Smithsonian.com

Will going to class become quaint? Photo courtesy of Coursera.

Depending on who you’re listening to, Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, are either the greatest boon to the spread of knowledge since Gutenberg cranked his first press or the biggest threat to learning on campus since the coming of cheap beer.

No question that they are the most disruptive innovation to come out of universities in a very long time, although it’s still too soon to say if that’s “good” disruptive or bad. A quick refresher: Though free online courses, notably through Khan Academy, were already starting to build an audience, the first MOOC by a university professor popped up at Stanford in the fall of 2011 when Sebastian Thrun, also head of the team behind Google’s driverless car, decided that he and his colleague, Peter Norvig, would offer online–and free–their course on artificial intelligence. About 160,000 people around the world signed up.

The following semester Thrun left Stanford–which didn’t particularly like the free part of his grand experiment–and started his own online education service called Udacity. A few months later, two more Stanford computer scientists, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, got venture capital backing to create another online company named Coursera, built around the model of signing up professors from top universities to teach classes. And then last fall, MIT and Harvard anted up, jumping in with a MOOC service they called edX.

A lot of professors who taught in the first wave of MOOCs were effusive about the experience, especially about having the opportunity to reach more than 100,000 people all over the world with just one class. But plenty of others wondered what really had been let out of the bottle, and whether once people got used to the idea of free college courses, how would they feel about the old model, you know, the one involving payment of tens of thousands of dollars.

Views from the front line

So, more than a year has passed since Thrun went to the free side and MOOCs–and the philosophy they promulgate of valuing competency more and time in the classroom less–are clearly gaining momentum.

Last week the State University of New York’s Board of Trustees approved an ambitious program of online education, including MOOCs designed to help students finish their degrees in less time for less money. The week before that, Darrell Steinberg, a leader of California’s State Senate, introduced legislation that would allow students to get full credit for a class by taking a MOOC if he or she was shut out of a course and unable to find a comparable one.

Also, the National Science Foundation has kicked in $200,000 to study a free online course in electronics offered through MIT last year, with the goal of comparing data and feedback from students who took the class online with what was gathered from those who took the same course in a classroom setting.

But a bit of analysis already has been done, in the form of a survey published by The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month. More than 100 professors who have taught MOOCs responded to an online questionnaire. Among the highlights of their feedback:

• Almost 80 percent said they think MOOCs are worth all the hype–although the Chronicle did point out that the professors most enthusiastic about the experience were more likely to respond.
• Eighty-six percent said they thought MOOCs would eventually reduce the cost of getting a college degree (45 percent said it would significantly, 41 percent marginally.)
• But 72 percent said they didn’t think free online students should receive full credit from their universities.

The dark side

It is a noble notion, this idea of first-rate professors sharing their wisdom with knowledge-hungry students around the world, playing the role of “sage on the stage,” as the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman put it recently.

In practice, it hasn’t been such an idyllic model. The large majority of people who sign up for free online courses are what Phil Hill, an education consultant who has analyzed some of the MOOC data, refers to as “lurkers.” These are people who perhaps watch a video or two, but then drop out–a lot never get beyond registering. Hill says as many as 60 to 80 percent of MOOC students never make it past the second week of a course.

It’s apparently not unusual for as many as 90 percent of those who sign up for a free online class to drop out before they finish it. In one case, a bioelectronics course offered by Duke University through Coursera, only 3 percent of those who registered made it to the final exam.

Proponents of free online classes acknowledge that a lot of people who sign up for MOOCs are more curious than committed, and with neither a financial investment nor the option to earn credit, they don’t feel a compunction to stick it out to the end. More often now, universities are providing certificates to students who finish a course, for a nominal fee, generally under $100.

For professors, a big part of the motivation to teach MOOCs, according to the Chronicle survey, was the sense that mass online education is inevitable and that it would be wise to get ahead of the curve. Many also said they thought the experience made them better teachers.

