What makes a 21st century mom? Photo courtesy of Flickr user Robert Whitehead

To be honest, I’ve never associated motherhood with science. I assume this has everything to do with the fact that I’m one of eight kids, and while I’m sure we were a study in chaos theory, my mother didn’t have much time to nail the concept and work it into bedtime stories.

That said, moms remain a subject of scientific inquiry because, no matter how constant they may seem to us, they’re always changing to keep up with the times.

Here then are 10 recent studies or surveys that give a bit more insight into the institution of 21st century moms.

1) Have I got a story for you: According to a study published recently in the journal Sex Roles, moms are better than dads at telling stories and reminiscing with their kids, and that helps children develop their emotional skills. The researchers observed that moms tended to include more emotional terms in their stories and were more likely to then explain them to their children.

2) But how many of the answers were “Because I said so”: A survey of 1,000 moms in the United Kingdom found that the typical mother answers up to 300 questions a day from their kids. Four-year-old girls are the most inquisitive, averaging a fresh question about every two minutes. The most questions are asked during meals–an average of 11–followed by shopping trips–10 questions–and bedtime–nine questions.

3) That magic touch: The skin-to-skin touch of a mother can make a big difference in helping preemies or other at-risk babies deal with the pain and stress of injections. Researchers determined that the touch of a father or an unrelated women can also help lower the stress of an at-risk baby, but neither had quite the soothing effect of physical contact with the child’s mother.

4) Even mom spit is special: A recent article in the journal Pediatrics recommended that mothers clean off their child’s pacifier by putting it in their own mouths. That’s right. What the researchers found is that infants whose mothers sucked on their pacifiers to clean them developed fewer allergies than children whose mothers rinsed or boiled the pacifiers. The children of moms who gave pacifiers a mouth rinse also had lower rates of eczema, fewer signs of asthma and smaller amounts of a type of white blood cell that rises in response to allergies and other disorders. The findings are in line with the growing evidence that some exposure to germs at a young age can be good for kids.

5) Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work I go: About 40 percent of working mothers in the U.S. now say the ideal situation for them would be to work full time. That’s according to the latest research on the matter from the Pew Research Center. It’s almost twice as many who felt that way in 2007, when 21 percent of the women surveyed said that would be their preference. The researchers speculated that this is probably a reflection of tough economic times. But working part time is still the top choice among working women, although the percentage of women who said that would be the best situation for them dropped from 60 percent in 2007 to 50 percent in the most recent survey.

6) Don’t do what I do: Just as moms generally can do more good for their kids than dads, they also apparently can do more harm. A 34-year study by the British think tank Demos found that the alcohol drinking habits of mothers can have the greatest impact on how their children consume alcohol. While at age 16, a child’s drinking behavior was greatly influenced by peers, the researchers found that that changed as children reached maturity. Then, the scientists more often discovered clear connections between alcohol consumption–particularly binge drinking–and childhood memories of how their mothers would drink.

7) Crouching tiger, failing children: So much for the power of Tiger Moms, the stereotypical demanding Asian mother depicted in the much-debated Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother in 2011. A University of Texas professor named Su Yeong Kim, who had been following more than 300 Asian-American families for a decade, recently published her findings. What she observed didn’t quite match the stereotype. Children of parents whom Kim classified as “tiger” had lower academic achievement–and more psychological problems–than the kids of parents characterized as “supportive” or “easygoing.”

8) Even in utero we know to take a vowel: According to a joint study of newborns in Washington State and in Stockholm, babies start learning language from their moms even before they leave the womb. The scientists said their research showed that the infants began locking on to the vowel sounds of their mothers before they were born. How did they know that? They studied 40 infants, all about 30 hours old, and they found that the babies–who were played vowel sounds in foreign languages and the language of their mothers–consistently sucked longer on pacifiers when they heard sounds different from the ones they had heard in utero.

9) Sure, but you’d know nothing about Legos without us: Judging by a bit of research done in Finland, boys, at least in times past, could take almost nine months off a mother’s life, compared to girls. The Finnish scientists analyzed the post-childbirth survival rates of 11,166 mothers and 6,360 fathers in pre-industrial Finland, between the 17th and 20th centuries. And they found that a mother who bore six sons would live on average another 32.4 years after the youngest son’s birth, while a mother who gave birth to girls would live approximately 33.1 years after her youngest daughter came along. The shorter life expectancy was the same regardless of the mom’s social or financial status. The researchers surmised that not only was bearing boys more physically demanding for the mothers, but also that daughters were more likely to prolong their mothers’ lives by helping with household responsibilities.

10) Putting it in words: And finally…this probably shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but a study just published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that caveman didn’t just grunt, but actually had a decent little vocabulary that included the equivalent of words for ‘thou’, ‘you’, ‘we,’ ‘bark,’ ‘fire,’ ‘spit’ and yes, ‘mother.’

Video bonus: Is there really such a thing as a “mom gene?” Here’s a report from “Good Morning America.

Video bonus bonus: For a less sentimental take of being a mom, here’s a “Motherhood Rap.”

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Do teachers need to train more like doctors? Photo courtesy of Flickr user WoodleyWonderworks

Question: What’s needed to raise the quality of school teachers in America?

Answer: A bar exam?

