Techno-News Blog

November 24, 2012

Schools grappling with how to best use technology in the classroom

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By Richard Cuthbertson, Calgary Herald

Canadian schools are grappling with how best to use technology in the classroom. The results in Alberta, so far, are mixed. One recent study of technology in Alberta high schools found some encouraging examples of really creative and engaging use. But in many other cases, researchers learned, using technology didn’t move much beyond looking things up on the Internet. Researchers also found examples of teachers and students being restricted by school-imposed firewalls or bandwidth limitations. Another project, an Alberta Education initiative called Speak Out, which asks students to share their thoughts on education, found some surprising attitudes. Students may be plugged into their smartphones and tablets, but when they really drill down into what is important to them in the classroom, a lot of things rank well above technology.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Schools+grappling+with+best+technology+classroom/7568017/story.html

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November 23, 2012

Flying Helicopter Orb Guided By Brainwaves

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by Nidhi Subbaraman, Technology Review

The Orbit’s distinctive shell is designed to protect its blades when it whams into walls or the ceiling, Puzzlebox explains. The helicopter shares a Bluetooth connection with a Mindwave Mobile EEG headset made by NeuroSky, the company that is also behind the Necomimi robotic ears. By linking moods with flight instructions to “mood” patterns picked up by the EEG headset, a person wearing the headset can cause the Orbit to fly forward or higher. The Orbit helicopter can be controlled using just the headset, a smartphone, and Puzzlebox mobile software. An optional third piece is the Puzzlebox “Pyramid,” a remote control system that collects data read by the headset. The Pyramid reflects the “mood” of the person wearing the headset by a ring of colored lights on its front face. You can also choose flight commands that will go along with a certain mood.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/507651/flying-helicopter-orb-guided-by-brainwaves/

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Fabrication Trick Offers Fivefold Leap in Hard-Disk Capacity

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By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Current hard-drive designs are reaching their limit in data storage, but a new manufacturing technique could allow drive capacities to keep expanding. The current method of making the platters that store data inside hard disks has been refined so much that it won’t allow for further significant improvements. Fine lines: Polymer molecules assembled themselves into the regular pattern of 10 nanometer-wide corridors in the larger of these two microscope images, thanks to the use of a new coating that helps the molecules align correctly. The smaller image shows that without the coating, the polymers don’t form organized structures. A technique that enables the nanopatterned layers that store data in hard disk drives to assemble themselves has been improved to better suit mass production, and could enable disks that store five times as much data as the largest available today.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507481/fabrication-trick-offers-fivefold-leap-in-hard-disk-capacity/

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How Friction May Someday Charge Your Cell Phone

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By Katherine Bourzac, Technology Review

A nanogenerator made from inexpensive materials harvests mechanical energy and produces enough power to charge personal electronics. Extending the battery life of portable gadgets would let users go longer between charges. The phenomenon that causes a painful shock when you touch metal after dragging your shoes on the carpet could someday be harnessed to charge personal electronics. Researchers at Georgia Tech have created a device that takes advantage of static electricity to convert movement—like a phone bouncing around in your pocket—into enough power to charge a cell phone battery. It is the first demonstration that these kinds of materials have enough oomph to power personal electronics.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507386/how-friction-may-someday-charge-your-cell-phone/

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November 22, 2012

Free Textbooks Spell Disruption for College Publishers

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by Michael Fitzgerald, Technology Review

Boundless Learning, a Boston company that has begun giving away free electronic textbooks covering college subjects like American history, anatomy and physiology, economics, and psychology. What’s controversial is how Boundless creates these texts. The company trawls for public material on sites like Wikipedia and then crafts it into online books whose chapters track closely to those of top-selling college titles. In April, Boundless was sued by several large publishers who accused the startup of engaging in “the business model of theft.” Theft or not, the college textbook industry is ripe for a disruptive shock from the Internet. Publishers today operate using what Mark Perry, a professor at the University of Michigan, calls a “cartel-style” model: students are required to buy specific texts at high prices. Perry has calculated that prices for textbooks have been rising at three times the rate of inflation since the 1980s.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506371/free-textbooks-spell-disruption-for-college-publishers/

