The Ministry of Education of South Korea and the Korean Information Research Center reported early today ambitious project in the area of education. The project involves complete abandonment of traditional paper textbooks in school and the transition to more advanced media.
Start in Korea intend to junior students who are already in the new year issued "digital book" of a tablet device equipped with high contrast display, electronic memory and feeding from the network or battery. The pilot project will start on the introduction in March 2008, when a number of schools to receive digital books to the course lessons of the Korean and English languages, mathematics, social science, music and other subjects.
In the Foreign Ministry note that the term digital textbooks facing sensory screens that students can write, wireless capabilities, you need to obtain and rapid updating training materials, see the video, as well as to test the knowledge teacher, who will be able to download school work. Among vysheperichislennogo, Korean Digital also replace textbooks and exercise books, but it will happen in 1-2 years, when the sensitivity of touch screens will increase and students will be able to write stylus on the screen just as pen and paper.
In the Information Center study reported that the Korean development of digital textbooks is already for 5 years and the first prototypes of new products have emerged in 2006. At the same time, they tried to 300 pupils and teachers, who approved the innovation.
Now Korean Foreign Ministry entrusted with the development of an appropriate digital learning material, which will be downloaded to the new textbooks.
It is expected that the transfer of all students in South Korea to digital textbooks will be completed by 2011.
Friday, January 18, 2008
South Korea abandons paper textbooks
Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision
Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision
A researcher holds one of the completed lenses.
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Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes � visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.
The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.
"Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside," said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. "This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it's extremely promising." The results were presented today at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz's now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. Other co-authors are Ehsan Saeedi and Samuel Kim in the UW's electrical engineering department and Tueng Shen in the UW Medical Center's ophthalmology department.
There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle's speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.
"People may find all sorts of applications for it that we have not thought about. Our goal is to demonstrate the basic technology and make sure it works and that it's safe," said Parviz, who heads a multi-disciplinary UW group that is developing electronics for contact lenses.
The prototype device contains an electric circuit as well as red light-emitting diodes for a display, though it does not yet light up. The lenses were tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no adverse effects.
Contact lenses with metal connectors for electronic circuits were safely worn by rabbits in lab tests.
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Ideally, installing or removing the bionic eye would be as easy as popping a contact lens in or out, and once installed the wearer would barely know the gadget was there, Parviz said.
Building the lenses was a challenge because materials that are safe for use in the body, such as the flexible organic materials used in contact lenses, are delicate. Manufacturing electrical circuits, however, involves inorganic materials, scorching temperatures and toxic chemicals. Researchers built the circuits from layers of metal only a few nanometers thick, about one thousandth the width of a human hair, and constructed light-emitting diodes one third of a millimeter across. They then sprinkled the grayish powder of electrical components onto a sheet of flexible plastic. The shape of each tiny component dictates which piece it can attach to, a microfabrication technique known as self-assembly. Capillary forces � the same type of forces that make water move up a plant's roots, and that cause the edge of a glass of water to curve upward � pull the pieces into position.
The prototype contact lens does not correct the wearer's vision, but the technique could be used on a corrective lens, Parviz said. And all the gadgetry won't obstruct a person's view.
"There is a large area outside of the transparent part of the eye that we can use for placing instrumentation," Parviz said. Future improvements will add wireless communication to and from the lens. The researchers hope to power the whole system using a combination of radio-frequency power and solar cells placed on the lens, Parviz said.
A full-fledged display won't be available for a while, but a version that has a basic display with just a few pixels could be operational "fairly quickly," according to Parviz.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-01/uow-clw011708.php
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The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and a Technology Gap Innovation Fund from the University of Washington.
Groundhog Day
GroundhogDay or Groundhog's Day is aholiday celebrated in New York and Pennsylvania on February 2. In weather lore, if a groundhog, also known as a woodchuck, marmotor ground squirrel, emerges from its burrowon this day and fails to seeits shadow because the weatheris cloudy, winter will soon end. If thegroundhog sees its shadow, it will return into its burrow, andthe winter will continue for 6 more weeks.