But some believe the trend doesn’t bode well for many universities, particularly smaller ones and community colleges. Michael Cusumano, a professor of the Sloan School of Management at MIT, sees a troubling parallel with what happened with newspapers. “Free is actually very elitist,” Cusumano wrote recently in the monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery. The result, he warns, could be a “few, large well-off survivors” and far more casualties.

His worst case scenario is “if increasing numbers of universities and colleges joined the free online education movement and set a new threshold price for the industry–zero–which becomes commonly accepted and difficult to undo.”

Adds Cusumano: “Will two-thirds of the education industry disappear? Maybe not, but maybe! It is hard to believe that we will be better off as a society with only a few remaining megawealthy universities.”

Open season

Here are other recent developments in open online learning:

• “Like” us if you’d rather not have a mid-term: The first MOOC service based in the U.K., called Futurelearn, launched in December and will be offering classes later this year. Its CEO says that one day people may congregate around online learning courses the way they now do around Facebook.
• Engineering can be fun! No, really: Brown University has begun offering a free, six-week online course designed to encourage more kids to consider careers in engineering.
• All MOOCs, all the time: And in Rwanda, a non-profit called Generation Rwanda is moving ahead with a creating a “university” for which all of the courses are taught online by professors elsewhere.

Video bonus: Here’s a bit more on MOOCs in a New York Times video report.

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Is the Bay Bridge now the cooler bridge in San Francisco? Photo courtesy of Leo Villareal

Last week, for the first time in 75 years, the Bay Bridge, connecting San Francisco and Oakland, made the Golden Gate seem like just another bridge.

Kudos to Leo Villareal. He’s an artist who works with lights, but also with algorithms. And his latest project, The Bay Lights, is probably the most spectacular example of that mix of art and tech that most of us have ever seen.

Under Villareal’s direction, teams of electricians spent the past five months stringing 25,000 LED lights a foot apart–from the top of the bridge’s towers down to the deck–for the full length (almost two miles) of the bridge’s western span.

Drivers crossing the bridge aren’t distracted by the spectacle of all the white dots. They can’t see them. But from the shore, it’s a very different view. Sometimes the light seems to drip down like a steady San Francisco rain. Other times it looks like shadows of clouds moving over the bay. That’s the point. Villareal wants the lights to mirror the natural elements around them. And like nature, the bridge’s lights will never look exactly the same for the next two years. That’s the algorithms at work.

There are no cheap tricks–no splashes of color, no words spelled out, no images–in fact, nothing clearly identifiable. Just constantly shifting abstractions so people can see what they want to see.

Says Villareal: “My goal is to make it feel alive as possible, as alive as a sequence of numbers can be.”

Whither reality?

Public art has come a long way from statues of white guys on horses. And it’s not just about the scale of something like The Bay Lights. It’s what technology has made possible–art that’s dynamic, that shifts mood and shape and sometimes augments reality. Some, of course, are not impressed, seeing art by algorithm as not much more than a 21st century version of parlor tricks. So be it.

But there can be little question that digital technology is now the driver in not just how we interact with our environment, but also in how we view it. And whether its method is to enhance the world around us or to change entirely how it appears, this is where public art is headed.

Like Leo Villareal, B.C. Biermann is a digital artist who wants to provide fresh visions to city life. But he does it by offering slices of an alternative reality. His art projects involve adding a new interactive layer to public spaces.

A few years ago, he co-founded an organization called RePublic and one of its first augmented reality projects, in July 2011, allowed people to point their smartphones at specific Times Square billboards and instead of viewing massive, flashing ads, they were able to see original pieces of urban art. Next came a project in which people aiming a digital device at a fading mural in Norway could see what it looked like when its paint was fresh. And then came the augmentation of buildings in Los Angeles and New York, which were were transformed into fanciful virtual murals on the small screen.

Biermann is now looking at refining his augmented reality concepts so that people could have choices of what “surface” of a building they want to see. Maybe they get an image of what it looks like inside the walls, maybe how it might look 20 years from now. He’s also working with an architecture professor at Washington University in St. Louis to develop a version of his app that would digitally revitalize several of the city’s buildings, with the goal of showing how better urban planning can profoundly change a streetscape’s looks.