So say the head of the country’s most powerful teachers’ union, the governor of New York and the U.S. secretary of education, among others. Their contention is that the only way teachers can truly elevate their profession–and with it the level of public education–is if they follow the lead of doctors, lawyers and engineers and are required to pass a test to prove mastery of their subject matter and how to teach it.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), first floated the idea last summer at the Aspen Ideas Festival when asked what more could be done in training teachers. Then, late last year, her union put out a report, titled “Raising the Bar,” that pushed the idea further, calling for “a rigorous entry bar for beginning teachers.”

The debate has raged on ever since.

Smarten up

Joining those singing the praises of a tough teacher assessment is Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City’s Department of Education. Writing on The Atlantic website, he pointed out that pretty much anyone who graduates from college in America today can become a teacher, and that “job security, not teacher excellence, defines the workforce culture.” He also quoted a sobering statistic from McKinsey: The U.S. gets nearly half of its teachers from the bottom third of its college classes.

And just last weekend, in the New York Times, Jal Mehta,an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, wrote that compared to many other fields where quality is maintained by building a body of knowledge and training people in that knowledge, “American education is a failed profession.”

He added:

“We let doctors operate, pilots fly and engineeers build because their fields have developed effective ways of certifying that they can do these things. Teaching, on the whole, lacks this specialized knowledge base; teachers teach based mostly on what they have picked up from experience and from their colleagues.”

So what exactly do the proponents have in mind? For starters, they think any exam would need to focus both on the prospective teacher’s subject and on teaching more generally, particularly the social and emotional aspects of learning. While states would be able to adapt the guidelines, the intent would be to set national certification standards. And, above all, the process would need to be “rigorous.” They say “rigorous” a lot.

AFT’s proposal also recommends that American universities need to get much more selective in accepting students into education programs, that they should require a minimum of a 3.0 grade point average, plus an average score in the top third percentile on college entrance exams. The goal, ultimately, is make teaching a skill to be mastered, and one that requires serious preparation. Said Weingarten: “It’s time to do away with a common rite of passage into the teaching profession—whereby newly minted teachers are tossed the keys to their classrooms, expected to figure things out, and left to see if they and their students sink or swim.”

Class action

Of course, not everyone thinks this is such a good idea. Some critics have suggested that it’s a ploy by the teacher’s union to sound high-minded, while actually aiming to protect its current members–who likely wouldn’t have to take the exam–and to justify a sizable bump in salary. Or that it’s really a swipe at programs like Teach for America, which offers a different route to becoming a teacher.

Still others think that focusing so much on a test score doesn’t make sense for a profession so dependent on interpersonal and motivational skills. Jonathan Kozol, author of numerous books on education, including “Letters to a Young Teacher,” makes the point that no test, no matter how refined, could adequately measure what he thinks is a good teacher’s greatest quality, that he or she loves being with students. The only way you can gauge that, he says, is watching them teach.

And Jason Richwine and Lindsey Burke, both of the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, argued recently in The Atlantic that having knowledge and being able to impart it are two different things. They wrote:

“A teacher with a doctorate degree, every certification and license available, and 15 years of experience is no more likely to be a high performer than a teacher with a B.A., the minimal certification, and five years of experience.”

Finnish products

In the end, this discussion often ends up in Finland. It’s the Magic Kingdom of Education, the place the experts talk about when they imagine what American teachers could be. Roughly 40 years ago, the Finnish government concluded that the key to the country’s economic future was a first-class public education system. And the key to that was a system that gave teachers the prestige of doctors.

To even be accepted into a Finnish teacher education program, candidates must be at the top of their class, complete exams on pedagogy, be observed often in clinical settings, and pass a challenging interview. Only about 1 in 10 Finnish applicants are accepted to study to be teachers. And while the U.S. has more than 1,200 universities that train teachers, Finland has only eight. In short, teachers need to earn the right to feel special.

So, does that elevated status of teachers there result in better students? Yes, you could say that. In science, in math, in reading, Finnish students rank first in the world.

Teaching moments

Here are other recent innovations in education:

• Never start by trying to learn Chinese: One of the hot trends in higher education is predictive analysis, which evaluates data to help identify students at risk of dropping out and also which course sequences are more likely keep kids in school and which are more likely to make them choose to drop out.
• Even tests can be all about you: A new online portal called Smart Sparrow allows teachers to offer material that’s adapted specifically to a student. For instance, quiz questions can be based on how a student answered the previous question. If he got it right, the next question’s harder, if he got it wrong, it’s easier.
• Do the math: A company called Mango Learning is building a reputation for its mobile apps that teach grade school kids math. They’re interactive games that supposedly can make kids even want to add decimals.

Video bonus: The Young Turks online news show offers its take on what makes Finnish education so special.

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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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Pattern recognition of a butterfly wing. Image courtesy of Li Li

Here in Washington we have heard of this thing you call “advance planning,” but we are not yet ready to embrace it. A bit too futuristic.

Still, we can’t help but admire from afar those who attempt to predict what could happen more than a month from now. So I was impressed a few weeks ago when the big thinkers at IBM imagined the world five years hence and identified what they believe will be five areas of innovation that will have the greatest impact on our daily lives.

They’ve been doing this for a few years now, but this time the wonky whizzes followed a theme--the five human senses. Not that they’re saying that by 2018, we’ll all be able to see, hear and smell better, but rather that machines will–that by using quickly-evolving sensory and cognitive technologies, computers will accelerate their transformation from data retrieval and processing engines to thinking tools.

