What happened?
Mark your calendars! The business case for ‘smart infrastructure’ has been made by one of the world’s biggest companies. On November 6th, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano delivered a speech (text / video) at the New York Council on Foreign Relations. Palmisano highlighted ‘Big Blue’s vision of a ‘Smart Planet’ and the tremendous near term opportunities in building out the global smart infrastructures for energy, water, information, and transportation of people and goods.
Palmisano echoed a vision described by visionaries and futurists long ago of a ‘digital planet’. Now we might expect broader endorsements for ‘smart infrastructure’ by mainstream business and policy leaders especially in the US under the incoming Obama Adminstration. We can also build more reliable forecasts and roadmaps based on expectations for investments and application of technologies that improve the flow of traffic (without adding more lanes), more efficient energy grids, wider access to clean water and food, improved personal safety, and more secure information flows around financial, governance, and healthcare information.
Quotes from Palmisano’s address: What’s making this possible? First, our world is becoming instrumented
“There will likely be 4 billion mobile phone subscribers by the end of this year… and 30 billion Radio Frequency Identification tags produced globally within two years. Sensors are being embedded across entire ecosystems—supply-chains, healthcare networks, cities… even natural systems like rivers.“
Second, our world is becoming interconnected
“Very soon there will be 2 billion people on the Internet. But in an instrumented world, systems and objects can now “speak” to one another, too. Think about the prospect of a trillion connected and intelligent things—cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines… even pharmaceuticals and livestock.“
Third, all things are becoming intelligent
“New computing models can handle the proliferation of end-user devices, sensors and actuators and connect them with back-end systems. Combined with advanced analytics, those supercomputers can turn mountains of data into intelligence that can be translated into action, making our systems, processes and infrastructures more efficient, more productive and responsive—in a word, smarter.“
For most of the 20th Century, the U.S. was the world leader in science, technology, and innovation, with the best scientists, the best universities and the most advanced research and development programs. But all of that has begun to change as other countries and regions have become more advanced and more competitive and increasingly challenge U.S. dominance “
A recent article in the New York Times addressed the U.S. technological decline, and the ways Senators Obama and McCain have approached the issue. This story includes some eye-opening statistics about the loss of U.S. primacy in technology, innovation and R&D. At the top of the story, the Times points out the importance of this sector for America’s economy and role in the world:
For decades the United States dominated the technological revolution sweeping the globe. The nation’s science and engineering skills produced vast gains in productivity and wealth, powered its military and made it the de facto world leader. Today, the dominance is eroding.
One sees this in multiple indicators, but perhaps the most important is the country’s high-technology balance of trade. Until 2002, the U.S. always exported more high-tech products than it imported. In that year, the trend reversed, and the technology trade balance has steadily declined, with the annual gap exceeding $50 billion in 2007.
The U.S. has also fallen behind in spending on research and development, which drives high-tech innovation and development.
October 23 2008 / by joelg Category: Education Year: 2008 Month: Oct Rating: 3 Hot
by Joel Greenberg
Scientists and engineers are going to develop the solutions to our energy challenges. An obvious fact, but what if we’re not preparing people for those careers in the US? At the recent NanoTX’08 conference, Dr. Zvi Yaniv, CEO of Applied Nanotech, Inc. discusses the challenges of educating scientists and engineers in the US. All is not rosy, but all is not lost.
Dr. Zvi Yaniv is an expert in LCD technology. He received his PhD in Physics at the Kent State Liquid Crystal Institute in 1982. Shortly after he graduated, he was recruited by Energy Conversion Devices to run their LCD laboratory. Three years later, he spun out Optical Imaging Systems, OSI, Inc. “The premier Liquid Crystal Display Company in America, designing displays for our avionics, for F22, phantoms, helicopters,” he says. “And I loved it!”
By as early as 2010, Microsoft, IBM and others will introduce software enabling students to communicate with computers similar to how we communicate with each other – using words, body language, and gestures.
These sophisticated new computers will understand ordinary everyday spoken words in English, Spanish, Chinese, or any major language, and will use avatars – on-screen images that could appear as Einstein, Columbus, or even a local classroom teacher – to communicate on a personal level with each student.
