Not just an ordinary pair of gloves

Two University of Washington undergraduates have won a $10,000 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for gloves that can translate sign language into text or speech.

The Lemelson-MIT Student Prize is a nationwide search for the most inventive undergraduate and graduate students. This year, UW sophomores Navid Azodi and Thomas Pryor — who are studying business administration and aeronautics and astronautics engineering, respectively — won the “Use It” undergraduate category that recognizes technology-based inventions to improve consumer devices.

Their invention, “SignAloud,” is a pair of gloves that can recognize hand gestures that correspond to words and phrases in American Sign Language. Each glove contains sensors that record hand position and movement and send data wirelessly via Bluetooth to a central computer. The computer looks at the gesture data through various sequential statistical regressions, similar to a neural network. If the data match a gesture, then the associated word or phrase is spoken through a speaker.

They honed their prototype in the UW CoMotion MakerSpace — a campus space that offers communal tools and equipment and opportunities for students to tinker, create and innovate. For Azodi and Pryor, that meant finding a way to translate American Sign Language into a verbal form instantaneously and in an ergonomic fashion.

“Many of the sign language translation devices already out there are not practical for everyday use. Some use video input, while others have sensors that cover the user’s entire arm or body,” said Pryor, an undergraduate researcher in the Composite Structures Laboratory in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics and software lead for the Husky Robotics Team.

“Our gloves are lightweight, compact and worn on the hands, but ergonomic enough to use as an everyday accessory, similar to hearing aids or contact lenses,” said Pryor.

Gravity waves detected at last!

Scientists finally discover gravitational waves that were predicted a century ago.

A very special burst of waves from deep space has forever changed the way we look at the universe. These aren’t water waves or waves of light. They are gravity waves, tiny ripples produced by massive objects moving very quickly.

Two black holes produced the newly reported waves when they collided at some point roughly 1.3 billion years ago. Black holes are massive objects that trap light because their gravity is so strong.

Scientists announced the long-awaited discovery of these waves on February 11. That was a century after the famous physicist Albert Einstein first predicted gravity waves would exist. They are also describing their data in a paper published February 11 in Physical Review Letters. 

"It's the first time the universe has spoken to us through gravitational waves," LIGO laboratory executive director David Reitze said at a press conference February 11. "As we open a new window on astronomy, we may see things we never saw before."

Their discovery now gives scientists a new tool for studying the universe. Astronomers need these tools because not everything in the universe can be seen through a telescope. Stars, galaxies and other bright objects emit light that travels to Earth. But black holes are truly black. They don’t emit light, so telescopes can’t see them.

“Gravitational waves allow us to look at the universe not just with light but with gravity,” says Shane Larson. He’s an astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

The discovery immediately becomes a likely candidate for a Nobel Prize. And that's not just because it ties a neat bow around decades of evidence supporting a major prediction by Einstein. In 1916, he came up with the idea for gravitational waves, also called gravity waves. He had just introduced his famous theory of general relativity. That theory says that objects with mass will curve space, similar to how a person standing on a trampoline will bend the fabric. The bending of space changes the motion of nearby objects. For example, the sun’s mass forces Earth to orbit the star in an ellipse, not just move in a straight line.

Intergalactic lessons: five creative ways to teach about space

Create your own big bang in the classroom with our lesson ideas, including making edible meterorites and studying real lunar rocks.

When Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the dusty surface of the moon, Armstrong summed up the epochal event with the famous words “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”.

The first moon landing will be remembered for centuries to come and this summer (Monday 20 July 2015) marks 46 years since it happened.

The anniversary is a great launching pad for teaching about outer space. We’ve gathered a few creative intergalactic lesson plans below – including edible meteorites and studying real lunar rocks. Our list isn’t exhaustive, however, so feel free to offer your own ideas in the comments thread below, or tweet us your favourites @GuardianTeach.

Borrow the moon

Get engagement levels soaring by bringing in real moon rock. The Science & Technology Facilities Council loans out moon rock, brought back to Earth by Nasa’s Apollo astronauts in the late 1960s and early 1970s, free of charge.

Advice on the website says that teachers should reserve samples four months in advance, and each loan comes with a wide range of support materials including books and DVDs. For example, as part of the Earth science unit at key stages 2 and 3 you can use the rocks to hold a talk exploring what lunar idioms and expressions mean. Teach about the differences and similarities between the Earth and the moon, as well as whether humans could survive there. There are plenty of ideas here on how to use the samples with secondary students.

