April 2012, Vol. 13., No. 4
- Should We Get Rid of Middle School?
- New Wireless Sensor Could Enhance Post-Surgery Treatment Follow-Up
- Envisioning a Blind-Friendly Internet
- White House Announces $200 Million For Big Data Research
- What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine
Should We Get Rid of Middle School?
Students who move to new schools for grades six or seven exhibit disproportionately lower math and reading scores and form an unusually large percentage of the students who drop out of high school (compared with kids who attended kindergarten through eighth grade schools prior to high school). These achievement drop-offs equate to losing between three and a half and seven months of expected learning, according to a survey of all Florida public schools conducted by Harvard researchers Martin West and Guido Schwerdt. The effects are more pronounced among students who switch in seventh grade, and are severest in urban districts and among African American students.
Nor do the students ever fully recover. Compared with students who never changed schools, they still averaged lower math and reading scores by the end of their eighth-grade year. Furthermore, their probability of dropping out of high school by grade 10 was 18% higher. West and Schwerdt say that their findings vindicate K-8 schools, which instruct students continuously from kindergarten to eighth grade.
Source: Harvard
New Wireless Sensor Could Enhance Post-Surgery Treatment Follow-Up
A prototype micro-scale wireless sensor could give surgeons better and timelier imaging of a patient’s physical condition after an operation than even the best X-rays and MRIs. Developed by engineers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute engineers, the sensor—which measures just 4 millimeters in length and 500 microns in width—would be implanted into the surgical site by being fitted atop any one of the commonly used orthopedic musculoskeletal implants that patients might receive, such as plates, prostheses, or rods. Once in place, the sensor would transmit data wirelessly, with no radiation, battery power, or electricity inside the body required, to an external receptor device. Compared to the existing imaging equipment, this sensor bodes to be less invasive and, thanks to its compactness and few parts, less costly.
Additionally, it would be much more reliable and accurate. Surgeons who use it would gain streams of accurate measurements of the healing site’s strain, pressure, temperature, and other indicators. This information would enable them to gauge more precisely whether a patient is healing properly and when he or she is able to resume work and daily activities. Eric Ledet, the Rennsselaer assistant professor of biomedical engineering who is leading the project, has spent five years developing it and is optimistic about its progress. He is currently obtaining a patent and is looking for ways to mass-produce it.
Source: Rensselaer
Envisioning a Blind-Friendly Internet
For all the multimedia wonders of the Internet, the vast store of information, knowledge, and connections it contains is largely based on graphics and text—visual input that is inaccessible to the visually impaired. Now, an information-studies scholar who is blind aims to make the Internet more universally available.
Blind and sighted users organize their online tasks and process information differently. Thus, text-based search tools such as tags are not particularly useful to the visually impaired, says Rakesh Babu, an assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s School of Information Studies. (Babu himself lost his vision to a degenerative eye disease.)
Screen readers provide digitized voice translations of text, but they produce a linear online experience that cannot keep pace with a nonlinear visual experience comprising color cues, animations, and text that can be quickly scanned.
Babu’s research is focusing on understanding the differences in how blind users conceptualize online tasks compared with sighted users; this includes not just information gathering, but also communicating and engaging in activities that are already available to sighted users—and are vital to career prospects and to independent living.
“Web accessibility is not a legal issue; it’s an equal opportunity issue,” says Babu. “When you sit down to design a Web site, you have to think, how would a screen reader read my Web site? You need to be user-centered from the beginning.”
Source: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Watch a demo by Rakesh Babu on YouTube
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White House Announces $200 Million For Big Data Research
The Obama administration will allocate $200 million to new and ongoing science initiatives to collect and interpret extremely large, structured and unstructured data sets. The recipients of the funds include NASA, for a wide range of activities including using satellite data to predict the impact of forest fires; the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), among others.
The amount of potentially useful data, particularly in terms of health, has grown exponentially over the past several decades, said NIH director Francis Collins, and the costs associated with collecting such data continue to decrease. In terms of human genome sequencing, in particular, “the average cost has fallen from $400 million in 2003 to less than $8000, today,” said Collins in a press conference on Friday, (March 30.) “So this is a real challenge.”
Collins announced that NIH will publish 200 terebytes of genomic data, a storehouse roughly equivalent to 16 million file cabinets, to the cloud through Amazon Web Services as part of the 1000 Genomes Project.
The largest recipient of funds will be the U.S. Department of Defense. “The data being brought to bear on Department of Defense operations, the data collected is often imperfect, incomplete, and heterogeneous…the share volume of info is creating background clutter, making it hard to identify the data we need to see,” said Kaigham “Ken” Gabriel, acting head of the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA).
Source: The White House Blog, The White House fact sheet on big data in government, PDF
What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine? (Members Only)
A selection of articles, special reports, and other future-focused material on our Web site that you might have missed. Members may sign in to read and comment. Not a member? Join now at http://www.wfs.org/renew.
Thriving in the Automated Economy
Two management experts show why labor’s race against automation will only be won if we partner with our machines. They advise government regulators not to stand in the way of human–machine innovation. Read more.
A World Wide Mind: The Coming Collective Telempathy
The Internet plus humanity equals hyperorganism, a merger of man and machine that may result in global mindfulness. Read more.
Nuclear Power’s Unsettled Future
A year after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan, prospects for the nuclear power industry worldwide are far from certain. An energy policy scholar assesses the key economic, environmental, political, and psychological hinges on which nuclear power’s future now swings. Read more
A Future of Fewer Words?: Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language
Natural selection is as much a phenomenon in human language as it is in natural ecosystems. An ongoing “survival of the fittest” may lead to continuing expansion of image-based communications and the extinction of more than half the world’s languages by this century’s end. Read more.
Visions: Toward Better Space-Weather Forecasts
Scientists hope to help avert devastating impacts of solar outbursts. Read more.