In western countries in the Northern Hemisphere the official first day of Spring is about six weeks after Groundhog Day, on March 20 or 21. About 1,000 years ago, before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar when the date of the equinox drifted in the Julian calendar, the spring equinox fell on March 16 instead. This was exactly six weeks after February 2. Assuming that the equinox marked the first day of spring in certain medieval cultures, as it does now in western countries, Groundhog Day occurred exactly six weeks before spring. Therefore, if the groundhog saw his shadow on Groundhog Day there would be six more weeks of winter. If he didn't, there would be 42 more days of winter. In other words, the Groundhog Day tradition may have begun as a bit of folk humor.
Alternatively, the custom could have been a folk embodiment of the confusion created by the collision of two calendrical systems. Some ancient traditions marked the change of season at cross-quarter days such as Imbolc when daylight first makes significant progress against the night. Other traditions held that Spring did not begin until the length of daylight overtook night at the Vernal Equinox. So an arbiter, the groundhog / hedgehog, was incorporated as a yearly custom to settle the two traditions. Sometimes Spring begins at Imbolc, and sometimes Winter lasts 6 more weeks until the equinox.
Robert E. Lee Birthday. Confederate General
Jan. 19 is the birthday of Robert E. Lee, a man we should all try to emulate. He was so nearly a perfect human being that it is hard for our modern minds to come to grips with him.
We have grown cynical. We've seen too often men who gain fame but lack virtue. We've seen too many flawed heroes marketed like soap. In contrast, Lee was the genuine article, the last of the Christian knights.
When secession came, Lee was offered the command of the Union Army. What a temptation to a professional military man. Lee was opposed to secession, though he recognized the right of states to withdraw from the union. He agonized over the decision. He simply could not bring himself to lead an invading army to fight his family and friends in Virginia. He did the honorable thing and resigned his commission.
He went through West Point without a single demerit, was a hero of the Mexican War, and married and remained faithful to his wife even though she became an invalid at a young age.
His fame earned during the tragic war was worldwide. Always at a disadvantage in numbers and equipment, he conducted brilliant campaigns. The New England historian Charles Francis Adams said: "My contention is that Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia never sustained defeat. Finally, it is true, succumbing to exhaustion, to the end they were not overthrown in fight."
It was not his courage and military skills, however, that make him unique. To Lee, Christianity was not something to be flaunted, but a way of life. Fame didn't faze him. He remained humble. He never took credit for victories, ascribing them to God and to his men. There is no record of his ever uttering a vulgarity or speaking ill of the enemy. He is the only general I've ever heard of whose men loved him.
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant bristled when he heard the radical Republicans had indicted Lee for treason after the war, and he warned Washington, "I will resign the command of the Army rather than execute any order directing me to arrest Lee or any of his commanders so long as they obey the laws." The charge was dropped. Gen. Winfield Scott said, "Lee is the greatest military genius in America."
Unlike today's generals, so many of whom seek to become millionaires on a paltry record by making expensive speeches and accepting corporate directorships, Lee turned down all the offers of gifts and lucrative positions that flooded in after the war, including the offer of an estate in England. "I have enough and am content," he said in refusing one gift.
His letters to his children are full of advice to seek knowledge and virtue. "The more you know, the more you find there is to know in this grand and beautiful world. It is only the ignorant who suppose themselves omniscient," he wrote to one daughter.
Instead, he accepted the post of president of what is now Washington and Lee University at a most modest salary. He told his young students there was only one rule: They were to act like Christian gentlemen.
Lee answered a request for an interview by a biographer, "I know of nothing good I could tell you of myself."
"Gain knowledge and virtue and learn your duty to God and your neighbor. That is the great object of life," he said in another letter. "The first business of education is to draw forth and put into habitual exercise the former dispositions such as kindness, justice and self-denial."
In today's me-first, egocentric world, that is hard to grasp, but Lee was indeed a genuinely humble man - and one of the greatest.