As Biermann sees it, one day we may be taking virtual tours of cities, but what we see on our smartphones could be a very different-looking place than the one before our eyes.

That is, if we’re still paying attention to the one before our eyes.

Art palpitations

Here are a few other public art projects built around digital technology:

• But the lights will not spell out, “Hi, Mom: Now that Bay Lights is in play, a little of the glitter is gone from Luminous, the light spectacle covering the front of a four-story building in Sydney, Australia. When it was unveiled last year, it was described as the world’s largest permanent interactive light display. And one big difference between it and the light show on the Bay Bridge is that it comes with touchscreens that give people in the restaurant down below the chance to become LED programmers.
• However, they refuse to dance to “Gangnam Style”: And in Winnipeg, Canada, they now have their own interactive art piece that makes up in whimsy what it lacks in grandeur. It’s a collection of 68 LED lights that react to sound, specifically whistling. Called Listening Lights, its inspiration is a Canadian legend that when a person whistles, the Northern Lights become more intense and dance towards the person doing the whistling.
• Finding their inner building: While it lasts for only a few days in January, the Ghent Light Festival in Belgium is worth a mention if you’re talking about doing digital magic on buildings. Here’s a video from the dazzling 2012 version of the event.
• And they should know at least a few insults: And here’s one that’s a work in progress. Believe it or not, New York City still has 11,000 payphones, which actually came in pretty handy during Superstorm Sandy. But clearly they need a 21st century facelift and now the city has just announced six finalists in a competition to reinvent the payphone. The entries will be judged on what their reinventions can do. Are they wifi hotspots? A gatherer of data, such as street level pollution levels? Or a true urban kiosk, one that can wirelessly call a cab and be able to tell you what food trucks are where that day? And they have to look good. This is New York, after all.

Video bonus: See for yourself the spectacle of the new Bay Bridge and get an explanation of how it works from the artist himself in this New York Times video report.

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A good night’s sleep is worth the effort. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Kaptain Kobold

This weekend, most of us Americans will lose an hour of sleep when we push the clocks ahead to swing into Daylight Saving Time.

That may not seem like much–the Academy Awards were three and a half times that long–but research suggests our bodies wouldn’t agree. A recent study by two Michigan hospitals found that they treated almost twice as many heart attack victims on the first day of Daylight Saving than on a typical Sunday. And if past behavior holds true, there will be a bump in traffic accidents on Monday because, as researchers have suggested, more people take “microsleeps” that day, due to the disruption of their body clocks.

Clearly sleep, or lack thereof, is a key component of psychic and physiological balance, although it wasn’t all that long ago that most scientists felt it wasn’t worth a lot of attention because frankly, it didn’t seem like all that much was going on. Now we know better–there’s a lot happening inside our brains and, apparently, our bodies, too when we’re snoozing.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t made us act much smarter when it comes to our sleeping habits. We’ve been hearing for years that our bodies need a good eight hours a night, but, according to a Centers for Disease Control report released last year, almost a third of working adults in America get only six.

So as David Randall, author of Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, noted in a Wall Street Journal column, we’re seeing a boom in sleep aids, energy drinks, expensive mattresses designed to help us find our right “sleep number”, sleep-tracking devices and “fatigue management consultants.” That’s right, fatigue management consultants. A lot of Fortune 500 companies are now using them to track how sleep habits are affecting employee performance and safety records.

When cells go bad

Most of us are painfully aware of the mental and emotional costs of cheating ourselves of sleep. Who among us hasn’t felt the stupidness of fuzzy brain? The physical effects, though, are harder to distinguish. There’s plenty of research now that links poor sleeping habits to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure. But they develop over time–which would seem to suggest that it would take years of bad sleeping to damage our health.

Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case. A study just published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that getting too little little sleep just a few nights in a row can disrupt hundreds of genes, including those tied to stress and fighting diseases.

Scientists at the Surrey University Sleep Research Center in England subjected 26 volunteers–men and women between the ages of 23 and 31–to two very different weeks of sleeping. One week they were permitted to stay in bed only six hours each night. The other week they were allowed to sleep as long as 10 hours every night. Then the researchers analyzed cells in the volunteers’ blood, focusing on changes in RNA, the molecule that carries out DNA instructions through the body.

