At the end of a busy week, here's your weekly-or-so roundup of KU news, notes and mentions from around the Internet.

• KU is leading the way among Big 12 universities in offering multiyear scholarships to athletes, according to this report from the Chronicle of Higher Education (It's behind a subscriber paywall). However, only 16 of KU's 354 scholarship athletes for 2012-13 have multiyear awards.

That's more or less in line with what the Chronicle found at other universities. It surveyed the public universities in the six biggest athletic conferences, and nearly all offered either a fairly small number of multiyear scholarships or none at all.

A new NCAA policy effective in August 2012 allows programs to offer multiyear scholarships to athletes for the first time. The change was made after the previous policy requiring renewable one-year awards drew some criticism. Critics — including a Florida State University sports management instructor quoted by the Chronicle — say the one-year deals could allow coaches to push athletes out of their scholarships because of athletic performance. A number of athletic administrators quoted defended the practice, saying the one-year scholarships provide an incentive for athletes to get good grades and stay out of legal trouble.

The Big 12 conference opposed the new NCAA rule, the Chronicle reports, and KU was the only Big 12 university that reported it awarded more than two multiyear scholarships this year (though the report didn't get counts from Baylor or TCU, both private universities, and the University of Oklahoma didn't report how many it awarded).

The University of Illinois embraced multiyear scholarships to a much higher degree than any other school in the study: This year, 192 of its 370 scholarship athletes have multiyear awards.

• We've got another dispatch from Leobardo Espinoza Jr., the Topeka high-schooler and New York Times blogger who's been offered a full-ride scholarship to KU. The big news is that he's been accepted to Yale University and placed on a wait list at Stanford, both of which he writes about with his usual candor. He says he's now pondering four options that he says will all cost him "little or no money," while also waiting to hear from Stanford: KU, Yale and two New England liberal arts colleges, Amherst and Bowdoin. He doesn't indicate if he's leaning one way or the other.

• Across the pond, The Guardian has an interview with Chip Taylor, director of KU's Monarch Watch, on his concerns about the future of the monarch butterfly population.

• Some research from Promothesh Chatterjee, an assistant professor of marketing in the KU School of Business, got some attention from the NYT as well as AOL's DailyFinance site. He collaborated with some researchers from the University of Utah on a study that found that a person with a single savings account is likely to save more and spend less than a person with multiple accounts. Chatterjee suggests consolidating your multiple savings accounts if you have them, or at least using a service that will provide an aggregated view of your different accounts.

If you've been SAVING up some KU news tips, now's the time to send them to merickson@ljworld.com! Ho ho. (As I said, it's been a long week.)

More LJWorld KU News Coverage

Your weekly update on where folks from KU have popped up in the news around the country:

• The Minnesota Star Tribune cited a study by assistant professor of business Felix Meschke, along with two University of Minnesota researchers, that found companies that make big political donations don't really tend to help their bottom lines. That study has been mentioned in the New York Times and Time magazine, too.

• Chip Taylor, director of KU's Monarch Watch Program, talked with the Washington Post's kids' section about monarch butterflies' annual migration to Mexico and back.

• Stanley Lombardo, a professor of classics, took part in a "Homerathon" at Ave Maria University in Florida, per the Naples Daily News. A Homerathon is a 24-hour reading of all 24 books of Homer's "Iliad," and the translation used was Lombardo's.

• Shane Lopez, a professor of the practice in the KU School of Business, talked with the Gallup Business Journal about his research on the importance of hope in business.

• Phillip Hofstra, a professor of design at KU and the most recent winner of the HOPE teaching award from students, got a mention in this Kansas City Star story about Shea Rush, the son of former KC high school basketball star JaRon Rush (and nephew of former KU star Brandon). Shea, 15, is also Hofstra's grandson, and the story says Hofstra's work has inspired his grandson to consider a career in architecture.

If you spot any KU mentions somewhere out there in the vast expanse of the Internet, feel free to shoot me a link at merickson@ljworld.com. And, please, don't forget to send your KU news tips there, too.