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Your book, now with sound. Image courtesy of Booktracks

Curl up with your iPad and start reading Gone with the Wind—go with me on this for a minute—and as you visualize Scarlett O’ Hara gliding across the room, you actually can hear the swish of her petticoats.

Or you’re plowing through The Da Vinci Code and suddenly you’re jolted by the two-note whine of Paris police sirens.

As disorienting as it may seem, the experience of reading to a soundtrack took a big leap forward last week with the launch of a new software application called Booktrack. The company, with a U.S. office in New York City, is about to start rolling out versions of e-books that come not only with music but also sound effects synched to the story line—a ticking clock here, a gunshot there and just like that, you’re multi-sensing. Booktrack files currently work on Apple devices and should be available on Android devices soon.

How does the book know when to fire the gun? It reads your mind. Almost. By calculating your reading speed from when you turn the page, it gauges when you’ll reach the word or group of words that trips a sound effect. For slow readers, the background music plays on a loop, idling euphoniously, until you get to one of the trigger words.

To show this isn’t some forever-in-beta bagatelle, Salman Rushdie, the Pulitzer Prize winner himself, was at the Booktrack launch party in New York. His short story “In the South” will be available with a soundtrack this fall. So will Jay McInerney’s “Solace.”

Plenty of classics will be getting the Booktrack treatment, perhaps with the notion that people will give the golden oldies another go if this time they come with music. Coming soon are sound-spiced versions of Huckleberry Finn, Peter Pan, The Three Musketeers, Pride and Prejudice, even Romeo and Juliet. (Hear those swords clanging? )

Let’s face it, though—this is not a product for those for whom a book is an experience in quiet immersion. Most likely Booktrack ultimately will be popular with the generation of people who can read/listen to a book while texting friends, watching “The Office” on Hulu and hacking into the Pentagon.

It’s no accident the first title available on Booktrack is a young adult, science fiction novel, The Power of Six by Pittacus Lore (aka James Frey). iTunes sells the Booktrack version for $12.99 and the ordinary e-book for $9.99.

Actually, a lot of innovative things are happening with sound these days. Here are a few of the latest:

• Pump up the volume: Orange, the French telecom company, has created a T-shirt that builds up enough energy through ambient sound to charge a smart phone. The shirt has sheets of piezoelectric film—the same thing you find in speakers—which can convert sound waves to enough current to charge a phone.  The downside: Right now, you’d have to stand along a noisy city street to generate enough juice.
• You again: Apple has applied for a patent for software that would allow your iPhone to recognize your voice.
• Noises off: Researchers in Spain have developed a prototype of an “acoustic cloak” that eliminates noise.
• Talk to the pants: MIT scientists have created plastic fibers that can detect and produce sounds. They can be used to make clothes that act as a microphone. 

Video bonus: A little old-school sound show featuring the lyrebird, which not only can mimic other birds, but also new sounds in the jungle, including a camera with a motor drive and strangely enough, a chainsaw.

What book do you think would be better with Booktrack treatment? Personally, I think the pitter-patter of hobbit feet would add a little something to Lord of the Rings.

Hurricane Irene makes landfall. Image courtesy of NASA

The week started with an earthquake, which led to the surreal scene of thousands of people standing on sidewalks in downtown Washington, realizing collectively that no one could get through on their cell phones and we’d have to talk to each other about our shared 15 seconds of shake, rattle and roll.

It ended with recurring reports of how it was going to rain cats and dogs and flying monkeys and how the power would probably go out, resulting in long lines of people buying enough batteries to light Vegas.

Usually, I love raging nature. It’s the great leveler, rendering us awed, thrown off our routines and scrambling like ants lugging rolls of toilet paper. Except, that in the past few years, these extreme events have come with such frequency that all sense of wonder is fading—not to mention that they’ve been tremendously destructive and costly. Hurricane Irene is the 10th billion-dollar natural disaster we’ve had in the U.S. alone this year, and it’s not even September.

You’re starting to hear this described as the “new normal.” While no climate scientist would blame a single storm on global warming, most will say that climate change increases the likelihood that weather will turn ugly—torrential rains, more intense heat waves, longer droughts and relentless snowstorms.

It looks as if Mother Nature will be going large on us more often in future. Surely, our old friend Technology can help us out, right?

