Kids are smart. Much, much smarter than we give them credit for. Most kids have an inherent curiosity, a craving for knowledge and a greater patience with the learning process than most adults. And curiosity is the most powerful force in education.
That was the hope of the non-profit OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project, an organization that provides educational resources to kids in the poorest communities. For this particular project, they shipped a box full of Android tablets to a rural village in Ethiopia. The town was illiterate. The kids had no concept of written language. Yet they were suddenly gifted a box of English-language tablets. No instructions, no instructor, just a powerful device.
The old axiom tells us that teaching a man to fish is better than giving him a fish. But what about giving the man a fishing pole? OLPC wanted to see how well these kids would perform if they simply had access to better tools. Would the kids’ curiosity be enough?
It’s an amazing story, but kind of a bittersweet one. There is limitless potential inside kids who haven’t yet had access to education and millions more who will never have access to education. There aren’t many causes as noble as providing that access.
A recent study out of Texas A&M University concluded that sending hands-free, voice-activated text messages impairs driver reaction times just as badly as actually typing them out.
“In each case, drivers took about twice as long to react as they did when they weren’t texting,” Christine Yager, who headed the study, told Reuters. “Eye contact to the roadway also decreased, no matter which texting method was used.”
Now, being distracted behind the wheel is obviously a serious problem for a lot of drivers, so I don’t want to cast doubt on the accuracy of the study, especially if it could save a few lives. But I do have to take some of the conclusions with a grain of salt. There are two other things Yager said, one I totally agree with, one which I’m not so sure.
Totally Agree
The biggest concern is that the driver felt safer while using voice-to-text applications instead of traditional texting, even though driving performance was equally affected, she said.
This may lead to a false belief that texting while driving using spoken commands is safe when in reality it is not, Yager said.
This part makes perfect sense to me, and seems to me like the most important thing to take home from this study. If drivers are just as unsafe using voice-to-text software as thumb-typing, it’s not because of the inherent danger in using a mobile device, but because of a misplaced confidence boost. Drivers need to be educated and disciplined enough that they keep their focus on the road. As terrible an idea as texting while driving is, only the most reckless of reckless drivers wouldn’t be aware of how dangerous they’re being while they’re doing it. Maybe that actually leads to an extra layer of caution drivers using voice-to-text don’t have.
Not So Sure
“You’re still using your mind to try to think of what you’re trying to say, and that by proxy causes some driving impairment, and that decreases your response time,” Yager said.
While I’m not doubting this from a technical perspective, I’m not sure what conclusions we’re really supposed to take away from this. I mean, I use my mind all the time while driving. It’s how I keep from dozing off during my hour commute into work. I listen to music or audiobooks. I think about stuff I’m going to do that day. I daydream. If I have a passenger, I talk to them. But if something comes up that requires my unbroken attention, I’ll stop doing those things and refocus.
I guess I’m just not entirely convinced that all types of distraction are inherently bad. There has to be a benefit to keeping your mind active while doing a monotonous activity.
Everyone needs to remember how new and unpolished this sort of technology is. As it gets better and as we get more comfortable using it, there will be less fiddling with the device, less need to make corrections, and less false confidence that it’s 100% safe. Then our phones will do a better job at helping us get through a long drive instead of distracting us.
Between Asteroid 2012 DA14 passing a mere 17,200 miles from the surface and the meteor impact in Chelyabinsk, Russia causing over 1,000 injuries, I think it’s time we start calling February 15th International Space Junk Day. Children can celebrate by throwing rocks at each other. Adults can coat ice cubes in 151, light them on fire, and drop them into a vodka & tonic. We can call the drink an “Atmospheric Entry,” or maybe a “Siberian Sky.”
NASA is working on redesigning their space suits. The idea behind the latest redesign, currently called the Z-1, is to make something more flexible and easier to take on and off. The hope is that these suits will one day be attached to the outside of rovers, so astronauts can simply step into the suit as they’re exiting the rover to walk around Mars (or wherever). Look closely at the “backpack” and you’ll see it’s actually a hatch. The astronaut simply climbs through to put the suit on.
Apparently it was also someone’s idea to make them look exactly like Buzz Lightyear.
