Category: News

The health benefits of eating certain foods raw are numerous, as raw foods are essentially living foods that contain live enzymes, undamaged nutrients, and alkaline-forming compounds that help nourish and cleanse the body. And you do not necessarily have to take the…

According to the website of the Transportation Security Administration, the agency was created in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks “to strengthen the security of the nation’s transportation systems and ensure the freedom of movement for…

Over the past 16 years, the rate of drug overdose from prescription opioid drugs skyrocketed seven-fold in New York City. In fact, researchers from Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health call it nothing less than an “epidemic.” Who are the people in New York overdosing…

Pregnant women are more prone to develop glucose intolerance, also known as gestational diabetes. This is the main reason why pregnant women are encouraged to keep a healthy weight by maintaining proper diet and performing regular exercise. During this time, the woman’s…

From the late 1990s to now, more and more statistical evidence regarding death and injury from medical interventions, known as iatrogenic deaths and injuries, have been exposed. The rate of iatrogenic deaths is quite high, higher than traffic fatalities, heart attacks…

Nearly one million teenage boys living in Australia are set to be vaccinated with the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil in the coming months and years, according to new reports. The first country in the world to give an official green light to the vaccine’s…

If you’re looking to clear up your problem complexion – specifically, your acne problem – new research suggests you may be able to do so simply by implementing some changes in your diet. A study published recently in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics…

“Newborn Screening in America,” a report from the Council for Responsible Genetics, states: “Before they are even a week old, ninety-eight percent of the 4.3 million babies born annually in the United States have a small sample of blood taken from their heels.” The…

First of all, you should know that the flu vaccine is based on “educated” guessing, not good science. In addition, these flu shots are created by mixing various flu virus strains (toxic germs) with formaldehyde, MSG, sodium chloride and mercury. And, here’s the kicker…

The unfolding horse meat outrage currently engulfing Europe has taken on a new, bizarre twist, according to investigators. Key figures involved in the unfolding scandal have been linked to a similar secretive network of companies that have ties to convicted Russian arms…

One of the few points of interest that emerged from a phablet-filled Mobile World Conference this year is the first round of phones powered by the new Firefox OS. Mozilla’s new HTML5-based mobile platform is open and available to vendors for free, and it could make a serious dent in emerging markets. But a stumbling block emerges as Samsung (005930), the world’s top cell phone maker by shipment volume, has reportedly stated that it has no interest in adopting the OS for its handsets, CNET reports. This makes sense since Samsung’s Android bet has already been hedged, but it could be a serious roadblock for Mozilla as Samsung continues to put its massive weight behind a push into emerging markets.

We’ve seen a number of “the young” of the conference’s theme in this session of TED2013. Now, to play us off out into the night are Sleepy Man Banjo Boys, a trio of brothers from New Jersey, the youngest of whom became a YouTube sensation in 2011 when he was only eight years old. “They’re fantastic musicians, really incredible players,” says TED music advisor Bill Bragin of the three, the oldest of whom even now is only 15 years old. “And there’s something about the interaction of a bluegrass band and the way the fiddle, the banjo, and the guitar intersect because they’re brothers. There’s a real intuitive sense that happens when they’re locked in that really comes across.” The crowd certainly feels it; whoops and hollers round off the end of the rollercoaster first day at TED.

It’s a question on so many minds: what will the future of education look like?

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity It’s something Sir Ken Robinson has asked for decades. And tonight in Session 3 of TED2013, Robinson got the opportunity to announce the winner of the 2013 TED Prize, someone who has a bold answer.

“So many kids are disengaged from education and there’s a tendency to confuse testing with learning,” says Robinson in his introduction. “What drives learning is curiosity, questioning … What fires people up to learn is having their mind opened up by possibilities.”

And with that, he revealed the winner of the $1 million TED Prize: education innovator Sugata Mitra, who has given two TED Talks over the years and released a TED ebook called Beyond The Hole in The Wall.

Mitra wants children around the globe, in addition to traditional schooling, to get a chance to participate in self-organized learning. Translation: to spend time in learning environments where they are given the space to explore on their own, make discoveries and share them with their peers. In his talk from the TED stage, Mitra offered a bold wish: to help design the future of learning by supporting children in tapping into their innate sense of wonder. To this end, Mitra asked the TED community to help him create the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India where children can embark on intellectual adventures, connecting with information and mentors online. He also asked the community, wherever they may be, to create child-driven learning environments for the kids in their own lives.

In his talk, Mitra points out that schooling as it exists now was created 300 years ago in the British Empire.