Appy days

Irene has been our first apps hurricane, the initial chance to see if smart phones can allow you to avoid watching local reporters trying to stay upright as they tell you it’s windy. There are plenty of storm apps out there already. The Weather Channel, naturally, has one (free). So does Accuweather (free). So do the National Hurricane Center (Hurricane Express, 99 cents) and NOAA (NOAA Radar U.S., free). Most come with cheerfully colored maps (which actually are much easier to read on iPads than phones,) satellite images, alerts and forecasts—in short, everything you’d get from the windblown reporter except the slapstick.

The Department of Health and Human Services is getting in on the app action, too, offering a $10,000 prize to the developer who designs the best Facebook mobile app to help people create support networks to get them through natural disasters.

Ready or not

That’s all good, but there must be someone thinking bigger, someone who has figured out a way to move hurricanes. Enter Bill Gates.

A few years ago, he and a group of scientists applied for a patent for technology to slow or weaken hurricanes. Simply put, a fleet of barges would be towed into the path of a developing storm and each would then pump warm surface water to the bottom and, at the same time, pull cold water from the deep up to the surface. In theory, it would work because warmer water strengthens hurricanes. But reality is always the tricky part. According to some scientists, it would have to be done on such a massive scale to be effective, that it likely wouldn’t make economic sense. Plus, wind is just too shifty. Imagine trying to get this big fleet into position in enough time to suck the life out of a storm.

We may, for the time being, have to be content with dealing with nature instead of trying to control it. Like the team of scientists at the University of Texas using IBM’s Deep Thunder computer model to do high-speed-simulations of flooding. It will allow them to predict water flow in an entire river system—every stream, every tributary—instead of just the main rivers. And that would help local officials evacuate the people at greatest risk of fast-rising water.

Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Missouri are taking on the flip side of extreme weather. They’ve built drought simulators—100-foot long mobile greenhouses on tracks—that are moved over crops when it rains and moved away when it’s sunny.  No matter how this might seem, the goal is not to kill plants. It’s to see how different crops in different soil react to droughts of different lengths and intensity.

These days, it’s all about being prepared.

Bonus: Watch this video collection of TV reporters getting blown away, compliments of The Daily Beast .

Is it time we got more serious about manipulating nature? Or should we just keep focusing on being ready for its biggest punches?

Steve Jobs -- no longer the CEO at Apple. Image courtesy of Flickr user leolambertini

It will be a long time before we see again a CEO go out with all the attention that Steve Jobs has received from a chorus of worshipful essays, blogs, slideshows and videos in the past 24 hours.

There’s no question Jobs has been that rare thing—an innovator who understood the ripple effect of the cult of personality. He was as much a logo as a CEO. But that doesn’t take away from his accomplishments as a marketer, businessman and trendsetter.

Here’s a smattering of the tributes, in print and images, to Apple’s core:

Tim Fernholz, Good: “He earned his place in the pantheon of American innovators with iconic products like the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. He developed a global production system to build the company’s products cheaply and at high quality. iTunes revived the music industry, while the App Store created a whole new software market.”

James Surowiecki, The New Yorker: “Contrary to corporate mythology, most C.E.O.s could be easily replaced, if not by your average Joe, then by your average executive vice-president. But Jobs genuinely earned the label of superstar. He did so by making Apple a company that, time and again over the past decade, created industries out of whole cloth.”

Derek Thompson, The Atlantic: “Making ideas marketable and universal is what Jobs has done for most of his career. Steve Jobs has been called the Edison of our time. That’s even truer than it seems. His genius (not unlike Edison)  is the mainstream application of existing ideas, rather than original invention. ”

Andrew Leonard, Salon: “But for me, Jobs’ career signifies something more primal—his comeback saga is a story of redemption, a fantasy epic in which a great king is toppled, but through force of will and grit and brilliance fights his way all the way back to the throne, and inaugurates an even greater empire. It’s hard to think of parallels. Muhammed Ali, maybe.”

Farhad Manjoo, Slate: “But Jobs’ achievement wasn’t just to transform Apple from a failing enterprise into a staggeringly successful one. More important was how he turned it around—by remaking it from top to bottom, installing a series of brilliant managers, unbeatable processes, and a few guiding business principles that are now permanently baked into its corporate culture.”

