Digital World is Exploding

Get past the advert and there are five-and-a-half minutes of amazing numbers. Then a bit more adverting and a great discussion by Khan on the future of education, tomorrow’s classrooms, the importance of self-directed education.

I wish they wouldn’t throw in their sales blurb so often.

Sunburst Digital – Inspiring Videos on Tranforming Education from Sunburst on Vimeo.

Credits to respective copyright holders.

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Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and author of two technology training books for middle school. She wrote Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman. She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a tech columnist for Examiner.com, Editorial Review Board member for ISTE’s Journal for Computing Teachers, IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything. Currently, she’s editing a thriller for her agent that should be be out to publishers this summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

Bing Caters to IE Users

Bing Users Are From Internet Explorer; Google Users From Firefox, Chrome & Safari, according to a new study by Search EngineLand:

Is anyone surprised?

Jacqui Murray is the editor of a technology curriculum for K-fifth grade and creator of two technology training books for middle school. She is the author of Building a Midshipman, the story of her daughter’s journey from high school to United States Naval Academy midshipman.  She is webmaster for five blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice book reviewer, a columnist for Examiner.com, an ISTE article reviewer, an IMS tech expert, and a weekly contributor to Write Anything and Technology in Education. Currently, she’s working on a techno-thriller that should be ready this summer. Contact Jacqui at her writing office or her tech lab, Ask a Tech Teacher.

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IBM Computer Competes with Jeopardy Winner

Fascinating. I wish computers could solve world hunger.

IBM computer taking on ‘Jeopardy!’ champs for $1M

By Jim Fitzgerald, Associated Press

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — It’s the size of 10 refrigerators, and it swallows encyclopedias whole, but an IBM computer was lacking one thing it needed to battle the greatest champions from the “Jeopardy!” quiz show.

It couldn’t hit a buzzer.

But that’s been fixed, and on Thursday the hardware and software system named Watson was to play a practice round against Ken Jennings, who won a record 74 consecutive “Jeopardy!” games in 2004-05, and Brad Rutter, who won a record of nearly $3.3 million in prize money.

“‘Jeopardy!’ felt that in order for the game to be as fair as possible, just as a human has to physically hit a buzzer, the system also would have to do that,” IBM spokeswoman Jennifer McTighe said. “Now Watson has its own real buzzer.”

The practice round was to be played on a stage at an IBM research center in Yorktown Heights, 38 miles north of Manhattan and across the country from the game show’s home in Culver City, Calif. A real contest among the three, to be televised Feb. 14-16, also will be played at IBM, but the date hasn’t been made public.

The winner of the televised match will be awarded $1 million. Second place gets $300,000, third place $200,000. IBM, which has headquarters in Armonk, said it would give its winnings to charity while Jennings and Rutter would give away half theirs.

Read on

Knowing Twitter Doesn’t Mean Using it

…or as my friend Jason Baer says, Twitter Sucks at Converting Awareness to Usage.

Here’s the statistics as revealed by an Edison Research study:

Known by 87%, just 7% of Americans use Twitter. Thus, fewer than one in 13 Americans who know about Twitter, actually use Twitter. Compare that ratio to Facebook, where 88% have heard of it, and 41% have a profile (a conversion rate approaching 50%).

–To get Sunday Stats every week, subscribe to the RSS feed (see sidebar).

Fermat’s Last Theorem–Extreme Sports for the Brain

I love exercising my brain. I don’t like health clubs or running, so the only

350 years ago, in the margin of this text, Fermat claimed he could prove this theorem

way I get exercise is by thinking. To me, this is one of life’s traits that separates human from non-. Have you ever seen a dog sit quietly and think. No. He falls asleep.  Most animals hunt, play or sleep. Their critical problems–those that might cause their extinction, those that might make their life easier–are solved by evolution. They are replaced by a different species that adapts better to the environment.

Not true with the human species, Homo. When we aren’t hunting or playing, we are as likely to be thinking through a problem as sleeping. We have adapted to our environment as much through our own big brain’s problem solving abilities as by evolution’s incremental process of replacing one species with another.

Extreme sports for a thinker is solving unsolvable mathematical problems. And one of the most extreme is Fermat’s Last Theorem. It took 350 years and over 150 pages to solve the first time, making it a worthy exercise for the brilliant human brain.

In the novel I am currently working on, my antagonist sponsors a competition between a brilliant mathematical scientist and a unique problem solving AI to see which can come up with the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Even for an eidetic mind, memorizing 150 pages of obtuse equations would be close to impossible. But if you know the logic that provides a blueprint for the solution, you could reproduce it.