What they found surprised them. They discovered that not getting enough sleep changed the patterns in the way genes turned on and off. Overall, 711 genes were expressed differently when people were sleep-deprived: 444 genes were suppressed, 267 were stirred up. And the ones that became more active were genes involved in inflammation, immunity and protein damage.

Plus, when sleeping time was limited to six hours, the genes that govern the body clocks of the volunteers changed dramatically. Almost 400 genes stopped cycling in a circadian rhythm altogether, a disruption that could throw sleep patterns even more out of whack.

Not even Derk-Jan Dijk, the director of the Surrey sleep center, expected to see that. “The surprise for us,” he said, “was that a relatively modest difference in sleep duration leads to these kinds of changes. It’s an indication that sleep disruption or sleep restriction is doing more than just making you tired.”

You snooze, you don’t lose

In honor of National Sleep Awareness Week, which ends Sunday, here are six other recent sleep studies of which you might want to be aware:

• One man’s pizza is another man’s slice: A study at Uppsala University in Sweden determined that men who were sleep-deprived invariably chose larger portions of food than they did when they had a good night’s sleep.
• So that’s why my pillow hurts my head: According to research at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, not getting enough sleep can lower your tolerance for pain. Volunteers who were allowed to sleep nine hours a night for four nights were able to hold their fingers to a source of heat 25 percent longer than study participants who weren’t permitted to sleep more than seven hours.
• Now that’s a vicious cycle: Meanwhile, at the University of California, Berkeley, scientists said they’ve found a clear link between aging brains, the poor sleep of elderly people and memory loss. After comparing the brains and memory skills of young study participants and older ones, the researchers determined that age-related brain deterioration contributes to poor sleep and that leads to memory problems.
• But wait, there’s more bad news: And in Norway, analysis of the medical histories of more than 50,000 people showed that people who said they had trouble falling asleep or remaining asleep were three times more likely to develop heart failure than those who reported no trouble sleeping.
• If only they could sleep right through it: Research from Harvard Medical School suggests that nursing home residents who take sleep aids, such as Ambien, are more likely to fall and break a hip than residents who aren’t taking any meds for insomnia.
• Did I mention that it makes you stupid about food?: Finally, two studies last year showed why sleep deprivation can lead to excess pounds. One discovered that lack of sleep can prompt bad decisions about what food to eat. The other study found that when subjects were permitted to sleep for only four hours, the reward section of their brains became more active when they were shown pictures of pizza and candy.

Video bonus: Here’s a recent ABC News piece on why bad sleep leads to bad memory.

Video bonus bonus: Okay, after all this grim science news, the least I can do is share an oldie-but-goodie stop motion clip of real fun in bed. Sleep tight.

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It tells you what’s happening on your phone. And it tells time. Photo courtesy of Sony.

It’s amazing how putting a lower case “i” in front of the name of a gadget can make it righteous.

What that means, of course, is that Apple has deemed that particular piece of technology worthy of its attention. And with that comes both market credibility and geeky cool.

So when rumors started swirling a few weeks ago that Apple could unveil an “iWatch” later this year, tech writers around the Web were quick to ponder if 2013 will become “The Year of the Smartwatch.” Maybe. Maybe not. The iGod has not yet spoken on the subject. At least not officially.

The article that stirred the iWatch clamor was a recent piece by Nick Bilton in the New York Times’ Bits blog. It was high on speculation–Apple isn’t talking–and spiced with juicy questions: Will it come with Siri, the voice of the iPhone? What about Apple’s map software? Will an iWatch enable its wearers to track their steps taken? How about their heartbeats?

But the biggest tease was an allusion to glass. Specifically bendable glass. Imagine a watch face that could curve around your wrist. That sounds light, sleek and yes, geekily cool. That sounds so Apple.

The Wall Street Journal followed up, citing a source saying that Apple has been discussing the design of a smartwatch with its Chinese manufacturing partner. And then Bloomberg chimed in, reporting that Apple has a team of at least 100 people cranking away on a “wristwatch-like device.”