See a pattern?

Today, let’s deal with vision. It’a logical leap to assume that IBM might be referring to Google’s Project Glass. No question that it has redefined the role of glasses, from geeky accessory that helps us see better to combo smartphone/data dive device we’ll someday wear on our faces.

But that’s not what the IBMers are talking about. They’re focused on machine vision, specifically pattern recognition, whereby, through repeated exposure to images, computers are able to identify things.

As it turns out, Google happened to be involved in one of last year’s more notable pattern recognition experiments, a project in which a network of 1,000 computers using 16,000 processors was, after examining 10 million images from YouTube videos, able to teach itself what a cat looked like.

What made this particularly impressive is that the computers were able to do so without any human guidance about what to look for. All the learning was done through the machines working together to decide which features of cats merited their attention and which patterns mattered.

And that’s the model for how machines will learn vision. Here’s how John Smith, a senior manager in IBM’s Intelligent Information Management, explains it:

“Let’s say we wanted to teach a computer what a beach looks like. We would start by showing the computer many examples of beach scenes. The computer would turn those pictures into distinct features, such as color distributions, texture patterns, edge information, or motion information in the case of video. Then, the computer would begin to learn how to discriminate beach scenes from other scenes based on these different features. For instance, it would learn that for a beach scene, certain color distributions are typically found, compared to a downtown cityscape.”

How smart is smart?

Good for them. But face it, identifying a beach is pretty basic stuff for most of us humans. Could we be getting carried away about how much thinking machines will be able to do for us?

Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at New York University, thinks so. Writing recently on The New Yorker’s website, he concludes that while much progress has been made in what’s become known as “deep learning,” machines still have a long way to go before they should be considered truly intelligent.

“Realistically, deep learning is only part of the larger challenge of building intelligent machines. Such techniques lack ways of representing causal relationships (such as between diseases and their symptoms), and are likely to face challenges in acquiring abstract ideas like “sibling” or “identical to.” They have no obvious ways of performing logical inferences, and they are also still a long way from integrating abstract knowledge, such as information about what objects are, what they are for, and how they are typically used.”

The folks at IBM would no doubt acknowledge as much. Machine learning comes in steps, not leaps.

But they believe that within five years, deep learning will have taken enough forward steps that computers will, for instance, start playing a much bigger role in medical diagnosis, that they could actually become better than doctors when it comes to spotting tumors, blood clots or diseased tissue in MRIs, X-rays or CT scans.

And that could make a big difference in our lives.

Seeing is believing

Here are more ways machine vision is having an impact on our lives:

• Putting your best arm forward: Technology developed at the University of Pittsburgh uses pattern recognition to enable paraplegics to control a robotic arm with their brains.
• Your mouth says yes, but your brain says no: Researchers at Stanford found that using pattern recognition algorithms on MRI scans of brains could help them determine if someone actually had lower back pain or if they were faking it.
• When your moles are ready for their close ups: Last year a Romanian startup named SkinVision launched an iPhone app that allows people to take a picture of moles on their skin and then have SkinVision’s recognition software identify any irregularities and point out the risk level–without offering an actual diagnosis. Next step is to make it possible for people to send images of their skin directly to their dermatologist.
• Have I got a deal for you: Now under development is a marketing technology called Facedeals. It works like this: Once a camera at a store entrance recognizes you, you’re sent customized in-store deals on your smart phone. And yes, you’d have to opt in first.
• I’d know that seal anywhere: A computerized photo-ID system that uses pattern recognition is helping British scientists track gray seals, which have unique markings on their coats.

Video bonus: While we’re on the subject of artificial intelligence, here’s a robot swarm playing Beethoven, compliments of scientists at Georgia Tech. Bet you didn’t expect to see that today.

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Finally, a suitcase that follows you around. Photo courtesy of Hop!

Earlier this week I rolled out the first half of a list of a dozen of the more innovative ideas of 2012.

We’re not talking Google Glass or invisibility cloaks or other flashes from the future. No, these are less splashy things, yet, in their own ways, no less inspired and probably more likely to become a part of our daily lives. They’re the creations of people joined under a common maxim, namely, “There’s gotta be a better way.”

So, muffled drum roll, please…the Fresh Ideas of 2012, Part 2:

7) While you’re at it, can you pick up a paper and some gum: Yes, suitcases with wheels were a big breakthrough, but Madrid designer Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez says why stop there? Why should we still have lug luggage?

So he has invented a new kind of suitcase he calls Hop!. What makes it so special is that it follows you around like the most loyal of pets.

Well, technically it follows your smart phone. The suitcase contains three receivers that communicate, via Bluetooth, with an app on your smart phone and, put simply, it follows that signal. The same controller also directs a dual caterpillar track-type system on the bottom of the suitcase to move it along. If the signal gets lost, the bag locks itself and vibrates its owner’s phone.

Of course, there are issues to resolve–think of the security challenges of an airport full of roaming luggage–but Gonzalez deserves props for giving us hope that we’ll one day break loose from our bags.

8) Anticipation was so overrated: It never really made much sense: In a world increasingly geared to instant gratification, we waited for ketchup. It took forever to come out of the bottle, but we seemed willing to live with that.