These future teaching machines will bring education to life. Utilizing virtual reality, they will take students on virtual trips to interesting places and events in the world, fly into space, or wander inside a human cell.
Interactive computers will gather and process video, graphics, and information from anywhere on Earth via the Internet, and reformat this data into words and images that will be clearly understood by each student, regardless of their comprehension level.
These education machines will also become the home of future artificial intelligence that will complement the teacher’s ability, guiding students through course work, supplementing the teacher’s knowledge and answering simple queries to liberate teachers to concentrate on individuals without the rest of the class sitting idle.
If there’s one thing that haunted me all through elementary
school, it was the teachers, constantly reminding us that
practicing cursive was a crucial skill needed in life. Hours each
day were spent preparing for this veritable Hell of a place called
High School where the bullies were bigger, the textbooks were
heavier, and every paper had to be written in cursive. That last
point was hammered in – No teacher in high school would
EVER accept a paper from a student if it
wasn’t written in cursive.
Then came August 20th, 1997, my first day at high school. The US
History teacher shocked me with the words, “Don’t hand-write your
papers, I can’t read them they’re so illegible. I’ll only accept
typed papers.” I couldn’t believe my luck! I had scored the one
teacher that didn’t require students to write papers in cursive.
But in reality, every class I had that day I heard the same thing.
Cursive is illegible… type everything. All that practice had meant
nothing, cursive had been eliminated. It was dead.
The Situation
In an age where airline tickets have gone electronic and bills
can be paid online rather than through check, handwriting itself is
becoming less and less important in our daily lives. One school
teacher even likened learning cursive to teaching kids how to drive
a stagecoach when they should be learning how to drive a car.
Students these days find it easier and quicker to type up lecture
notes than to write it out by hand. The sheer simplicity,
efficiency and speed of typing will be the undoing of
handwriting.
True, things aren’t looking too bright for longhand writing, but
just how bad is it? Online bill pay has killed the check along with
credit and debit cards. Blogs, social networking sites and Email
has obliterated the need for letters. Resumes are Emailed.
Applications are filled out online. All in all, for people who are
heavily immersed in the technology of today, writing is no longer
important. Sure, there is the occasional Post-it note, the grocery
list, or even written instructions. But when you think about some
of the technology most futurists say is coming around the corner,
these can all be wiped out. Refrigerators that order food for you
when your stocks get low. Voice recognition software that makes it
quicker to record instructions than to write. Even Post-its could
be replaced with flexible electronic paper, endlessly reusable and
environmentally safe.
When was the last time you saw fast-food restaurant employees
actually key prices into the register? Today, clerks behind the
counter press buttons with pictures of cups, burgers, or bags of
fries. They never need to read or remember cost of items.
Futurist William Crossman, author of Vivo [Voice-In/Voice-Out]:
The Coming Age of Talking Computers, believes that tomorrow’s
mobile and virtual reality devices, using visual displays like
those in fast-food restaurants, will render reading, writing, and
text obsolete in the not-to-distant future.
Crossman explains why this transformation will take place.
“Before Homo sapiens ever existed, ancient proto-humans accessed
information by speaking, listening, smelling, tasting, and
touching. They relied on memory to store information they heard.
Speaking and listening was civilization’s preferred method of
communication for millions of years.
Then about 10,000 years ago an explosion of information emerged
with the onset of the agricultural revolution and memory overload
quickly followed. Human memories were no longer efficient and
reliable enough to store and share the huge volume of new ideas. To
overcome this problem, our forbearers developed a remarkable
technology that has lasted for thousands of years – written
language.
Academic institutions are usually slow to make changes,
especially when it comes to integrating new methods of teaching. We
keep talking about how the web will shape education, but school
administrations don’t make it easy to take advantage of all the new
tools out there. For instance, most schools block access to
YouTube, leaving teachers no choice but to roll in the VCR cart every time they want to incorporate a video
into a classroom presentation.
Luckily, there are a few sites out there that provide the
platform for educators to upload and share media. Most notable is
TeacherTube, an obvious
YouTube copycat that’s been around for just over a year now. They
boast over 15,000 user-generated videos to supplement K-12
education, many of them tutorials for projects or instructional
videos. Teachers can upload material and collaborate with other
educators around the world, and most schools have allowed access to
the site.