Of course, there are a few contrarian views, such as this Advertsing Age piece by Ken Wheaton, “Steve Jobs Isn’t THAT Awesome.” He pulls out some of Jobs’ stumbles, such as his annoying stubborn refusal to allow Adobe Flash in his products. (Then again, Edison had his loony invention of concrete houses.)

But wait, there’s more.

The New York Times pulled together this gallery of Jobs’ patents. And Huffington Post rolled out slideshows of 10 products that defined his career and some of his better quotes. There also are photo collections of Jobs through the years and one on MIT’s Technology Review website, titled “Steve Jobs: Secret Sex Symbol.” The latter comes complete with a soundtrack, the ’70s hit, “Dream Weaver.”  I kid you not.

There are plenty of video snippets out there, but the one that does Jobs the most justice is the commencement speech he delivered at Stanford in 2005.

Or you could just save yourself a lot of clicking and check out Fast Company’s mashup of lines from the Jobs’ lovefest.

So if you happened you get into an elevator and it’s just Steve Jobs in there, what would you say to him?

Computers are coming closer and closer to mimicking the human brain. Image courtesy of Wikicommons

So much happened last week, what with Wall Street in need of a sedative and Gerard Depardieu in need of a bathroom, you probably missed the news that a team led by IBM has created a computer chip that mimics how a brain works.

Big deal, right?  Hadn’t they already created the computer that delivered a smackdown of those two “Jeopardy” whizzes turned hapless humans?

Actually, this latest creation is something very different and potentially more momentous. Watson, the “Jeopardy” god, is a ridiculously powerful computer that, nonetheless, operated in a fairly conventional way—except it was retrieving info from a database of more than 200 million pages of content.

But the new invention, the “cognitive” computer chip, is a leap into uncharted territory. The chips, as they become more sophisticated, could eventually copy the brain’s ability to sense surroundings, recognize patterns, and—dare I say it—learn on their own.

IBM’s Dharmendra Modha headed up the project, which so far has involved researchers from four universities and more than $20 million from DARPA, the Defense Department’s high-end research arm best known for creating the predecessor of the Internet. Modha uses a right-brain, left-brain analogy to explain what the team has conceived.

Computers have the left-brain part down cold.  They’re sequential and analytical and make us humans seem immensely dull-witted when it comes to processing numbers and data. But they can’t make connections that aren’t programmed or pull in information from their  surroundings to re-evaluate the data. That’s where the right-brain computer would come in, says Modha. Without requiring much memory, it would be able recognize changes in the environment and consider those before taking action.

Modha, thankfully, has offered a few real-world examples—traffic lights that can take in sights, sounds and smells, and, by pulling them together, flag an unsafe intersection before an accident happens. Or a grocer’s glove with sensors that integrate temperature, smell and vision to determine if produce has gone bad. As Modha sees it, cognitive chips would work with existing computers to produce a total brain experience.

A breakthrough came two years ago, when scientists developed something they call BlueMatter, a software algorithm that simulates the pattern of connections within the brain. By 2020, they think they’ll have a computer that can go brain-to-brain with a human being.

That sounds a bit optimistic. The human brain has about 100 bilion neurons. IBM’s two cognitive chips have 256 neurons each. That’s about the brain power of an earthworm. But the chips have taught themselves how to play Pong. Which sets up the possibility that one of us could lose at Pong to the equivalent of an earthworm.

And so it begins.

Brain candy

Here are other tasty things going on in brain research:

• You’re getting sleepy: Researchers for a California firm called NeuroSky are testing car headrests that can pick up your brain signals and set off an alarm if it detects you’re dozing off.
• It’ll come to you: Turns out the brain doesn’t need external stimuli to remember something; sometimes it just needs a little time.
• Sweet sensations: When it comes to sugar cravings, wanting and liking are two different things
• Hit makers: Teenagers’ brain waves while listening to a song could help determine if it will be a hit.

Bonus: No one has made more out of the notion that the future will belong to right-brained people than Daniel Pink, the author of A Whole New Mind: Moving From the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. Here’s one of the better interviews with him.