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Google’s Internet Service Might Actually Bring the U.S. Up to Speed

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by David Talbot, Technology Review

Google’s effort to install a blazingly fast, gigabit-per-second fiber Internet service in the two-state metropolis of Kansas City—a speed 100 times faster than the national average—is a radical new business direction for the company, and perhaps provides an unorthodox model for how to rewire parts of the United States. At one level, the project reflects Google’s desire to keep developing new businesses by giving people ultrafast speeds and then offering experimental services like Google TV. But if Google’s business model for actually getting fiber built pans out, it may usher in a new era for privately built broadband.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507476/googles-internet-service-might-actually-bring-the-us-up-to-speed/

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Computers identify what makes abstract art move us

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by Hal Hodson, New Scientist

Ecstacy. Joy. Sadness. Despair. The sweeping lines and blocks of colour in abstract art prompt us to respond emotionally in ways that we do not really understand. Now computers are getting in on the act, and the results could add a new dimension to the weird world of artificial creativity. The pioneering abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky (whose work is pictured) suggested that the emotional effects of abstract art are “objective, determined by the characteristics of the colours and their interactions”. If that is true, machines should be able to get a handle on those emotions, too. It turns out that they can. A team led by Nicu Sebe at the University of Trento in Italy used machine vision to analyse 500 abstract paintings at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628916.000-computers-identify-what-makes-abstract-art-move-us.html

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November 21, 2012

Spotify Is Coming To The Web

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by John Paul Titlow, ReadWrite

Soon, Spotify will be joining us all where we hang out the most: the World Wide Web. The wildly popular streaming music service is breaking free of its app-only confines and launching a browser-based version, the company confirmed. This is great news. To date, Spotify’s relationship with the Web has been a little awkward. Since the service has long existed only in the form of a desktop app and mobile counterparts, embedding music from Spotify within Web pages hasn’t exactly been the completely elegant thing. Various widgets exist to do it, but they require the desktop app to be running in order to function.

http://readwrite.com/2012/11/16/great-news-spotify-is-coming-to-the-web

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More Apps for Android Tablets

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By KIT EATON, NY Times

This week’s App Smart was about apps you may like to try out on your new Android tablet — a class of device that is really making a splash in the mobile computing market to rival the iPad. But of course there are thousands upon thousands of apps, and only limited space in the column, so here are a few more suggestions. I suggested the News360 app, and by all means try it out free. But if it does not appeal to you, then you may have more luck with the Flipboard app, also free. This is another highly popular news aggregator that has a graphics-centric interface controlled by gestures. The app is now optimized for the bigger screen real estate that tablets offer compared with Android phones.

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/app-smart-extra-more-apps-for-android-tablets/

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Twtrland: A Social Analytics Tool And Simple Way To Discover New People In The Twitterverse

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by TechCrunch

Twitter does a lot of things well, but it hasn’t really nailed context yet — or search. After you first join the service, it takes a significant amount of following and unfollowing before you settle on a stream (or Twitter hose, as some call it) that works for you. Search, too, is noisy and generally unhelpful. In May, Twitter started to test some personalization features to start making better suggestions in terms of who to follow, etc., and it continues to improve search and “Discover.” In the meantime, a newly-launched platform called Twtrland wants to give you a simple way to figure out whether or not you should follow, along with a new way to search the Twitter graph.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/16/twtrland-a-social-analytics-tool-and-simple-way-to-discover-new-people-in-the-twitterverse/

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November 20, 2012

The anti-MOOC? Small costly online courses

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by Amy Scott, Marketplace

There’s a moment in John Covach’s course on the history of rock music when he takes apart the Beatles song that launched the British Invasion. Until now only students at the University of Rochester could take Covach’s class. Starting next fall it’ll be open to students at Duke, Northwestern and Vanderbilt — online. Rochester is one of ten universities teaming up to offer online courses to one another’s students. Students from outside can also apply. Unlike massive online courses, these classes will be small. Think the opening credits of “The Brady Bunch.” Also unlike most free online courses, students will earn full college credit. Ed Macias, provost of Washington University in St. Louis, says, “we want the online learning experience to be as rich and robust as that we already have in our in-classroom experience.” Speaking of rich, that experience will cost just as much as traditional classes — roughly $4,000 a course.