It also quoted Bruce Tognazzini, a tech consultant and former Apple employee: “The iWatch will fill a gaping hole in the Apple ecosystem.”

Keeping watch

So game over, right? Whenever Apple rolls out its device, it will define what a smartwatch should be, right?

Not so fast. Believe it or not, it’s already a crowded field, with more than half a dozen smartwatches out in the market. Maybe the best known, at least among gadget geeks, is the Pebble, which made a big splash a year ago, even before it existed. Its inventors made a pitch for investors on Kickstarter, hoping to drum up $100,000. Instead they raised $10 million, and a crowd-funding legend was born. The first Pebbles shipped earlier this year, to generally positive reviews.

Sony came out with its own model last year, sometimes to less than enthusiastic reviews. Others in the game include the MetaWatch Strata, the strangely-named I’m Watch,  the oddly-named Martian Passport, one called Buddy and another called Cookoo. Later this year, a model called The Pine is expected to hit the market.

But, aside from having names that you’d never imagined calling a wristwatch, what do all these products bring to modern life? Obviously, they tell time, but most also connect wirelessly to your smartphone so you can see who’s calling or texting or emailing or posting on your Facebook page without digging into your pocket for your phone. They can show you weather forecasts, sports scores or news headlines. Some have apps that let you control the music on your phone or track how far you’ve run or cycled.

And keep in mind, this is only the first wave. They probably can’t do enough yet to entice most people to shell out a few hundred bucks–they range from $130 for a Cookoo to more than $400 for an I’m Watch. But as more apps are added, they could be used to make mobile payments, navigate with GPS, take photos and shoot videos. A few already can  handle phone calls, albeit clunkily. So, the day is fast coming when you’ll be able to talk into your wristwatch without making people nervous.

Some say we’re on the cusp of a wearable tech boom, and that the smartphone, as something we need to actually carry around, will become passe. Others are more dubious, positing that the smartwatch is just another gadget phase we’re going through.

But there’s that bendable glass…

Fresh smart

It’s long been said that if you want to succeed, it helps to be smart. Now that applies to products, too.

• At last, a cure for expiration date anxiety: Researchers at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands say they’ve developed packaging with sensors that will be able to tell if the food inside is still edible.
• When bottles share: A Florida entrepreneur thinks the time has come for medicine bottles to get smart. His idea is to put QR codes on bottles that once scanned, will play a video on your smartphone telling you all you really need to know about the meds inside.
• Let sleeping babies lie: And for anxious young parents who check every 30 seconds to see if their baby is still breathing, students at Brigham Young University are developing something they call the Owlet Baby Monitor. Using a built-in pulse oximeter, the wireless smart sock can track both a sleeping child’s heart and breathing rates.
• Say goodbye to the “You’ll just feel a little pinch” lie: Scientists at Purdue University have created bandages that could make the needle stick obsolete. Powered by a person’s body heat, the adhesive patches would be able to deliver medication without the need for a shot.
• Which is so much cooler than wearing a smart sock: In Japan, Fujitsu has unveiled its “Next Generation Cane.” Yep, it’s a smart cane and it can monitor a person’s vitals. It also comes with GPS so you can always know where Grandma’s taking a stroll.

Video bonus: Want the lowdown on how the Pebble smartwatch works? The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg lays it out a video review.

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Zinc oxide nanoparticles. Courtesy of National Institutes of Health.

So, we’re 42 years into the War on Cancer, and while the enemy remains formidable, our strategy is shifting into yet another phase.  We’ve been through the equivalent of hand-to-hand combat–surgery–carpet bombing–radiation–and chemical warfare–chemotherapy.

Now the fight is about stealth.  Instead of concentrating on blasting away at cancer cells, or poisoning them, you’re more likely to hear cancer scientists talk about “Trojan horses” or “cloaking strategies” or “tricking” the immune system.  All are cell-level ploys hatched through nanomedicine–medical treatment gone very, very small. How small? At the nano level, about 5,000 particles would be as wide as a human hair.