Not Kripa Varanasi and his team of MIT engineers. They’ve developed a substance called LiquiGlide, which, when coating the inside surface of bottles, helps ketchup and mustard slide right out. Now this may seem a trivial modern indulgence, but, as the LiquiGlide team estimates, roughly a million tons of food could avoid being tossed in the garbage if it wasn’t getting stuck in bottles. So it’s only right that we go with the flow.

9) Which gives new meaning to “All you can eat”: While we’re on the subject of food waste, let’s give it up for WikiCells. These are the edible membranes created by Harvard professor David Edwards and French designer Francois Azambourg that encase food and liquids. In other words, it’s packaging you can eat.

The membranes, meant to mimic the skin of a grape, are made of food particles, such as cheese or dried fruit, and are held together by calcium or magnesium ions. So far, the pair have conjured up a tomato membrane containing gazpacho, an orange one filled with orange juice, a chocolate version holding hot chocolate. They’ve even created a grape-flavored pouch filled with wine. The goal is to do away with plastic bottles and packaging. Let’s raise our membranes to that.

10) Talk to the glove: Four Ukrainian students have designed gloves that can communicate with a smart phone and, as a result, developed a way for people with speech and hearing disabilities to talk to people who don’t use or understand sign language.

Their invention, which they call Enable Talk, works like this: The gloves are lined with 15 flex sensors in their fingers that can recognize sign language and transmit the message to a smart phone where it’s converted to text. The phone then says the words that the gloves sent.

11) So now we can stay focused on not changing the oil: If you’re like me, you have no idea when you last checked your tire pressure. It’s a blind faith thing. As long as the tires keep rolling, no need to look for that little gauge you bought many tires ago.

Goodyear understands this so they’ve gone ahead and invented a tire that takes us out the equation. It does this by inflating itself. A regulator in the tire senses when the pressure drops below a pre-set point and opens to allow air flow into the pumping tube. As the tire rolls, deformation flattens the tube, pushing air into the tire cavity. And we’ll no longer have to worry about keeping our tires pumped up. Not that we ever did.

12) No longer will a charger come between you and your phone: A few years ago the 11-year-old daughter of Wake Forest University scientist David Carroll wondered aloud if a cell phone could be charged solely by human body heat. Good question, thought Carroll, and earlier this year he and his team came up with an answer.

They unveiled Power Felt, a fabric that uses nanotechnology to convert heat into electricity. It’s still in the early stages of development but initial results suggest they’re on to something big–an inexpensive material that could use the heat from your car’s engine to run its AC and radio and the sun to power your home’s appliances and yes, your own personal warmth to keep your cell phone alive. Thanks, Dad.

Video bonus: While we’re talking about nifty ideas whose time is about to come, it’s pretty certain that Samsung will come out with a bendable phone next year. As you can see in this video, it passes the hammer test.

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The college classroom of the future? Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon.

It was a just about a year ago that a handful of Stanford professors began hatching a revolution in college education.

Sebastian Thrun, more widely known as the head of the team behind Google’s driverless car, decided that he and colleague Peter Norvig would start making their popular course in artificial intelligence available online. Free of charge. To anyone in the world. About 160,000 people signed up.

A few weeks later, another Google researcher/Stanford computer scientist, Andrew Ng, followed suit, offering his equally popular course, “Machine Learning” for free. More than 100,000 people watched his lectures online. As Ng pointed out, it would have taken him 250 years to reach that many students in a conventional Stanford classroom.

The problem, of course, is that Stanford charges students in those conventional classrooms about $40,000 a year. Freebies were not a good business strategy.

By January, Thrun had lined up venture capital money and left Stanford to start Udacity, an independent, online-only education service focusing on science and technology courses. Within a few months, Ng and another Stanford computer scientist, Daphne Koller, had rounded up their own boatload of VC money–a reported $16 million to start with-and went on leave from Stanford to start their own online college operation called Coursera.

Less talk, more questions

But Ng and Koller actually have ratcheted things up another notch. Instead of just distributing its own online courses, Coursera has formed partnerships with some of America’s top universities to help them convert courses for free Internet access. Last month, the startup announced that in addition to its four original partners,–Stanford, Princeton, Penn and Michigan–it has added 12 more, ranging from Duke and Johns Hopkins to the University of Toronto and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

So what does that mean? For starters, Coursera is spreading what’s becoming the new model for online teaching. No more videos of professors talking non-stop for an hour. Instead, lectures are chopped into much smaller chunks, say 10 minutes long, with students asked a quiz question every few minutes. They need to answer correctly before they can move on with the video.

And having tens of thousands of people taking the course at the same time makes it much easier than you would expect for students working on their own to find and study with like-minded classmates. Ng says that, on average, it takes only 22 minutes for someone to get a question answered in Coursera’s online forums.

The huge size of Internet classes–they’re now known as massive open online courses or MOOCs–also allows for much more comprehensive analysis of how subjects are taught and whether they’re understood. Since the online behavior of students is tracked–where they rewind videos, how they respond to quiz questions, etc.–professors can see where a large number of students may have struggled or given the same wrong answer and then make adjustments. Course material now not only has to be interactive, but also more dynamic. Immutable lectures, delivered as if chiseled on stone tablets, are going the way of chalkboards and elbow patches.

