Adapting to the iPad, called education's 'equalizer'

From USATODAY.com

Image source: USA Today

Well-designed interfaces can open the world to people.

"The 18-year-old is a quadriplegic with multiple disabilities that make speech and muscle control extremely difficult. He interacts through eye gaze or by tapping his head against a switch on a communication device to spell out words.

But on a recent afternoon at the Lehmann Center, a special-needs school in Lakewood, N.J., Leuck was able to make music. With some effort, he slid his knuckles lightly over the digital image of a guitar on an iPad screen. The touches produced a series of acoustic-style chords from the iPad — and a big grin from Leuck."

Robocleaners, tweeting appliances in the home of tomorrow

From USATODAY.com

Image Source: jeffbots.com

"Ever wondered what your home might look like in 10 years' time? Will it be cleaned by robots and run by computers? Will your fridge go online to allow you to discuss dinner plans with your spouse or instruct it to do the shopping?"

"If the technology giants exhibiting their latest wares at the recent IFA trade fair in Berlin are to be believed, this is what life could be like. The technology exists, even if some of the products have so far only been launched in places like Korea, one of the world's leading consumer electronics markets."

Smart credit cards coming

From USATODAY.com

"The United States is the only developed country still hanging on to credit and debit cards with those black magnetic stripes, the kind you swipe through retail terminals. The rest of the industrialized world has switched —or is in the process of switching— to "smart" chip-based cards.

"The problem with that black magnetic stripe on the back of your credit card is that it's about as secure as writing your account information on a postcard: everything is in the clear and can be copied. Card fraud, and the measures taken to prevent it, costs U.S. merchants, banks and consumers billions each year.

The smart cards can't be copied, which greatly reduces the potential for fraud. Smart cards with built-in chips are the equivalent of a safe: they can hide information so it can only be unlocked with the right key. Because the important information is hidden, the cards can't be replicated."

 This seems to be an example where being technologically advanced stands in the way of technological advancement. Countries that adopt technologies early go on to build infrastructure to support that technology. Then when new technologies come along, there is an inertia to stick with the existing technology. Something similar has happened in many developing countries -- land line telephones have been completely bypassed, with a majority of the population going from no phone to a cell phone in a relatively short time.

Internet Use Affects Memory, Study Finds (Yawn)

Image Source: masternewmedia.org

From NYTimes.com

"The widespread use of search engines and online databases has affected the way people remember information, researchers are reporting."

Some would likely interpret this with alarm -- "Internet use impairs memory!" But is it really cause for concern? Does use of tools make us rely on the use of tools? Almost certainly! (How many of us could live an independent hunter-gatherer lifestyle?) But so what? The march of technological progress moves us away from low level menial tasks to higher level work. If we didn't have calculators, ability to do mental arithmetic would be much more important. But since we do have them, mathematicians can focus on much more interesting problems!

Stanford offers free CS courses

From DeviceGuru

Last year at Educause, I heard Neil Gershenfeld (of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms) speak on a shift away from a scarcity-based model of education. A significant point was that technology has the potential to radically revolutionize the business of education. In the past, access to ideas was limited by access to physical resources: books, laboratories, faculty members. When resources are digitized, the nominal cost of reproducing them becomes insignificant.

In the latest of a series of similar examples, Stanford University has announced that it will be offering a series of 10 free online computer science courses, including their introduction to computer science, artificial intelligence, and robotics. As of a couple of days ago, more than 120,000 students had signed up for the courses.

Profile Pics Put Your Privacy At Risk

From Discovery News

Data mining techniques applied to massive amounts of publicly available data make it easier than you would imagine to cyberstalk.

Image source: neonfudge.com

"In one experiment, Acquisti and his team uniquely identified 4,900 out of 5,800 anonymous dating site members."

"In arguably the most disturbing experiment, Acquisti used students who had their date of birth and hometown publicly posted on their social network profile to predict their Social Security numbers (SSNs). By using techniques from a previous study showing that SSNs can be somewhat accurately guessed using public information, Acquisti correctly identified the first five digits of SSNs in 16 percent of the students. After four attempts, the accuracy rate jumped to 27 percent."