We are not the enemy

Okay, so we’re in beyond comprehension territory here.  But let’s not get hung up on size; let’s focus on deception.

The latest example of microscopic trickery was laid out last week a paper from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania. One of the most appealing aspects of nanomedicine is that it allows scientists to deliver drugs directly to a tumor instead flooding the whole body with chemotherapy. Unfortunately, the immune system sees the nanoparticles as invaders and tries to clear them away before they can go to work on the tumor cells.

The trick was to make  the “sentry cells” of the body’s immune system think that the drug-delivering nanoparticles were native cells, that they weren’t intruders. The researchers did this by attaching to each nanoparticle a protein that’s present in every cell membrane. And put simply, it sent out a “don’t eat me” message to the body’s guard cells.

The result, at least in mice, is that this technique  dramatically improved the success rate of two different kinds of nanoparticles–one that delivered tumor-shrinking drugs and one filled with dye that would help doctors capture images of cancer cells.

Meanwhile, earlier this year, scientists at the Methodist Hospital Research Institute in Houston announced that they had found their own way  of letting nanoparticles fool the immune system.  They developed a procedure to physically remove the membranes from active white blood cells and drape them over nanoparticles. And that “cloaking strategy” was enough to keep proteins that activate the immune system from doing their job and ordering it to go repel the invaders. The researchers believe it will one day be possible to harvest a patient’s own white blood cells and use them to cloak the nanoparticles, making it that much more likely that they’ll get to their target without being attacked.

As magical as all this can sound, nanomedicine is not without risk.  Much more research needs to be done on the long-term impact of nanoparticles inside the body.  Could they accumulate in healthy body tissues?  And if they do, what effect would it have? Can those tiny particles  now seemingly so full of promise,  eventually turn toxic?

Still plenty of questions about nanomedicine, but it’s feeling more like an answer.

Small talk

Here are six other ways in which thinking small is moving medicine forward:

1) But first, remove all jewelery: At the University of Minnesota, scientists are experimenting with nanoparticles and magnets to fight lung cancer.  They’ve developed an aerosol inhalant that a patient can draw into his or her lungs with a few deep breaths. And that carries iron oxide nanoparticles to tumors inside the lungs. Then, by waving a magnet outside the body, they can agitate the particles so that they heat up enough to kill cancerous cells around them.

2) A new shell game: A team of engineers at UCLA has developed tiny capsules--about half the size of the smallest bacterium–that are able to carry proteins to cancer cells and stunt the growth of tumors. And the nanoscale shells degrade harmlessly in non-cancerous cells.

3) Gold’s fool: And at Northwestern, researchers say they’ve found a way to use gold nanoparticles to effectively fight lymphoma. They fool the lymphoma cells into thinking they contain high-density lipoprotein (HDL), which the cells need to survive. The gold nanoparticles bind to the cancer cells and starve them of cholesterol.

4) Way better than Krazy Glue: In Germany, scientists have invented a paste made of nanoparticles that they say can makes broken bones repair themselves faster. The paste contains two growth-factor genes that enter cells and accelerate bone healing.

5) Alas, it can’t help you find meds you dropped on the floor: While technically not nanomedicine, a small smart pill that tracks if people are taking their medications correctly could soon be on the market. Approved by the FDA last year, the pill contains a tiny sensor that interacts with stomach fluid and sends a signal to a patch on a person’s body. Taken with a real medication, the smart pill transmits information about the other med, particularly when it was ingested, to a smartphone. But it also sends physiological data, including heart rate and activity level.

6) Body heat gone bad:  Along the same lines, firemen in Australia have started taking a tiny capsule to protect them from being overcome by heat.  Sensors in the pill are able to take their core body temperatures in real time and relay that data to a smart phone.  And that has led to changes in firefighters’ work patterns, including the length of time they are exposed to blazes.

Video bonus: Still not clear on nanomedicine?  Here’s a TED talk on how it’s being used to fight cancer by Mark Davis, a leading expert on the subject and a chemical engineer at the California Institute of Technology.

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