Professors also will be teaching classes far more culturally diverse than any they’ve previously experienced. When Coursera announced a few week ago that its enrollment had topped one million in just four months, it also noted that the students who’ve signed up for courses live in 196 different countries. Six out of 10 are outside the U.S.

Can this make money?

Is this really where college is headed? It says something that last spring Harvard and MIT launched their own their MOOC partnership called edX, and that over the summer, the University of California at Berkeley joined it. Even if top-line universities aren’t sure what they’ll gain by offering free courses to the world, they don’t want to risk being left behind if this is a template of the future.

Clearly, there remain some very large unanswered questions, starting with how do any of these partnerships make money. One notion is to charge a relatively small fee, say $50, for a student to receive a certified copy of a letter saying he or she has completed a course. In other words, it wouldn’t cost anything to take a class, but you’d have to pay for proof that you finished it.

Another idea Sebastian Thrun has floated is to have MOOCs serve as a new kind of placement service, using what they glean about students to help companies find employees with very specific skills. But, as recruiters from Intel and Dell told Bloomberg Business Week recently, a certificate for an online course may help someone land a job, but only if they already have a conventional, sit-in-a-classroom four-year degree. Only a very few colleges, including the University of Washington and the University of Helsinki, have agreed to give credit to students who complete MOOC courses.

What about cheating?

No question that plenty of skeptics are dubious about the depth and quality of an online education, who feel the sheer size of the classes precludes any level of one-on-one learning and also invites cheating.

So far only about 25 percent of the people who have enrolled in Coursera courses have actually completed them. And earlier this month The Chronicle of Higher Education reported “dozens” of complaints about plagiarism in essays written for some of the humanities courses Coursera is now offering. (Almost all of the free online courses to date have been in science or technology.)

The accusations actually came from other students, who, in the Coursera system, grade and comment on each other’s essays. In response to the complaints, Coursera reminded students of the honor code they signed when they enrolled. It also is considering using software that can detect plagiarism.

Some professors in the program have suggested that cultural differences could, at least in part, explain why someone would lift whole sections of text from Wikipedia for a course for which they’re not receiving any credit. Eric Rabkin, a University of Michigan English professor who teaches a Coursera class, told the Chronicle that one student who admitted plagiarizing content said he didn’t realize copying and pasting text from another site was inappropriate.

Coursera’s Daphne Koller would point out that this comes with making top college courses available in places where a year ago it would have been inconceivable. She put it this way recently: “This could enable a wave of innovation because amazing talents can be found anywhere. Maybe the next Albert Einstein, or the next Steve Jobs, is living in a remote village in Africa.”

Class acts

Here are a few other ways technology is changing education:

• Pack light: Another well-financed online initiative called The Minerva Project will be added to the mix by 2014. Its goal is to be the first elite global university. From sophomore year on, students will be encouraged to live in a new country, or at least a new city, every semester.
• That algorithm just doesn’t understand me: Winners of a competition sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation have devised algorithms that can grade essays.
• Today’s assignment is from “Mythbusters:” Big media companies, such as Discovery Communications and the News Corporation, are moving into the digital textbooks business in a big way. They see it as a boom market that could become a new source of revenue.
• You tie shoes?: According to an infographic from LearnStuff.com, 1.5 million iPads will be used in classrooms this year. Also, while 70 percent of American children between ages two and five can use a computer mouse, only 11 percent can ties their own shoes.

Video bonus: Want to hear why so many top universities have become enamored of Coursera? Here’s co-founder Daphne Koller, in a recent TED talk, laying out why online courses should be a big part of college education’s future.

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Kitchen tech teaches chefs to cut along a virtual line. Photo courtesy of Kyoto Sangyo University

Last week The Voice was back. I’m not referring to the treacly TV show or the latest crooner chased down by TMZ. I’m talking about Julia Child.

In honor of what would have been her 100th birthday, America’s first real TV chef was all over the airwaves. Or at least her voice was, a voice that, on first hearing, sounded like it could set off car alarms, or maybe was a car alarm. But it was all part of the package, a presence as genuine as it was gangly. There was nothing snooty about Julia as she taught Americans French cooking. If you dropped a piece of lamb and you were alone in the kitchen, she once confided to viewers, just pick it up. No one had to know.

So it was no small irony that the day after her birthday, the New Scientist’s website published a piece about how robots, sensors and augmented reality are now being used to train novice chefs. It’s good that Julia never had to hear about this.

Something’s watching you

Nonetheless, this is where cooking is headed, a future where precision and skill in the kitchen will have as much to do with what’s watching as who’s training.

Consider the setup that computer scientist Yu Suzuki and his team have created in a test kitchen at Kyoto Sangyo University. They’ve installed cameras and projectors on the ceiling that project cooking instructions right on the ingredients.

So, let’s say you want to filet a fish. Once you place it on a chopping board, the camera detects its size and shape and the projector then overlays the equivalent of a virtual dotted line showing you where to make the cut. In a macabre twist, instructive word bubbles appear at the fish’s mouth to ensure that his gutting is done properly.

So far, because the scientists have to program each process manually, Suzuki’s system can teach people only how to prepare fish and peel onions. But he promises that once it’s automated, its repertoire will grow quickly.

Do the right thing

Then there’s Jinna Lei, a robotics Ph.D. student at the University of Washington. She’s also using cameras in the kitchen, specifically Kinect-like depth-sensing cameras capable of recording both the shape and appearance of kitchen objects. And that allows them to track cooking actions, such as whether a certain ingredient has been poured into a bowl.