Edible meteorites

Explore chondrules and fusion crust by making edible meteorites from peanut brittle and chocolate brownies. This resource, designed by Nasa, is aimed at 10- and 14-year-olds (fifth to eighth grades) in the US to help teaching the exploring meteorite mysteries unit. It can easily be adapted for other curriculums, however, including the Earth science unit in the UK.

Student gardeners: here's how to grow your own fruit and veg

Whether seasoned seedsmen or gardening greenhorns, all students can harvest the benefits of growing their own food.

From nurturing a few fresh herbs on a windowsill, to making regular trips to your local allotment, growing is the gift that keeps on giving. Gardening can provide fresh food at student-friendly prices. It’s a perfect antidote to work stress and the best way to win someone’s heart, should you wish to.

Whether you’re at one with a trowel, or a gardening novice, there’s always something new to learn. Here’s how to get growing while at university.

Growing with no garden or with limited space

If you live in student accommodation, you may find that the closest you get to a garden is the Great British Bake Off finale, when Mary Berry and Paul are joined by bakers and their families to celebrate outside the tent.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Mark Ridsdill Smith founded Vertical Veg in 2010 to encourage people to grow food in containers if they don’t have access to gardens. As well as running the online project, Smith gives workshops in cities across the UK. “You’ll be amazed at what’s possible in a tiny space. Try it,” he says.

Observing how much sun your growing space gets is key. Three hours or more a day and you’ll be able to grow salad leaves and other leafy greens like kale and chard, says Smith. If it gets five or six hours you can grow peas, beans and potatoes. Over six and you can grow fruiting crops like tomatoes and courgettes.

Sunshine aside, make sure containers are kept well watered as they dry out easily, and check how windy your growing spot is – as rooftops and balconies are often exposed. Smith offers more advice on container growing on the Vertical Veg website, as well as a list of 10 edible growables to get you started.

Fight on to preserve Elfdalian, Sweden’s lost forest language

When I visited the remote Swedish town of Älvdalen, I was immediately struck by the tranquil splendour of the undulating, forest-covered valley in which it is situated. The river Österdalälv, which runs to the valley and has given it its name, was still partly frozen, and the gleaming ice resonated with the last patches of snow that were strewn across the landscape. Here, in this Swedish Shangri-La, I was set to meet the last speakers of Elfdalian, a tiny and well-hidden linguistic gem that only very few know about.

Elfdalian (älvdalska in Swedish and övdalsk in the language itself) sounds like something you would more likely encounter in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings rather than in a remote Swedish forest. But the small town of Älvdalen, which gives the language its name, is not an Elven outpost. It is one of the last strongholds of an ancient tongue that preserves much of Old Norse, the language of the Vikings. And it is now to be taught in the town’s preschools for the first time in September, marking a small victory for a group campaigning for its preservation.

Elfdalian is currently used only by about 2,500 people, but is a treasure trove for linguists. Hidden between the trees and hills, it has preserved linguistic features that are to be found nowhere else in Scandinavia, and that had already disappeared from Old Norse by 1200 AD.

Unique among Nordic languages

Elfdalian has, for instance, preserved nasal vowels that disappeared elsewhere. Nasal vowels are well-known from French, as in un bon vin blanc (“a good white wine”), but not from the modern Nordic languages. In Old Norse, nasal vowels are only found in a single manuscript from 12th-century Iceland, but linguists never thought much of it – until it was discovered that modern day Elfdalian has nasal vowels in the exact same words.

Because of its relative isolation, Elfdalian evolved in an entirely different direction than the modern Scandinavian languages. Its sounds, grammar and vocabulary differ radically from Swedish. So, while speakers of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian can easily understand each other in simple conversations, Elfdalian is completely unintelligible to Swedes who are not from the area.

For centuries, it was unnecessary for the majority of the native Elfdalian-speaking population to learn standard Swedish, as the economic networks were locally-oriented and there was no compulsory schooling in Swedish until the mid-1800s. As a result, Elfdalian remained a vigorous language until well into the 20th century.

Feel the beat: how rhythm shapes the way we use and understand language

Stress-timing and meters aren’t merely the stuff of poetry – their everyday use in conversation and song reveals a fundamental pattern in language skills.

