”

• KU journalism graduate Brenna Daldorph has earned first place in the in-depth reporting category of the William Randolph Hearst Foundation’s Journalism Awards, considered the Pulitzers of college journalism.

Daldorph, who today is teaching English to French-speaking islanders on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, will receive a $2,600 scholarship for her work.

Her article, “Living in Limbo,” chronicled the stories of two undocumented immigrants brought to the United States by their families at a young age. They excelled in school and at KU, but still faced a number of challenges because of their immigration status.

It’s pretty interesting stuff, and worth a read.

• Here’s my message for space aliens: Feel free to give me a tip for Heard on the Hill at ahyland@ljworld.com. It’s fun. I promise. Now if someone could just beam that into space for me…