Eventually, says Lei, the system should be able to alert the cook if he or she makes a mistake. Already, she’s tested it with a cake-baking video and it was able to identify, in seconds, the start and end points of 17 different recipe actions.

Still another chef-teaching technique has been developed by researcher Thomas Ploetz at the University of Newcastle in the U.K. He has installed sensors in kitchen utensils which record when and how they’re used by the novice cooks. And since they hear their instructions from a computer in French, the chefs learn both cooking and French.

Now that Julia would have loved.

Kitchen help

Here are more recent innovations on the food front:

• Oodles of noodles: A Chinese restaurateur has started mass-producing robots that can tirelessly hand-slice noodles into a pot of boiling water. One robot costs about $2,000 in American dollars; a human doing the same job in China would make about $4,700 a year. (That’s right, $4,700.)
• I, Sushi Master: Meanwhile, in Japan, a new robot is cranking out 2,500 perfect sushi rolls an hour. The machine injects a puff of air into each tofu skin to open it up fully, then a second robotic probe tucks the sushi rice inside the corners.
• The printer needs more meat: A startup in Missouri is promoting the idea that one day hamburgers could be produced on a 3-D printer. The company, Modern Meadow, thinks it will be able to “print” slivers of environmentally-friendly, in-vitro meat. I know, doesn’t
  sound too tasty, but Pay Pal co-founder and billionaire Peter Thiel has kicked in about $300,000 to see if it could actually work.
• Can you earn rewards for banning cell phone yakking?: If they can make a game out of running a farm, why not one where you manage a restaurant? So now there’s a game app called Cafeteria Nipponica where you hire staff, create dishes, maybe set up a mobile phone campaign to get customers in the door. And if you really get serious, you can try your hand at trying to run three restaurants at the same time.
• Do we really need to make it easier to buy donuts?: Dunkin’ Donuts has gone the Starbucks route and is now offering a mobile payment app that lets you set up your own donut account where you can pay at the counter by scanning your phone over a barcode. You can even use the app to send donut gift cards to your friends, for which they will either love you or hate you. Probably both.

Video bonus: In case you forgot what a charmer Julia Child could be, watch this 1987 clip where she whips out a blow torch to grill up a burger for David Letterman. And for a bonus bonus, here’s a great new remix of Julia at her snappy best.

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Augmented reality puts flesh on dinosaur bones. Photo courtesy of Meld Media.

Chances are you think you already have enough information in your life. Why, oh why, would you want to add more layers?

Yet there’s something intriguing about the concept of augmented reality, the notion of enhancing objects in the real world with virtual sounds and images and additional info. And when Google revealed earlier this year that it was developing glasses that will be part wearable computer, part digital assistant that flashes relevant data right before your eyes, augmented reality (AR) no longer seemed such a digital parlor trick. The geek gods had spoken.

In fact, recent analysis by the London firm ABI Research concludes that the next big phase of AR–now largely played out on smartphones and tablets–will be through wearable tech. That’s when the technology will become truly functional, when your glasses are able to tell you everything you want to know about the restaurants and stores on the block where you’re walking.

Will Powell, an AR wiz recently interviewed by Slash Gear, concurs:

I think that with the desire for more content and easier simpler devices, using what we are looking at and hearing to tell our digital devices what we want to find is the way forward. Even now we have to get a tablet, phone or laptop out to look something up. Glasses would completely change this because they are potentially always on and are now adding full time to at least one of our fundamental senses.

Scenes from an exhibition

One place, however, where AR is still making its mark on small screens is the museum world. Those who run museums know that the people walking around their buildings are already spending an inordinate amount of time using their phones, whether it’s taking pictures or texting friends or taking pictures to text to friends. So it only makes sense to find ways to turn phones into storytelling tools that can bring the inanimate to life. Or shift time. Or add layers of knowledge. More museums are taking the leap and while the results can sometimes still seem a bit gimmicky, it’s a move in the right direction.

One of the the latest examples is an exhibit called “Ultimate Dinosaurs” that opened at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto earlier this summer. It uses augmented reality to add flesh to the bones of dinosaurs and lets them move around. In some cases, you can use an app on your smartphone to make beasts pop out of markers around the exhibit, including on the floor; in others you can use iPads provided by the museum to turn fossils into fleshed-out creatures. And along the walls are animated projections of dinos that also are interactive. With the help of a Kinect 3-D camera, their eyes follow your every move. A bit creepy, but what museum couldn’t use a little thrill.

Instead of reconstituting dinosaurs, the Laguna Beach Art Museum in California is using AR to bring motion to still photos. Dancers frozen in an image start to spin on your smartphone screen; a woman captured under water suddenly swims away. It’s the first phase of images escaping their frames.

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles is taking yet another approach. In an exhibit titled “Life of Art,” it enables visitors to use iPads to explore in much more detail–and even rotate–classic historical objects from its permanent collection–a 17th century lidded porcelain bowl from Asia, for instance, and an 18th century French armchair.

But maybe the most engaging twist of AR with an exhibit has been pulled off by the Science Museum in London. An iPhone app turns James May, one of the hosts of the popular BBC show “Top Gear,” into a virtual museum guide. By aiming the camera at a marker near nine of the exhibits in the Making the Modern World Gallery, you conjure up a CGI version of May, spinning tales and reeling off details about steam engines and the first home computers.

