Many U.S. schools adding iPads, trimming textbooks

From USATODAY.com

I got to be Santa Claus this week, handing out 11 iPads, a Kindle and a Sony eReader to students participating in pilot projects here at Messiah. We're exploring the utility of these technologies in the learning environment. At Educause last year I heard about several school districts forgoing textbooks in favor of iPads and digital resources; according to the article there are now at least 600 schools districts that have launched programs which provide at least some of their students with iPads for use in school.

Image Source: getliquid.com

I'd love to see this at my kids school, if for no other reason than to save their backs from the enormous backpacks full of textbooks :)

For incoming freshmen at western Connecticut's suburban Brookfield High School, hefting a backpack weighed down with textbooks is about to give way to tapping out notes and flipping electronic pages on a glossy iPad tablet computer.

The iPads generally cost districts between $500 and $600, depending on what accessories and service plans are purchased.

By comparison, Brookfield High in Connecticut estimates it spends at least that much yearly on every student's textbooks, not including graphing calculators, dictionaries and other accessories they can get on the iPads.

IT Hiring Remains Strong Despite Economic Fears

From CIO.com

Good news for CIS folks on the jobs front:

"IT professionals looking for new jobs need not fear that the recent spate of bad economic news will hamper their job searches. IT staffing industry executives agree that IT hiring in the U.S. will remain robust through the end of the year, bucking renewed fears of a double dip recession recently brought on by stock market corrections, the ongoing debt crisis in Europe and the U.S., and Standard & Poor's downgrade of America's credit rating.

"Despite the economic woes we've been hearing about, I haven't on the ground seen any change in demand [for IT workers]," says Shane Bernstein, managing director of IT staffing firm Q. "In fact, demand keeps increasing. Every week I hear [from our clients], 'We have a lot more positions coming down the pipeline that we need to fill.'"

Quantum optical link sets new time records

From physorg.com

Image Source: physorg.com

Advice to young people interested in cutting-edge computing: take lots of physics! So many interesting physics news items... so little time to comprehend.

"Quantum communication could be an option for the absolutely secure transfer of data. The key component in quantum communication over long distances is the special phenomenon called entanglement between two atomic systems. Entanglement between two atomic systems is very fragile and up until now researchers have only been able to maintain the entanglement for a fraction of a second. But in new experiments at the Niels Bohr Institute researchers have succeeded in setting new records and maintaining the entanglement for up to an hour. The results are published in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters."

SignalGuru - a high-tech way to avoid red lights

Image Source: gizmag.com

From gizmag.com

Driving is yet another activity being totally transformed by technology. I always check my iPhone before heading across the Susquehanna to figure out if it's worth it to take the Turnpike (and avoid the 83 traffic). This story describes a system to help drivers avoid red lights.

"One of the most effective hypermiling techniques is maintaining a steady speed while driving instead of constantly stopping and starting. Unfortunately, traffic lights all too often conspire to foil attempts at keeping the vehicle rolling. Researchers at MIT and Princeton have now devised a system that gathers visual data from the cameras of a network of dashboard-mounted smartphones and tells drivers the optimal speed to drive at to avoid waiting at the next set of lights."

"The new system, dubbed SignalGuru, was tested in both Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Singapore. In Cambridge, where traffic signals are on fixed schedules, the researchers say the system was able to predict when lights would change with an average error of only two-thirds of a second and helped drivers cut fuel consumption by an average of 20 percent. "

Researchers identify first flaws in the Advanced Encryption Standard

From Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Image Source: edgetechcorp.com

A flaw in the AES sounds pretty scary, given that most of our online banking and other 'secure' network transactions rely on AES. But note the repercussions (esp. those of you who have been in Data Structures and Algorithms):

"To put this into perspective: on a trillion machines, that each could test a billion keys per second, it would take more than two billion years to recover an AES-128 key."

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New Computer Chip Modeled on a Living Brain

From Popular Science

Note the reference to the von Neumann bottleneck (esp. students in Organization of Programming Languages). See more about von Neumann architecture.

“This new architecture represents a critical shift away form today’s traditional von Neumann computers, to extremely power-efficient architecture,” Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research, said in an interview. “It integrates memory with processors, and it is fundamentally massively parallel and distributed as well as event-driven, so it begins to rival the brain’s function, power and space.”

Computational method predicts new uses for existing medicines

From National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Image Source: nccs.gov

An example of computation as a "fourth leg" of scientific research.

"For the first time ever, scientists are using computers and genomic information to predict new uses for existing medicines.

A National Institutes of Health-funded computational study analyzed genomic and drug data to predict new uses for medicines that are already on the market. A team led by Atul J. Butte, M.D., Ph.D., of Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif., reports its results in two articles in the Aug. 17 online issue of Science Translational Medicine.

“Bringing a new drug to market typically takes about $1 billion, and many years of research and development,” said Rochelle M. Long, Ph.D., who directs the NIH Pharmacogenomics Research Network. “If we can find ways to repurpose drugs that are already approved, we could improve treatments and save both time and money.”

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