Do you feel the rhythm? Or a French rythme, Spanish ritmo, Swedish rytm, Russian ритм (ritm) or Japanese rizumu? Is there a difference? Perhaps one way to find out is to have a French conversation, German konversation, Spanish conversación, or Italian conversatione? Doing so will of course reveal many differences, but languages of the world also share much, just as these words demonstrate.

For millennia we have been singing, dancing, clapping, drumming and talking to a beat. Just like the evolution of our DNA, languages have cross-pollinated, overlapped and changed, but at a far more rapid rate than our bodies. But are linguistic rhythmic patterns really universal?

An extensive 2010 Oxford University study comparing a series of rhythm algorithm measurements for English, French, Greek, Russian and Mandarin found – “surprisingly”, as the study itself expressed – that none of these languages could be separated, and that languages do not have dramatically different rhythms. It found variants came far more from individual speakers than the rules of the language itself. So perhaps universal patterns of rhythm aren’t so surprising after all. Could the instinct for rhythm in language be innate and echo Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, that we are all essentially hard-wired to form sentences? The answer lies in the weight of syllables.


A world of stress, a matter of meter 
 

Languages use rhythms composed of syllables that are variously stressed and unstressed, all in a variety of patterns that, though discernible and often complex under analysis, we mostly use unconsciously.

Dollard teen discovers pothole solution

There is a delicious irony in knowing that a 14-year-old from Dollard-des-Ormeaux may have found an amazingly simple remedy to Canada’s perennial pothole problem.

While governments spend millions annually in largely futile attempts to repair our rotting roadways, David Ballas, a Grade 9 student at West Island College, believes he may have come up with a cost-effective solution by mixing chicken feathers with asphalt to form a nearly impermeable surface.

Don’t laugh: The French term for potholes is nids-de-poule, or chicken nests.

Ballas’s discovery took the form of a science project, which recently garnered first prize at his school’s science fair. That honour will allow him to represent WIC next month at the Montreal Regional Science Fair at Concordia University.

Ballas came up with the idea after his mother, Joy Struzer, blew a car tire after hitting a pothole in Dollard. It wasn’t the first time, either.

So Ballas consulted a few chemists, who encouraged him to look for “hydrophobic” materials, a scientific term for water repellent.

Ballas found his answer during an Internet search for waste materials with hydrophobic surfaces.

“The first thing that I found was chicken feathers. Actually, there are 5 million tonnes of them that are wasted every year, just in Quebec. It was a perfect idea.”

Bob the Street Cat books sell 1m copies in UK

Homeless busker James Bowen was helped in his struggle against addiction by the companionship of a stray cat. Now his books charting their friendship have propelled him into an elite publishing club.

 

 
Samuel Johnson used to buy oysters for his cat, Hodge; Charles Dickens was so distressed when his own pet died that he had its paw stuffed and turned into a letter opener. Now, proving that there is nothing the British like more than a heartwarming story about an indomitable feline, the homeless busker turned author James Bowen, who wrote about how his cat changed his life in A Street Cat Named Bob, has joined an elite club of writers to have sold more than one million copies of their books in the UK.

In 2007, Bowen, a recovering drug addict, found an injured Bob curled up on a step when he himself was living in sheltered accommodation. "He gave me this look, almost saying, 'help', but also 'sort it out'," said the author today. Bowen nursed Bob back to health, only to find the cat following him everywhere he went, even joining him when he busked and sold the Big Issue. The pair became well-known in London, going on to attract the attention of a literary agent, who sold Bowen's story of how, with Bob's help, he would get over his addictions to heroin and methadone, to Hodder & Stoughton.

The publisher said today that in just two years, combined sales of A Street Cat Named Bob (written with Garry Jenkins), its sequel The World According to Bob and the children's book Bob: No Ordinary Cat, have now topped sales of 1m copies – 1,082,025 to be exact – in the UK, in all formats. The extraordinary sales bring Bowen into the company of publishing phenomena including JK Rowling, EL James, Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown.

"It's incredible," said Bowen. "When I first saw Bob on this doorstep, I never thought this is where I'd be today."

Turning up for his first signing, Bowen had expected a maximum of 50 people. "I don't think even Hodder thought there would be much of a turnout, but when there was a queue around the block, when they were turning people away and we had sold over 300 copies, I thought, 'what?' This is just about me and Bob and my life, talking about how I'm not perfect. Why are people so in love with this little man who's come into my life?" he asked.