What is reality?

Here are other examples of augmented reality pushing envelopes:

• Now that’s point-and-shoot: Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab have developed an AR device they call EyeRing. It’s a tiny camera you wear on your finger and when you take a picture of an object, it transmits it to a smartphone that gives you information about what you’ve photographed.
• But does it work on bald?: Meanwhile, the folks at Disney Research have created a technology using reverse electrovibration that projects texture on to smooth surfaces.
• Really interior design: The 2013 edition of the IKEA catalog has its own AR spin. You can use a smartphone app to see inside cabinets and get design ideas not available to those satisfied only with reality.
• But wait,there’s more: The Los Angeles Times used the start of the London Olympics to join print publications dabbling in AR. It rolled out an app that enabled readers to get more material by hovering their phones over Olympics photos in the paper.
• For those who expect more from their chips than crunch: We should all be grateful that we have lived long enough to experience potato chip bags that predict the weather. This month and next, Walkers crisps will come in bags that, once you download the appropriate mobile app, share the weather report for today and tomorrow. There are no plans, as yet, for five-day forecasts.

Video bonus: Here’s a demo video showing how dinosaurs come back to life in a Toronto museum.

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The protests in Egypt fit right into the counterterrorism narrative. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Mosa’aberising

Not long ago, banner ads showing coffins draped with American flags started appearing on websites in Yemen. They had been placed by supporters of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Their message was that Americans were the enemy and Al Qaeda was killing them.

A few days later people working for the U.S. State Department posted banners on the same websites, only this time the coffins were covered with Yemeni flags, photoshopped into the image. The message also had changed. This time it said that most of the people killed by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were Yemen.

For all the attention paid to drone strikes and intelligence coups, the daily grind of counterterrorism is as much a digital parry and thrust, a continuous war of words and ideas played out on websites, chat rooms, forums, blogs and Twitter feeds. Now, experts will tell you, it’s all about the cyber-narrative.

And the State Department, specifically a group within it called the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, is taking on this role with tools and techniques few could have imagined in the days after 9/11. Among other things, they’re training people to be trolls.

Hit them with your best shot

It’s part of something called Viral Peace. As yet, it’s a small project with a miniscule budget by federal government standards, but this gives you a sense of what’s now in play when it comes to counterterrorism tactics. The man behind it, a former Silicon Valley geek named Shahed Amanullah, believes that impressionable young men and women can be discouraged from becoming terrorists by challenging and undercutting extremists online, which is where they do most of their recruiting.

As he told Wired in a recent interview, Amanullah intends to use “logic, humor, satire, religious arguments, not just to confront them, but to undermine and demoralize them.”

To that end he sent two members of his team to Muslim countries–Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Phillipines, Pakistan–where they met with young adults who had already developed online followings. Better for them to do the trolling instead of people who’d be seen as mouthpieces of the U.S. government.

How effective this guerilla strategy of ridicule and rebuke will ultimately be is anyone’s guess, although people who monitor extremists online say they generally don’t respond well to being challenged. But it’s clear that the strategy of using the Web to take on terrorists goes all the way to the top of the State Department.

None other than Hillary Clinton was the one who proudly revealed the story of the photoshopped coffins.

Have I got a story for you

Meanwhile, over at the Pentagon, the focus on controlling the narrative has taken an even more intriguing turn. DARPA, the Defense Department agency that funds cutting-edge research, is underwriting a study of what happens in the brain to incite political violence and how reshaping the narrative can help make people less radical.

The concept is called Narrative Networks and it looks at how stories affect the brain and human behavior, with the goal of finding ways to present narratives that help persuade people not to become terrorists.

Critics have already railed that it has all the makings of a new form of mind control, that with the highly sophisticated brain scans available today, a government could get a far better sense of how to refine messaging to make it more effective at changing people’s minds.

One of the researchers on the project, Paul Zak, of Claremont Graduate University in California, studies how listening to stories affects the brain’s release of oxytocin, known as the “love” or “trust” hormone. He says the purpose of the research is to see what kind of messages would help people view the military in the best possible light.

“We’re not in the business of reading people’s minds or implanting thoughts,” says Greg Berns, an Emory University professor also doing brain research for DARPA. “By understanding the biology of what causes people to go to war, we might begin to understand how to mitigate it.”

The fight stuff

Here’s more of the latest research into devices geared to 21st century warfare:

• Inner vision: Veritas Scientific is developing for the Pentagon a helmet it says will help identify enemies. When placed on a person’s head, it would use sensors to read their brain’s reactions to images flashed on the helmet’s visor, such as specs for how to make a bomb.
• Think fast: U.S. soldiers may soon be able to use a new technology called Sentinel, binoculars connected to a computer that would actually speed up the brain’s normal thought-processing so threats can be identified more quickly.
• Shock troops: Next month some U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan will start carrying a small pack called a Soldier Body Unit. Developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute, it’s equipped with sensors that will measure the force of blasts that soldiers have been exposed to, and help doctors know if he or she has suffered a concussion.
• That’s what he said: In May DARPA awarded a $7 million contract for the first phase of a project to create software that not only would translate all aspects of a foreign language, –including slang, regional dialects, and text messaging lingo–but would do it in real time.
• Sound effects: And earlier this month DARPA unveiled a technique for putting out a fire using only sound. By playing a low-frequency bass note through two speakers pointed at the flame, researchers were able to increase air velocity and create a wider and cooler flame that sputtered out.

