UMass Boston is offering flu vaccines for those wanting to protect themselves this coming season. The vaccines are $12 for students and $22 for faculty, and are available at the University Health Services office on the second floor of the Quinn Administration Building.***The founders of MYRICHUNCLE, a student loan company, have decided to give a little back to students traveling to New York via the Fung Wah Bus this holiday season. Students who take the Fung Wah from Boston to New York on Dec. 21 are eligible to receive a $15 gift from MYRICHUNCLE’s founders-the cost of a one-way ticket. Students need to provide their valid student IDs and their bus ticket to receive the refund. They will be at the South Station Bus Terminal from noon to 7 p.m.***A paltry showing of UMass-Boston students showed up to discuss Governor-Elect Deval Patrick’s plan for Massachusetts’ higher education funding. The newly elected governor sent staff members from his office with the expectation of fielding questions from UMB students about what he intends for the commonwealth’s public higher education. Three days prior to the administration’s visit, on December 1, Patrick told a crowd of around 700 students and faculty members at UMass-Amherst that he planned to allocate $400 million over the next five to seven years to Massachusetts’ twenty-nine state college and university campuses. ***A UMass-Boston survey, called geographic information systems (GIS) technology, found that nearly 350 Dorchester area businesses opened their doors within the first six months of 2006. The findings are done so by using a sophisticated mapping software programs and expertise provided by UMass Boston’s GIS Core Research Facility. The UMB facility helped prepare the analysis for the Dorchester Board of Trade through a partnership created by the university’s Office of Community Relations. The aim of the project, which began nine months ago, is to help the 174-member Dorchester Board of Trade to better understand the neighborhood’s commercial sector, thus allowing them to launch new building-initiative projects.***UMass Boston’s Fiske Center for Archeological Research has been digging up prizes this year. Secretary of the Commonwealth William Francis Galvin, Chairman of the Massachusetts Historical Commission, awarded the commission’s 2006 Historic Preservation Award to the Hassanamesitt Woods in Grafton. The Fiske Center collaborated with the town of Grafton, as well as the Nipmuc Tribal Nation and state officials on the Hassanamesitt Woods. The property is associated with John Eliot’s 17th-century Nipmuc Praying Indian Village of Hassanamesitt. Archaeological research conducted by the Fiske Center for Archaeological Research at UMass Boston, has documented the remains of a farmstead on the property occupied by three generations of Nipmuc residents.