I guess they’re saving the wrist-mounted laser for the Z-2 and the retractable wings for the Z-3. (more…)
Any NYU students reading this? They should already know the story…
Like all schools, NYU keeps a listserv of all its students for anytime it needs to send out mass emails. But because it was improperly set up, one student gave the entire student body access to that listserv by accidentally hitting “reply all” instead of “forward.” (more…)
If you’re NASA, you should really be more careful about throwing around phrases like “one for the history books.” That’s the terminology John Grotzinger, head of the Curiosity rover mission to Mars, used in a recent interview. But he was light on other details, so, since wild speculation is human nature, people are trying to figure out what Curiosity could have dug out of the Martian dirt that can be called “historic.”
The specifics of this discovery are remaining secret until (most likely) a conference in early December, to give the scientists time to triple-check the results. But since one of the primary objectives of Curiosity is to see if the Red Planet has ever been capable of supporting simple organisms, it stands to reason that a discovery along those lines would be the sort of thing NASA was looking for.
So what could they have found in the analyzed soil samples? Large amounts of methane, an organic compound that’s usually produced by lifeforms?
Sure, that’s a reasonable assumption, but who wants to hear that? I prefer the unreasonable, thank you very much:
a human skeleton
the Holy Grail
the Ark of the Covenant
whatever those magic stones were in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Amelia Earhart
a dinosaur in a space suit (proving they didn’t go extinct, they just got tired of Earth)
I have news that’s incredibly disappointing to my younger self, age 3 to 9. Sadly, we’ll never be able to build a real-life Jurassic Park, because the half-life of DNA strands only lasts 521 years.
While it’s been generally assumed that DNA would break down after a long enough period, proving it would require large samples of theoretically DNA-rich material. A group of Australian scientists found the right test materials in bones of the now-extinct moa, an emu-like bird from New Zealand that looked a little something like this:
These bones were hundreds or thousands of years old, not millions, but it gave the scientists enough information to conclude that it takes 521 years after cell death for the bonds that hold together DNA to dissolve completely. Even under perfect conditions (for example, protected inside mosquitos preserved in amber like in Crichton’s book and Spielberg’s movie), there is no way the DNA would remain intact after the 6.8 million years that separate us from dinosaurs. The team’s best estimate for the oldest potentially readable DNA under perfect conditions is 1.5 million.
So no Cloneosaurus in our future. Though with that 521 year half-life bearing down on us, we still might be able to make a cloned Christopher Columbus if we hurry.
There was a very, very, very pointless news story last week regarding Olympic gymnast Gabby Douglas’ hair. A handful of idiots took to Twitter to complain that her hair looked unkempt. Now any reasonable person reacts to this “story” by not reacting at all, because what an athlete’s hair looks like is about as important as what shoes a surgeon wears. In this case, a high and tight bun is standard operating procedure for gymnasts, so I really don’t know where the conversation came from in the first place.
Oh that’s right, it came from a handful of idiots. Turns out when you give everybody a voice through social media, idiots will say idiotic things.
What I don’t see is how that handful of easily ignored idiots got to dictate headlines. Tell me what’s wrong with the following real headlines:
You all do realize that for a debate, you need a point and a counter-point. All we’ve got here is a counter-point. Nobody is actively arguing that Douglas’ overly practical hairstyle is unacceptable. But the press, blogs, and other commenters are keeping this one-sided conversation going anyways. It’s blossomed into a full-on “debate” but the only people having the debate are the ones still acting like there’s something that needs refuting.
Check out this lead from NBC’s Today Show website (the first link above):
Just before the scoreboard showed that Gabby Douglas had won the gold in individual gymnastics last week, her mom Natalie Hawkins had only one reaction: relief. It was relief that came after ten years of training, after her daughter said she dreamt of being an Olympian, and after she let her daughter move away from home at 14 to chase her dreams.
The relief didn’t last long, as Hawkins soon found herself defending her daughter’s hair, which had been swiftly criticized for being both “unkempt” and “embarrassing” very soon after Douglas made Olympic history.
“The relief didn’t last long”? Give me a break, Today Show. I seriously doubt Gabby or her family give any thought whatsoever to this “controversy” beyond when you and other media outlets bring it up. This all grew out of a handful of Twitter posts. Don’t you all know how easy it is to ignore a dumb Twitter post?
Creating a news story from Twitter stupidity is incredibly easy. You can do it yourself. Next time any sort of news or sports event happens, just search for keywords that could be linked to the most offensive possible interpretation. You are bound to be hit with big pile of ignorance and failed wit. That’s what one story did after the women’s soccer match between Japan and the U.S. I’m sure you can imagine what the keywords were for that.