It’s been a great way for teachers to generate new and
interesting lesson plans, and it allows students to review a
concept several times to make sure they understand it. It would
also be a great platform for students to share information with
each other from different schools or countries, and work on
projects together. But, despite its popularity and benefits to both
teachers and students, some schools are still wary of allowing
video-sharing sites to be used at school.
A key European government committee has established a set of
general privacy guidelines that give children control over their
previously generated data upon reaching adulthood.
Earlier this week the Working Party, an independent advisory
body on data protection and privacy composed of data protection
officials from various European countries, published a
comprehensive
document that lays out a long list of protocols and
recommendations concerning children’s data, particularly the
digital information collected over the course of a school
career.
The new rules establish that “[i]f the processing of a child’s
data began with the consent of their representative, the child
concerned may, on attaining majority, revoke the consent. But if he
wishes the processing to continue, it seems that the data subject
need give explicit consent wherever this is required.”
As more and more data is captured and stored, these regulations
are a necessary reaction to the potential for misuse and lay the
groundwork for a whole new set of developmental digital rights.
“The rationale of this principle is that a person who has not
yet achieved physical and psychological maturity needs more
protection than others,” the experts explain about the decision,
“Its aim is to improve conditions for the child, and aims to
strengthen the child’s right to the development of his or her
personality. This principle must be respected by all entities,
public or private, which make decisions relating to children.”
The Ohio
University has set up a fairly innovative experience inside
Second Life
focused on educating residents about food choices. The experience
asks residents to choose 3 meals and then it tells them about the
amount of calories, fat and the long term impact of their health if
they continue to eat this way. The below video gave a really nice
overview.
It was recently
announced that hospitals in Isreal have begun using virtual
reality programs to diagnose and treat patients with brain
injuries. The patient tries to catch a virtual tennis ball being
thrown on a screen, their actual hand movements are recorded, and
the information is fed into a computer program. The program then
diagnoses whether the person has had a traumatic brain injury or
stroke (with 90-98% accuracy!), and run a series of simulations to
determine what will be the most effective treatment and
rehabilitation methods.
This is a huge step in demonstrating the value of virtual
environments and simulations to do real good in the world. For
almost all of the decisions we make, we run simulations in our
brain without even thinking about it. “If I do A, then B is a
likely and desired outcome.” Through trial and error, our
simulations get more accurate over time – we may call it “wisdom”.
But, in some situations, such as the above brain injury example,
even our best human guesses for the right course of action may be
wrong. By running computer simulations, we can take that guesswork
out. Instead of creating a rehabilition therapy that may not only
be ineffective, but downright harmful, doctors will now be able to
implement the most effective therapies according to the patient’s
level of injury.
As computer processing speed continues to increase, and we
methodically quantify the underlying systems that drive everything
around us, we’ll see simulations popping up as tools for increasing
efficiency in all fields. I can see this being used to improve
learning and skill development in both education and the
workplace.
When it comes to education, the definition of ‘literacy’ is
changing as we begin the 21st century. It’s not just about rote
memorization of dates and facts anymore. We’re living in a world
where computers are allowing various types of social media, virtual
environments and simulations, and games to be interwoven into
complex new tools for understanding and interacting with the
systems in which we live.
One big advocate of that notion is Katie Salen, a game designer and
director of the graduate Design and Technology program at
Parsons School of Design. She’s written books and lectured
extensively on how the creation and use of games can be a
foundation for learning and innovation in our ever accelerating
world. Pushing that vision further, she is now spearheading a
project to open a school based on gaming literacy. Katie shared
some of her thoughts and predictions about the future of games and
learning with us in a text-based interview.
V: What do you do and how is that related to the
future?
K: Most of my current work focuses on the future of learning,
and the role games and social media might plan in transforming that
future. The non-profit I run—The Institute of Play —is
designing a new 6th-12th grade school in New York City, based on
game design and systems-thinking. The project aims to change the
way schools think about learning by designing the school from the
ground up around the intrinsic qualities of games and play. And
while parents might be concerned about the amount of screen-time or
game play an approach such as this might involve, researchers from
fields as diverse as the learning sciences, literacy studies,
computer science, and anthropology are seeing that games can and do
affect how, when, and where kids learn.
What happened?
