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

• If you’re a fan of trivia and/or money, you might make it a point to ride on the KU bus system around lunchtime this week.

KU’s Student Union Activities will plant people on buses on Jayhawk Boulevard this week to ask students trivia questions about the university for a $10 cash prize. It’s called “KU Cash Bus,” suggesting it’s in the spirit of the Discovery Channel game show “Cash Cab.” It’s the second year SUA has put on the program.

The contest will be going on between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Monday through Friday, so if you’re a gambler, you could leave your lunch at home and ride the bus for two hours in hopes of landing some meal money.

According to an SUA release, the question-askers will be be boarding buses at the Kansas Union and heading down the boulevard. So keep that in mind, if you’re aiming for that sweet, sweet $10 bill.

• During a free moment on campus last week, I poked my head in on a University Senate meeting, and I heard a bit of an update on the KU Core curriculum revamping effort before I had to run off elsewhere.

The new universitywide general-education curriculum will go into effect in fall 2013, so it’s easy enough to see how it will affect incoming freshmen. But at the meeting, Sara Rosen, senior vice provost for academic affairs, mentioned how the new system will affect current KU students and students who transfer from other institutions.

Current students will have an “opt-in” option for the new curriculum. That is, they can choose to take on the new course requirements instead of the current ones. Rosen predicted that many students who’ll be sophomores this year, the ones who just started as freshmen this fall, might want to do that.

In order to encourage things like double majors, minors and study-abroad programs, the new curriculum will require far fewer gen-ed courses for a lot of students — maybe half of the 72 hours of gen-ed courses currently required for students in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is what I’ve heard. So sophomores next year might opt in because it would cut down on their gen-ed load; upperclassmen, though, might presumably stay the course, since they’ve likely already filled many requirements.

Transfer students, meanwhile, will have an “opt-out” option, Rosen said, at least for two years. That’s because students transferring from community colleges might have been loading up on current requirements, and it might take awhile for those institutions to get on board with the new curriculum when advising students on what they’ll need to do to transfer to KU. By fall 2015, though, all transfers will likely be switched over to the new curriculum, Rosen said.

• KU’s Emily Taylor Center for Women and Gender Equity is holding a “Denim and Pink Day” event this week for faculty and staff, in an effort to raise awareness of breast cancer and also help out a KU student in need.

KU departments can buy themselves the right for faculty and staff to wear jeans and something pink on Thursday with a suggested donation of $5 per person. The center will then use the money raised to fund a shopping trip at the KU Bookstore for a needy student who’s been affected by breast cancer.

Any departments that want to participate should give a call to Jenn Streeter at the Emily Taylor Center at 864-3600. Tell her your department name, as well as your building and room number, and the center will drop off a donation packet. Donations should be in the form of cash or checks made out to the Emily Taylor Center for Women and Gender Equity.

• We can’t promise you a cash prize if you read Heard on the Hill every day, but we bet the knowledge you gain will make you quite the attraction at parties and the envy of your family and friends. Keep those tips coming to merickson@ljworld.com.