Why elephants never forget

It’s a common saying that elephants never forget. But the more we learn about elephants, the more it appears that their impressive memory is only one aspect of an incredible intelligence that makes them some of the most social, creative, and benevolent creatures on Earth. Alex Gendler takes us into the incredible, unforgettable mind of an elephant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSXNqsOoURg

Four trends in tech that every trainee teacher should know about

Classroom technology is changing tomorrow’s world of learning. Trainee teachers should know how to make the most of it.

 
There is more computing power in the average smartphone than the spacecraft that sent the first man to the moon, Gareth Ritter, head of creative arts at Willows high school, is fond of pointing out.

“That’s an incredible educational resource, and every student has one, but schools often try to ban them. It’s absolutely crazy,” says Ritter, who won the 2013 Pearson award for outstanding use of technology in the classroom.

Technology is now playing a greater role in young peoples’ lives than ever before and the opportunities this provides for new teachers to enliven their lessons and engage with students are incredible. Yet it also poses a challenge that trainee teachers need to be ready for. 

“You’ll be preparing young people to live, work and generally exist in a world that’s increasingly dominated by digital technologies, so it’s essential that they’re meaningfully inducted into their use,” says Angela Mcfarlane, CEO and registrar of the College of Teachers and previously head of the University of Bristol’s graduate school of education. “That’s impossible if you don’t have a good understanding of those technologies yourself.” 

 
Here’s our overview of the key trends in educational tech that trainee teachers should be aware of. 

Online learning

Universities all over the world now upload videos of their lectures, reading plans and assessments as massive open online courses (Moocs) to sites like Udacity, Coursera and EdX, creating an incredibly rich knowledge bank on everything from app development to ancient Greek history. “I recommend Moocs to older students,” says Emma Lamb, a teacher trainer and head of religious education and year seven at King Edward VI Camp Hill school for boys.

Meat Free Mondays

Sir Paul McCartney asks fans to pledge support for Meat Free Mondays in an attempt to raise awareness on the environmental impacts of eating meat.

Wisdom in the Age of Information and the Importance of Storytelling in Making Sense of the World: An Animated Essay

by Maria Popova

Thoughts on navigating the open sea of knowledge.

 

For my part in the 2014 Future of Storytelling Summit, I had the pleasure of collaborating with animator Drew Christie — the talent behind that wonderful short film about Mark Twain and the myth of originality — on an animated essay that I wrote and narrated, exploring a subject close to my heart and mind: the question of how we can cultivate true wisdom in the age of information and why great storytellers matter more than ever in helping us make sense of an increasingly complex world. It comes as an organic extension of the seven most important life-learnings from the first seven years of Brain Pickings. Full essay text below — please enjoy.

 

 


We live in a world awash with information, but we seem to face a growing scarcity of wisdom. And what’s worse, we confuse the two. We believe that having access to more information produces more knowledge, which results in more wisdom. But, if anything, the opposite is true — more and more information without the proper context and interpretation only muddles our understanding of the world rather than enriching it.

This barrage of readily available information has also created an environment where one of the worst social sins is to appear uninformed. Ours is a culture where it’s enormously embarrassing not to have an opinion on something, and in order to seem informed, we form our so-called opinions hastily, based on fragmentary bits of information and superficial impressions rather than true understanding.

“Knowledge,” Emerson wrote, “is the knowing that we can not know.”

Creating Classrooms We Need: 8 Ways Into Inquiry Learning

If kids can access information from sources other than school, and if school is no longer the only place where information lives, what, then happens to the role of this institution?

“Our whole reason for showing up for school has changed, but infrastructure has stayed behind,” said Diana Laufenberg, who taught history at the progressive public school Science Leadership Academy for many years. Laufenberg provided some insight into how she guided students to find their own learning paths at school, and enumerated some of these ideas at SXSWEdu last week.

1. BE FLEXIBLE.

The less educators try to control what kids learn, the more students’ voices will be heard and, eventually, their ability to drive their own learning. But that requires a flexible mindset on the part of the teacher. “That’s a scary proposition for teachers,” Laufenberg said. “‘What do you mean I’m going to have 60 kids doing 60 different projects,’ teachers might say. But that’s exactly the way for kids to do interesting, high-end work that they’re invested in.”