How 5 Recent Social Uprisings Were Wired

From Scientific American

Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, China -- modern day revolutions are relying on wired technologies.

"From the horseback ride of Paul Revere—and for millennia before—people have used the latest technology available to rally others sympathetic to their cause. As ubiquitous as Twitter and Facebook have seemed lately in spreading the word for gatherings, whether benevolent or malevolent, many recent demonstrations and revolts have used a variety of primarily digital platforms to spread their message. Here are five examples in just the past two years:"

Google threatens to leave China

Washingtonpost.com reports on Google's threat to leave China after attacks on activists' e-mail:

"Google said Tuesday that it might pull out of China because of a sophisticated computer network attack originating there and targeting its e-mail service and corporate infrastructure, a threat that could rattle U.S.-China relations, as well as China's business community."

GR: Is Google's act here an attempt at coercion, or one of self-preservation?

Stimulus package to support Electronic Health Records

Discovery Tech Electronic Health Records: "In this age of electronic devices, the Internet, iPhones and TiVo, it's hard to believe that some hospitals, doctors' offices and health clinics still rely on paper. But that's all going to change. The stimulus package has allocated more than $20 billion for assistance, grants and incentives that will help physicians and hospitals convert to electronic health records. But will e-records save money and improve efficiency? And what about patient privacy? This Wide Angle series will explore the questions, concerns, reasons and debate surrounding Electronic Health Records."

An intelligent system avoids forgetting things

Artificial Intelligence applied to help care for the aging: "An elderly lady is about to go to bed. She goes into her room, sits down on the bed, takes off her slippers and turns off the light. Suddenly, before getting into bed, a small alarm goes off and a mobile device reminds her that she has not taken her tablets.

This is how the new intelligent system developed by researchers from the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the UGR works. Maria Ros Izquierdo is from the Higher Technical School of Computer Engineering of the UGR and the co-author of a study which is published this month in the Expert Systems with Applications magazine. 'It is a prototype which, in a non-intrusive manner, facilitates the control of the activity of people with special needs and increases their independence', she explained to SINC."

"A team of researchers from the University of Granada (UGR) has created a system with Artificial Intelligence techniques which notifies elderly people or people with special needs of the forgetting of certain everyday tasks. This system uses sensors distributed in the environment in order to detect their actions and mobile devices which remind them, for example, to take their keys before they leave home."

Singularity University taps students' technology ideas

Singularity taps students' technology ideas: "The inaugural graduates of Singularity University, a Silicon Valley school backed by NASA, Google Inc., and tech industry luminaries like Ray Kurzweil, unveiled their grand visions on Thursday for leveraging emerging technologies to solve humanity's great challenges."

"Before a filled conference room at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, the students faced the dual pressures of presenting what were both final class projects for the faculty on hand, as well as business pitches to the venture capitalists and business leaders in attendance. Most, if not all, of the four teams hope to secure the funding necessary to transform their ideas into viable ventures.

RFID--A Key to Automating Everything: Scientific American

"Thirteen years ago, in an article for Scientific American, the late Mark Weiser, then my colleague at Xerox PARC, outlined his bold vision of “ubiquitous computing”: small computers would be embedded in everyday objects all around us and, using wireless connections, would respond to our presence, desires and needs without being actively manipulated. This network of mobile and fixed devices would do things for us automatically and so invisibly that we would notice only their effects. Weiser called such systems “calm technology,” because they would make it easier for us to focus on our work and other activities, instead of demanding that we interact with and control them, as the typical PC does today.

"Today systems based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology are helping to move Weiser’s vision closer to reality. These systems consist of tags (small silicon chips that contain identifying data and sometimes other information) and of readers that automatically receive and decode that data.

Women Scientists And Engineers Tackle Isolation On Campus

ScienceDaily — Integrating new location-aware computer networks with old-fashioned human networks, researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) have developed an innovative solution to the problem of isolation that women face in the academic science and engineering workforce. The project, 'NJIT Advance,' is funded by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF)."