Sunday Stats: Turn Numbers into Pictures

Here’s your site for all things number pictures:

How’s a DNA Computer Work

You’ve probably read a lot about DNA computers. The next generation of

computing power. Based on the idea that our cells program our entire genome with DNA and its six bases. All our bodies do is rearrange the position of the bases and the length of the message. Kind of like the bases are letters, strung together into words, or sentences (without the space between the words). A high school senior won a scholarship by programming the Declaration of Independence into a DNA molecule. She described it as counterintuitively easy.

Scientists accept that DNA computers are the future. DNA is the most common molecule on earth. A DNA computer that fits in a drop of water, carries its own energy pack , stores millions of times the data of a personal computer, operates hundreds of thousands of times faster than conventional silicon computers–and performs ten trillion operations at once.

A typical problem that a DNA computer excels at is the so-called “burnt pancake problem”:

Sunday Stats: Internet Use by Age

Lots of people use the internet for lots of different reasons.

• Teens are more likely to be playing video games
• Gen X and Y–and younger boomers–are more likely to be watching videos
• Older boomers are more likely to be job hunting
• The Silent Generation is sending instant messages

A Scentific Love Story (Kind Of)

–thanks to xkcd

Sunday Stats: Lets Talk Video Games

Source: Online Education

Early Warning Signs of Technology Addiction

I’ve been wondering about this… about myself. I spend an awful lot of time researching gadgets, virtual reality, AIs. I’m considering joining Second Life. I understand the difference between ‘crackers’ and ‘hackers’, and when I’m reading about ‘virtual reality’ as opposed to ‘simulated reality’. I’d rather chat online than in person.

Am I addicted? For a diagnosis, I went to Clara Moskowitz at LiveScience. Here’s her analysis:

How to Tell If You Are Addicted to Technology

By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Staff Writer

posted: 25 January 2008 03:51 pm ET

They’re not called “Crackberries” for nothing. Some people may be as addicted to Blackberries and other personal electronics as junkies are to drugs, according to John O’Neill, director of addictions services for the Menninger Clinic in Houston.

These over-wired people are so focused on their gadgets, they neglect relationships with other people, O’Neill said. Communication aids such as texting and e-mail may actually hamper our abilities to have more important face-to-face conversations.

But some experts object to labeling the techno-savvy as addicts without verifying that they meet the precise psychological definition of addiction.

* In 2006, psychiatrists at Stanford University surveyed people over the phone to try to determine how compulsively they used the Internet. They found a sizable portion of respondents displayed troubling tendencies, but could not determine whether their use merited a medical diagnosis and said more research needed to be done.

* A 2006 article in the journal Perspectives in Psychiatric Care said the Internet can “promote addictive behaviors” and advocated formally recognizing its use as a possible addiction to improve treatment.

* Another research paper, published in 2007 in the Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology by a psychiatrist at Tel Aviv University, recommended that Internet addiction be regarded as an extreme disorder on par with gambling, sex addiction and kleptomania.

O’Neill admitted that there is not enough research to establish whether excessive technology use qualifies as addiction, but cited people who can’t sit through a movie without checking their cell phones or make it through dinner without peeking at their Blackberries as potential addicts.

“Technology can become more than a passing problem and more like an addiction,” he told LiveScience. He listed some danger signs: “You become irritable when you can’t use it. The Internet goes down and you lose your mind. You start to hide your use.”

He said he can see corollaries between drug and alcohol addiction and the way some people use technology.

But some experts object to calling any excessive behavior “addiction.” (more)

Is the Virtual World More Real than Life?

Second Life is a 3D virtual world created by its Residents (people like you) that’s bursting with entertainment, experiences, and opportunity. Not only is it a play world for adults, a place they can be anyone they wish, with radically different physique and goals than they’re saddled with in real life, Second Life offers an array of virtual tools to the business and scientific world. They call this Second Life grid. already, it’s being used by corporations, education, non-profits, to simulate challenges they face and test out solutions.

Second Life Work offers a virtual world for meetings that are affordable (no one goes further than their computer), environmentally-friendly with exactly the business climate you’d like. There, you can hold meetings and events, conduct training sessions, or create simulations that address a wide variety of business problems and situations.

It also can be used as a virtual lab, where tests that can’t be completed in the real world, can be exhaustively studied in a 3D environment:

A Virtual Laboratory

Residents of Second Life—an online computer game in which players can do almost everything they can do in real life, such as buy and sell property, take classes and date—tout their world’s realistic settings and social opportunities. Now a growing number of scientists are beginning to take notice and are bringing their human behavior research into the virtual world.