Laufenberg recalled a group of tenacious students who continued to ask permission to focus their video project on the subject of drugs, despite her repeated objections. She finally relented — with the caveat that they not resort to cliches. In turn, the students turned in one of the best video projects she’d ever seen: a well-produced, polished video about Americans’ dependence on pharmaceutical drugs that was dense with facts backed up by students’ research. “And I almost killed this project,” she said. “There are vastly creative minds that are capable of doing intensely wonderful things with their learning but often we don’t let that live and breathe. Thankfully I got out of their way and let them do the work they were capable of.”

2. FOSTER INQUIRY BY SCAFFOLDING CURIOSITY.

Teachers always come up to Laufenberg wanting to learn more about her progressive pedagogy — and they invariably ask, “But when do you just tell them things? Don’t you have to just tell them sometimes?”

The power of vulnerability

Brené Brown studies human connection — our ability to empathize, belong, love. In a poignant, funny talk, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity. A talk to share. 

This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxHouston, an independent event. TED editors featured it among our selections on the home page. 

https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability?awesm=on.ted.com_a0Nt3&utm_campaign=&utm_source=l.facebook.com&utm_content=awesm-publisher&utm_medium=on.ted.com-facebook-share 

How playing an instrument benefits your brain

When you listen to music, multiple areas of your brain become engaged and active. But when you actually play an instrument, that activity becomes more like a full-body brain workout. What's going on? Anita Collins explains the fireworks that go off in musicians' brains when they play, and examines some of the long-term positive effects of this mental workout.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0JKCYZ8hng&feature=em-subs_digest

Einstein Hated Quantum Mechanics. Brian Greene and Alan Alda Discuss Why

Albert Einstein was not a fan of quantum mechanics. He was annoyed by the uncertain, random nature of the universe it implied (hence the famous quote “God does not play dice with the universe”). So, Einstein tried to develop a unified theory that would circumvent what he saw as quantum mechanics’ flaws.

Universe re-created in computer simulation

Most detailed model of cosmos reproduces distribution of galaxies.

 

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,” said Carl Sagan, “you must first invent the universe.” A new simulation of the evolution of the universe, called the Illustris Project, is a start. Led by Mark Vogelsberger, an astrophysicist at MIT, Illustris is the most detailed and comprehensive simulation of the universe to date and produces a cosmos that looks similar to today’s.

“The only way we can learn about the universe is to observe it through telescopes,” says Vogelsberger. And the way to test ideas about its evolution, he adds, is by doing simulations. One of the simulation’s insights, reported in the May 8 Nature, is the role that supermassive black holes must have played in shaping galaxies. As the behemoths swallow gas, they are known to belch out energetic gas bubbles that span hundreds of thousands of light-years. Without these eruptions, the universe would look much different; galaxies would be larger, for example.

The Beginning of Everything - The Big Bang

How did all begin? Find out here, watching this interesting video made by Kurzgesat. Kurzgesagt is a team of designers from Munich who loves science. The team makes fun, short videos trying to explain "serious" stuff such as evolution, climate change and the solar system.

How the ancient Greeks shaped modern mathematics – video animation

In this Royal Institution animation about a group of revolutionary thinkers who changed the way we see mathematics, we see that maths isn't just about performing calculations, but a way of understanding and testing the reality of the world around us. Ancient thinking is still helping engineers, scientists, economists, architects gain a better understanding of our world

This project was supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Animation by 12foot6. Narrated by James Grime.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2014/mar/12/ancient-greeks-modern-mathematics-video?CMP=twt_gu 

College Students Outsmarted By Preschoolers At Figuring Out Gizmos

Preschoolers can be smarter than college students at figuring out how unusual toys and gadgets work because they’re more flexible and less biased than adults in their ideas about cause and effect, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Edinburgh.

The findings suggest that technology and innovation can benefit from the exploratory learning and probabilistic reasoning skills that come naturally to young children, many of whom are learning to use smartphones even before they can tie their shoelaces. The findings also build upon the researchers’ efforts to use children’s cognitive smarts to teach machines to learn in more human ways.

“As far as we know, this is the first study examining whether children can learn abstract cause and effect relationships, and comparing them to adults,” said UC Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, senior author of the paper published online in the journal, Cognition.