Does the idea of a computer that “thinks” like a human creep you out?  Or do you think it’s time to get over our fear of computers like Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

What can our schools do to better prepare students for the workplace? Image courtesy of Flickr user Old Shoe Woman

As campuses begin to fill, it seems fitting to ask: When so many corporate execs say they want employees who are creative, critical thinkers who know how to collaborate, why are the chief measures of future performance standardized tests for which there is only one right answer for every problem and working together is, to put it mildly, frowned upon?

Education has always been a laggard to innovation. That reality is made clear in a new book about attention and the brain, Now You See It, by Cathy Davidson. She estimates that as many as 65 percent of the kids now in grade school will likely end up in jobs that don’t yet exist. And yet most schools still follow a model not all that different from when Henry Ford was pumping out Model Ts and Pittsburgh actually had steel mills. Education then—and now—is geared to serve an industrial economy, one in which conformity and punctuality kept the engine running and creativity gunked it up.

To Davidson, a professor of English and interdisciplinary studies at Duke University, this makes about as much sense as teaching kids how to make wooden barrels. There was a reason her students who turned in lame term papers could also churn out perfectly fine blogs. The latter was about writing for the world in which they lived, a highly social place where ideas bounce around like marbles in an empty bathtub, feedback is immediate and sharing trumps syntax.

Davidson is big on teaching digital literacy, not so much how to use the tools—the kids could teach that—but how to use them to develop ideas and express themselves responsibly. For instance, starting in grade school, students would be expected to collaborate on wikis and award points to classmates who move projects forward. The idea is to encourage students to take all this sharing and turn it into a productive way to solve problems and shape their world.

Creativity’s comeback

Not that Davidson is the only one thinking imaginatively about education. Plenty of people are, such as advocates for deep-sixing the standard lecture.

Ten years ago, the big thing was STEM, the initiative to keep the U.S. competitive, both by merging Science, Technology, Engineering and Math into one mega-discipline and shifting the focus from teacher talk to problem-solving and collaborative learning. Meanwhile, though, a lot of schools dealt with budget-slashing by eviscerating arts programs to the point where arts education became little more than reminding kids when “Glee” was on.

But now, with companies looking for creative thinkers and multimedia communicators, the arts—particularly media arts—are being worked back into the mix. Or, as they say in the land of acronyms, STEM is becoming STEAM. This has inspired no one less than Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart to quote Einstein.

As for phasing out the exercises in ennui more commonly known as lectures, that’s the mission of Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur, who thinks the conventional arrangement should be flipped: students learn material on their own time, with classes saved for making sense of how it applies in the real world. Mazur has created his own interactive software, Learning Catalytics, to ease the transition for skittish professors.

Let’s go to the video

Allow me to recommend a few relevant videos, some of which are, admittedly, lectures.

• Let’s start with Ken Robinson, one of the few people who can call himself a creativity expert without a whiff of arrogance. He’s been writing and speaking about creativity in education and business for more than 20 years now and nobody does it better. After a high-ranking British government official once told him that while creativity in education was important, the country’s schools needed to focus on literacy first, Robinson replied, “That’s like saying we’re going to bake a cake and if it works out, then we’ll put the eggs in.” His lectures are all over the web, but my favorite is this TED talk, made that much more entertaining by the work of RSA Animate.
• The aforementioned Cathy Davidson weighs in on the need to “unlearn” much of what we know about education if we want it to be relevant in the 21st century.
• Management guru Tom Peters—a bit over the top, as always—lays into the U.S. educational system in this 2008 talk, in which he implores  audience members never to hire someone with a 4.0 GPA.
• It took place eons ago in Internet years, but this 2002 TED talk by Mae Jemison, a physician and the first African-American woman in space, is right on point. She warns against the consequences of keeping science and the arts separated.
• And finally, here’s a TED lecture by Brian Crosby, a Nevada elementary school teacher, who shares how his classes of low-income kids, most of whom speak English as a second language, have flourished in the world of wikis and blogs.

Bonus: If you want to know why Finnish schools are often considered the best in the world, give this article in the latest Smithsonian a read.

All of us have at least one teacher who knew how to hook us in, even before there was an Internet. My favorite was my 7th grade teacher, Roberta Schmidt. I will never forget the day she explained how ancient Egyptians mummified a body, especially the part about removing the brain through the nostrils. For a 12-year-old boy, that’s gold.

What about you? What teacher do you wish you could have cloned? And why?