Second Life allows researchers to study scenarios that they cannot in real life…(more)

The (Virtual) Reality of Education’s Future

Intuitively, it sounds good. I get an image of the StarTrek Holodeck, walking through virtual forests where energy has been reformed as matter, where force fields make it feel like I’m walking, even though I’m not moving. I can touch, taste, even smell my surroundings, though they are nothing more than electrical currents. I experience it with all of my senses, like no book or video can ever deliver.

That’s my image of a Virtual 3D lab, which is nothing like what Wikipedia defines it: a software system designed to support teaching and learning in an educational setting. A VLE will normally work over the Internet and provide a collection of tools such as those for assessment, communication, uploading of content, return of students’ work, peer assessment, administration of student groups, collecting and organizing student grades, questionnaires, tracking tools, etc.

What is ‘reality’, at least according to the ground-breaking Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, is more like Google’s Holodeck Streetview: You know you aren’t moving, but the 10 high-definition 72-inch TV monitors, arranged in two five-screen semi-circles, give an eerie sense of being there. If you are a member of Second Life, you know better than most what this would be like.

Virtual 3-D lab aims to stimulate learning

Students at a Baltimore County high school this fall will explore the area surrounding Mount St. Helens in a vehicle that can morph from an aircraft to a car to a boat to learn about how the environment has changed since the volcano’s 1980 eruption.

But they’ll do it all without ever leaving their Chesapeake High School classroom–they will be using a three-dimensional Virtual Learning Environment developed by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) with the university’s Center for Technology Education.

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DNA Computers–Think Origami, or Brain Folds

Scientists have struggled for over thirty years to market a DNA computer to the masses. It can play tic-tac-toe and solve the Traveling Salesman Problem (best way for a national sales guy to visit twenty-thirty cities–quite relevant to everyday people). Now the experts are considering using DNA computer apps to fight disease. But, for us middle Americans, we are far from benefiting from the power, affordability and tiny size of DNA computers.

Here’s a clever idea I stumbled across on MIT’s blog. We all know that the reason the brain can do so much is it relies on the folds that cover its surface. Technically, they’re not ‘folds’; they’re Gyri or Gyrus (singular) and the ‘valleys’ between the Gyri are called Sulci or Sulcus. Anyway, Mother Nature added these to give that umph to our brains in power, storage capacity and speed that no computer comes close to matching. Why not add them to DNA computers? Here’s a discussion:

DNA Origami for Faster, Smaller Computer Chips

Using DNA structures, researchers may be able to construct tinier, cheaper chips

Artificial, self-assembling DNA structures may help make smaller and cheaper microchips, according to research presented in the latest issue of Nature Nanotechnology. Tinier microchips would allow faster computers and other electronics.

Researchers from IBM and the California Institute of Technology used a technique known as DNA origami, where a long strand of DNA is folded into a shape with many shorter strands dubbed staples, creating a three-dimensional shape. In the paper, the researchers demonstrated using DNA origami-shapes as a scaffold for carbon nanotubes–a trick that could eventually be used to create nanoscale microchips.

The DNA structures are tiny enough to have features measuring six nanometers–the current industry standard for microchips is 45 nanometers. The process could replace the expensive tools manufacturers currently use to make tiny chips, although IBM suggests that it could take up to 10 years to test and refine the process for manufacturing.

Is MS Word in Danger of Being Pulled?

This one’s hard to believe. A judge orders MS to stop selling MS Word because of patent infringements. I’ll be following this one:

Judge orders Microsoft to stop selling Word

A judge on Tuesday ordered Microsoft to stop selling Word, one of its premier products, in its current form due to patent infringement.

Judge Leonard Davis of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas issued a permanent injunction that “prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML,” according to a statement released by attorneys for the plantiff, i4i.

Microsoft said it was disappointed in the ruling and that it would appeal the verdict. (more)

12 Tips for Googling Like an Expert

I do a lot of research on Google. I’m a scientist and a grad student. It’s part of the package. Here’s how I get the most out of my time.

DNA Computers Moving from SciFi to Reality

DNA computers are coming, mark my word.  Two reasons:

• First: We’ve had viable alternatives in the past, but traditional computing power will soon be too slow and limited for our expectations. We’ll have to come up with the Next Great Computer.
• Second: DNA Computers need that Killer App. Once we are talking about something other than ‘the DNA computer that plays tic-tac-toe or that traveling salesman problem, see how fast they come to a store near you.