http://www.marketplace.org/topics/tech/education/anti-mooc-small-costly-online-courses

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All-Carbon Solar Cells Will Mean Cheap and Flexible Solar Panels

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By Katherine Bourzac, Technology Review

Carbon solar cells promise to be inexpensive, printable, flexible, and tough enough to withstand extreme conditions. Using a grab bag of novel nanomaterials, researchers at Stanford University have built the first all-carbon solar cells. Their carbon photovoltaics don’t produce much electricity, but as the technology is perfected, all-carbon cells could be inexpensive, printable, flexible, and tough enough to withstand extreme environments and weather. The goal is not to replace solar cells made from silicon and other inorganic materials, says Zhenan Bao, professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University, who led the work. Rather, it is to fill new niches. “Carbon is one of the most abundant elements on earth, and it is versatile,” Bao says. Carbon is remarkably tough—atom-thick graphene and long, thin carbon nanotubes are two of the strongest materials ever tested. So carbon photovoltaics might be sprayed on the sides of buildings, or rolled up and taken into the desert. Various forms of carbon can be printed to make thin, flexible, transparent, and even stretchable electronics.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506901/all-carbon-solar-cells-will-mean-cheap-and-flexible-solar-panels/

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Qeexo’s Touch Screen Tech Can Distinguish Fingernails from Knuckles

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by Rachel Metz, MIT Technology Review

As smartphones skyrocketed in popularity, we got used to using our fingertips to navigate their touch screens with pokes, taps, swipes, and two-finger pinches. There’s more to our fingers than just the tips, though, and a startup called Qeexo aims to take advantage of this with technology that can differentiate between fingertips, nails, and knuckles. The San Jose, California-based company’s technology, called FingerSense, can be used to do things like bring up a menu of options (akin to right-clicking on a mouse) on an e-mail with the knock of a knuckle, or enable new kinds of controls in games. Currently in talks with phone manufacturers, Qeexo hopes to have FingerSense installed in smartphones within a year.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/507516/qeexos-touch-screen-tech-can-distinguish-fingernails-from-knuckles/

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November 19, 2012

In Online Learning Exams, Big Brother Will Be Watching

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by Brian Bergstein, Technology Review

The boom in online education has created a job that didn’t exist a few years ago: remote test proctor. More than 100 of them work for ProctorU, a fast-growing startup founded in 2009. Sitting at computers in ProctorU’s offices in Hoover, Alabama, or Livermore, California, the proctors use webcams and screen-sharing software to observe students anywhere as they take a test or complete an online assignment. As the students do the work on their computers, the proctors watch to make sure they don’t cheat.

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/506346/in-online-exams-big-brother-will-be-watching/

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Tablet devices in schools beneficial to children

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By Anna Kårhammar, E&T

School children who use a tablet computer benefit the most when allowed to take it home, rather than just using it in school, reveals research from the University of Hull. The iPad Scotland Evaluation Study set out to establish the impact of handheld computer tablet devices in schools, and found that personal ‘ownership’ of such devices is the single most important factor for successful use of the technology. The study is the largest of its kind ever conducted within the UK, covering students from eight schools across six Scottish Local Authorities over a six-month period. “We saw very early on that the biggest impact came from personal ownership of the computer, and being able to take it home,” said Kevin Burden, principal investigator on the research project. The research focused on four central themes in order to evaluate the overall effectiveness of these devices in assisting with learning, and was carried out by researchers from the Technology Enhanced Learning Research group at the Faculty of Education at the University. The first theme – how tablet devices impact on teaching and learning generally – found that benefits included greater motivation, engagement, parental involvement and understanding of complex ideas.

http://eandt.theiet.org/news/2012/nov/scottish-schools.cfm

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UK Schools criticised on computer use