Video bonus: DARPA’s also been very big on funding robots. Here’s its AlphaDog Robot lugging 400 pounds over rugged terrain.

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Robots are moving to center stage. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Andy Miah

For all the speech lines we hear about jobs these days, rarely does anyone mention robots.

They do occasionally, but usually it’s saved for the “innovation” speeches. This is understandable. If you’re running for office, better to keep the two ideas separated, because while jobs are good because they’re, well, jobs, and robots are good because they mean progress, mix the two together and soon enough people will start asking how you’ll be able to create a lot of jobs if these really smart machines are doing more and more of the work.

No, I’m not going all Luddite on you. I’m in awe of machines and the remarkable things they can now do. But that’s the point. We’re not talking about the technology of the past, which clearly made humans more productive and allowed us to move into better-paying jobs requiring more specialized skills.

Now we’re creating machines that are much more than tools. They’re learning to think and adapt, and technologists such as Martin Ford, author of Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, believe that within five to ten years, machines will be able to surpass the ability of humans to do routine work. As he told The Fiscal Times: “It’s the first time we’ve had this level of technology that allows machines to solve problems on their own, to interact with their environment, to analyze visual imagines, and to manipulate their environment based on that.”

Do robots know “Kumbaya?”

There are those, of course, who feel that Ford and other techno-downers have the human-robot thing all wrong. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, for one, is convinced that by mid-century, humans and robots will merge in some form. Maybe we’ll be able to live forever in a body of artificial parts. Or our consciousness will live on inside a computer, a kind of humanoid software. Whatever shape it takes, Kurzweil already has a name for it– singularity.

Kurzweil’s take is that machines are gaining intelligence so quickly that it won’t be that long before they’re considerably more intelligent than humans. And he says we should be encouraged by this, not threatened. Technology will only continue to make our lives better, he contends, in ways we can’t yet imagine.

Five years ago, he likes to point out, who would have thought that hundreds of millions of people around the world would be walking around with devices as powerful as smart phones. Or that almost half a million people could have jobs in the business of making mobile apps.

Still, all of this doesn’t seem to bode well for people who don’t have the skills to play in that world. Earlier this month, Forbes, in an article titled, “Is Your Job Robot-Proof?” noted that, “Today America needs 5 million fewer workers to produce a greater value of goods and services than it did in December 2007 when the recession began.”

And other recent news from the robot front provides more grist for worriers like Ford. Canon just announced that it has begun phasing out human workers in its plants, and that in a few years its cameras will be made solely by robots. Earlier this month DARPA, the R&D arm of the Pentagon, awarded $1.2 million to a Georgia start-up to develop machines that would allow U.S. factories to “produce garments with zero direct labor.” That might allow American clothing factories to actually undercut the costs of cheap labor in China.

Or maybe not. Foxconn, the giant Chinese company known both for manufacturing Apple products and for worker suicides, announced last year that it will create a “robot kingdom” of more than 1 million robots within the next few years.

If you could read my mind

But there’s been at least one recent development that’s more in line with Kurzweil’s vision of robot-human togetherness. Researchers at MIT say they’ve developed an algorithm that will enable robots to work side-by-side with humans. The software apparently will allow robots to learn the preferences of their human partners and anticipate their needs out on the factory floor. And if the machine has to move on to help another worker, it would be able to quickly adapt to him or her.

Julie Shah, head of the MIT research team, put it this way: “It’s an interesting machine-learning human-factors problem. Using this algorithm, we can significantly improve the robot’s understanding of what the person’s next likely actions are.”

Wonder if they’ll be able to smell fear?

Mo’ better machines

Here are more reports on robots rising:

• Snakes on a vein: Scientists at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh have created tiny, snake-like robots that, armed with cameras, scissors, forceps and sensors, are helping doctors perform surgery on hearts and cancer tumors.
• The barista will not respond to lame attempts at flirtation: A start-up at the University of Texas has installed a coffee kiosk run by a robot barista in the campus’ academic center. Students can order their drink online or on their phone and receive a text when it’s good to go.
• So much for the career in sushi: Yes, the Japanese have been on to the robots in restaurants thing for awhile. But now food machine manufacturer Suzumo has developed a sushi-making robot that can crank out 2,500 pieces in an hour.
• Don’t even think about pulling my finger: Researchers at the University of Southern California have given robots a sense of touch–one, in fact, that’s actually more sensitive than a human’s finger. Sensors can even tell where and in which direction forces are applied to robot’s fingertip.
• That’s nice, but it still doesn’t do windows: Roomba, the king of household robots, is going wireless. iRobot announced earlier this week that its new Roomba 790, which retails for a mere $699, will come with a “wireless command center” that, among other things, will allow you to schedule it to clean your house while you’re not home.

Video bonus: From the land that nailed Robot Cute long ago comes i-SODOG, a robot pup that shakes, dances, responds to voice commands and can be trained through your smartphone. Ignore the background din of little awestruck Japanese kids. This is a toy you’ll want to take to work, to dates, to job interviews. How could they not hire you?