Now, admittedly, we ran a story back in the spring about Twitter reactions, regarding The Hunger Games and the casting of actress Amandla Stenberg as the character Rue. Actually, it’s remained one of our most popular articles on the blog. But, as the writer of that article, I’d argue there’s a difference between stories that ask broader cultural questions — in that article’s case, people judging a film based on how it matches up to their own imagination, not to the descriptions in the book — and stories that simply point out dumb people saying dumb things.
We’ll always have idiots. Let’s try to limit how often we give them a stage.
Google’s suggestions feature (that is, when you start typing something in and it guesses in advance what question you’re going to ask) is a great way to get a snapshot of things the world is thinking, by showing what search queries tend to be on people’s minds.
For example, while watching the Olympics over the weekend, I did a quick search during a commercial break to find out more information on Ryan Lochte, the gold-medal winning swimmer. Notice the second suggestion:
Where did your name come from? Possibly from one of your parents, or a more distant, long-dead ancestor. Maybe you were named after a song, or a character from a book or movie your parents liked. Or maybe your parents looked at your squishy newborn features and decided you simply looked like a (insert first name here).
In other words, it’s fairly arbitrary. But that makes it no less important. Names are potent things. I’m not even aware of the thousand tiny ways my self-perception would be changed if I had been named Adam or Joshua or Maximilian instead of Chris. I might have even come out a little different if I was Christian instead of Christopher.
This doesn’t just go for people. It’s no less important with the names we give just about anything else. Look at dinosaurs. Everyone knows velociraptors from Jurassic Park, but actual raptors were feathered and about the size of dogs. The dinosaurs in Crichton’s book and Spielberg’s movie were closer to deinonychus. But the name “velociraptor” is more versatile (it can be shortened to raptor), easier to remember, and sounds more intimidating. So the misappropriated name stuck. Similarly, the spinosaurus is bigger and likely more vicious than a tyrannosaurus, but only one of these two gets the Latin “rex” slapped on the end of its name. Thus, the king stays the king.
Just like your name, the names of everything we discover or invent usually end up coming from a pretty arbitrary place: a parent, a long-dead ancestor, a pop-culture reference, or the first impressions of the inventor/discoverer. Almost half the planet bears the name of merchant, mapmaker, and sometime explorer Amerigo Vespucci, simply because he suggested, “Hey, maybe that’s not Asia.”
You’ve heard about the discovery of the Higgs boson by now, right? This is the so-called “God particle.” If you haven’t, here’s the simple version, coming from a guy who needed it really dumbed down before he understood it: Bosons are elementary subatomic particles of energy that do not occupy space, in the way particles like electrons, protons, or quarks do. The Higgs boson was a theoretical but (until recently) unobserved particle that permeates all of observable reality and allows all the stuff of the universe to have mass, giving all objects with mass a consistent set of properties. Got it, Jesse Pinkman?
While it’s nearly impossible to speculate on the practical possibilities of this discovery, it’s a major scientific breakthrough because it helps us get a tiny bit closer to understanding the most basic mechanisms of the universe. So what do you call something that permeates all matter in the universe? You name it after the guy whose name came first on a paper suggesting that something like this could exist back in the 60′s. I can’t imagine the hubris associated with having a fundamental piece of existence named after you.
Meanwhile, poor Satyendra Nath Bose (whom bosons are named after) gets a bit of a snub. One of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, his work was more fundamental and more revolutionary, and, along with Einstein, he laid the groundwork that gave rise to Higgs’ theory, the eventual construction of the Large Hadron Collider, and the discovery of the particle. But because it’s not immediately apparent that “boson” (lower case “b”) comes from somebody’s name, it’s undeniable that more people will know the name “Higgs.”
Giving something so universally fundamental some guy’s name is one approach, but giving it a name that actually indicates its importance is another. As mentioned above, the Higgs boson has also been dubbed “the God particle,” by Leon M. Lederman and Dick Teresi from the title of their book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? By and large, it’s a name that makes physicists cringe, since it suggests a science vs. religion debate where there is none. And the actual source of the “God” moniker is even more harmless. The authors originally called their book “The Goddamn Particle” (after the frustration scientists trying to detect it felt), but their editors weren’t comfortable with the profane title. So Lederman and Teresi changed it to “God,” with the after-the-fact justification that the particle is powerful and omnipresent.
So whether you’re naming a building block of existence or a cat you adopted, take your time with its name. It will inevitably affect the way everyone thinks about he, she, or it. Or you can just defy all expectations and go the “Boy Named Sue” route. It’s your call.