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by UK MSN

Innovation charity Nesta claimed millions of pounds worth of cutting-edge technology is sitting unused in school cupboards. UK schools are spending more than £450 million a year on hi-tech computing equipment, with “little or no evidence” about the impact on learning, a report has warned. The report from the innovation charity Nesta warned that schools were “buying into the hype and lure of digital education” without thinking through how new tablet computers, whiteboards and games are going to be used. As a result, millions of pounds worth of cutting-edge technology is sitting unused in school cupboards. The report, entitled Decoding Learning, found that modern technology was largely being used to support existing teaching practices, rather than transforming the learning experience. Nesta chief executive Geoff Mulgan said: “A tablet replacing an exercise book is not innovation – it’s just a different way to make notes.

http://tech.uk.msn.com/news/schools-criticised-on-computer-use-1

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November 18, 2012

LinkedIn’s Core Mission: Making Its Profiles The Next Generation Résumé

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by DREW OLANOFF, Tech Crunch

I spent a few hours on the LinkedIn campus a few weeks ago, with the sole mission of learning more about the new LinkedIn profile redesign. It was quite a shift from its previous iteration, and instead of just letting the regular news cycle and announcement go without further detail, I wanted to actually spend time with the people who put their ideas, blood, sweat and tears into the project. As you might know, something like this isn’t easy, especially when you have as many users as LinkedIn does. Not only that, but there are many different types of LinkedIn users who participate on the site for a slew of reasons: people looking to connect, people looking for a job and recruiters looking for talent. How do you design and re-design one site to make all of those people happy? That’s what I set out to learn

http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/14/linkedins-core-mission-making-its-profiles-the-next-generation-resume/

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Texas Instruments Cuts 1,700 Jobs and Winds Down Tablet Chips

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By REUTERS

Texas Instruments is eliminating 1,700 jobs, as it winds down its mobile processor business to focus on chips for more profitable markets like cars and home appliances. Texas Instruments said in September it would halt costly investments in the increasingly competitive smartphone and tablet chip business, leading Wall Street to speculate that part of the company’s processor unit, called OMAP, could be sold. The layoffs are equivalent to nearly 5 percent of the Austin, Texas-based company’s global workforce. “A sale would have been better than a restructuring but a restructuring is certainly better than nothing,” Sanford Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2012/11/14/business/14reuters-texasinstruments-jobcuts.html

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Fla. math teacher’s online lessons go viral

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by Associated Press

A southwest Florida math teacher is getting students around the world excited about math thanks to some creative YouTube postings. St. Petersburg High School teacher Rob Tarrou began recording lessons on algebra, trigonometry and statistics last year and posting them online to help a student who couldn’t attend class. The Tampa Bay Times reports people around the world have watched “Tarrou’s Chalk Talk” videos more than half a million times. More than 3,000 people from more than 100 countries have subscribed to his online channel.

http://www.winknews.com/Local-Florida/2012-11-12/Fla-math-teachers-online-lessons-go-viral#.UKRUK-TaI44

http://youtu.be/UBBV7O_KT8c

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November 17, 2012

How to Bridge the Hiring Gap

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By ROBERT W. GOLDFARB, NY Times

I talked to about a dozen C.E.O.’s in a variety of industries, along with more than 135 graduates, to try to get to the bottom of this hiring paradox. Instead of finding shared interests linking those who need work and those who need workers, I uncovered a serious divide that limits the success of both. Every C.E.O. I met described recent graduates as lacking the skills and discipline required in today’s workplace. They complained that young employees deemed themselves entitled to promotion before mastering their assigned tasks. All concluded, in effect, “Let them grow up on someone else’s payroll.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/jobs/bridging-the-hiring-gap-for-college-graduates.html

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Happy 8th Birthday Firefox! Can Mozilla Adapt To The Mobile Era?

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by Dan Rowinski, ReadWrite

On November 9, 2004, President George W. Bush was still glowing a week after his successful re-election bid and preparing for his second term in the White House. Xbox game Halo 2 had the most successful opening day sales of any video game, topping $125 million. And the Mozilla Foundation released the first version of the Firefox browser. Yes, Firefox is eight years old. Begat from the ruins of Netscape and the evolution of the Mozilla Navigator browser, Firefox had a very specific aim: topple the near monopoly of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

http://readwrite.com/2012/11/09/happy-8th-birthday-firefox-can-mozilla-adapt-to-the-mobile-era

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