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education “The Victorians created a global computer made up of people. It’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine,” says Mitra, in the bold opening of his talk. “In order to keep that running, you need lots and lots of people. They must be identical to each other … So they created a system, called school, to make parts [for this human computer]. They must have good handwriting, they must be able to read, and they must be able to add, subtract and do division.”

But these skills aren’t as necessary with the advent of computers.“It’s quite fashionable to say education system is broken,” says Mitra. “It’s not, It’s wonderfully constructed — it’s just that we don’t need it anymore. It’s outdated.”

We can’t imagine the technology of the future, and thus we can’t know what jobs we’ll need the skills for. So Mitra suggests that education should be about developing the ability to learn anything on one’s own.

Mitra has a history of research to back up this wish. In 1999, he began what he calls his “hole in the wall” experiment. He carved a hole in a wall in a Delhi slum — about three feet high — and placed a computer in it. Kids had gathered around within a matter of hours and asked Mitra questions about what this thing was. He responded “I don’t know,” and walked away.

Soon the kids were surfing the internet — and teaching each other how to do it more effectively.

Mitra repeated the experiment 300 miles away, where computers even less familiar. He installed a mysterious computer on the side of a road. A few months later, he returned and found kids playing games on it. Remembers Mitra, “They said, ‘We want a faster processor and a better mouse.’”

Another thing these kids said that was music to his ears: “You’ve given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English.”

Mitra says, “It was the first time I heard the words ‘teach ourselves’ said so casually.”

Mitra kept testing, seeing if rural students could learn different pronunciation simply by talking into a speech-to-text engine until it understood them. They did it. And then he went even more absurd. He asked:  Can Tamil-speaking 12-year-olds learn the biotech of DNA replication by themselves on a streetside computer in English?

Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselvesSlowly but surely, over months, the kids began to learn the material — showing understanding of concepts far advanced for their age. In three months, with a test, they went from 0% comprehension to 30%. But Mitra wanted to see if he could go further. He brought in a 22-year-old woman with no knowledge of the subject to tutor the kids, using “the method of the grandmother.” Instead of traditional instructing, she simply gave encouragement. The kids’ test comprehension scores jumped.

“We live in a world where, when we want to know something, we can learn it in two minutes,” says Mitra. “Could it be, the devastating question, that we’re heading towards a future where knowing is obsolete?”

Mitra isn’t ready to say that, but he is willing to challenge traditional modes of education based on teaching, testing and regurgitation. As Mitra explains, punishments and exams are seen as threats by kids. He says that these are tools no longer needed outside of the age of empire. Mitra urges us all to shift the incentive for education from threat to pleasure.

Mitra shared another one of his experiments — the “granny cloud,” a community of retired teachers who Skyped into learning centers and encouraged children with questions and assignments. He calls this type of environment a SOLE — a self-organized learning environment. It’s based on a curriculum of questions that set curiosity free, varying forms of peer assessment and certification without examination.

“If we let the educational process be a self-organizing organism, learning emerges,” says Mitra. “It’s not about making learning happen, it’s about letting education happen.”

Mitra’s $1 million TED Prize is not a gift– it’s seed money to fund a global  initiative toward this vision. The money will help Mitra break ground on the School in the Cloud in India this very year. This school will serve as both an education and research center to further explore approaches to self-directed learning. It will be managed by cloud technology, but with an adult supervisor always on hand. The plans for the school will be open-sourced.

But Mitra is asking for your help, too.

He has released a toolkit for parents, educators and teachers who want to create SOLEs. The online resource will help them support kids (8-12 years old) as they tap into their innate sense of wonder. The key: asking big questions. For example, “If a meteroite was coming toward the earth, how would you figure out if it was going to hit?” Mitra has been amazed with how kids come up with new approaches to questions like this.

Closing his talk, Mitra shared an anecdote. “A little girl was following me around. I said, ‘I want to give a computer to everyone,’” recalls Mitra. “She reached out her hand and she said to me, ‘Get on with it.’”

Richard Turere is 12 years old, and he lives in Kenya, in Nairobi National Park. It’s a park with lots of animals that roam freely, including lions. The lions kill livestock. So he say, “I grew up hating lions.”

Turere, who took part in the Global Talent Search last year, tried to solve the problem. First, he used fire. But that didn’t work, and actually, “It was helping the lions see through the cowshed.”

So he went to a second idea: a scarecrow. “I was trying to trick the lions. But lions are clever.” On the first day, the lions came, saw the scarecrow and left. The second day, they came and realized it wasn’t moving, and killed the cows.

But one day Turere discovered that lions are afraid of moving lights. So he got a bunch of lights and an old car battery, and the thing from a motor car that makes the blinkers blink. He set up a circuit that made lights flash. It worked: “The lights flash and trick the lions that I’m walking around the cowshed when I’m sleeping in my bed.”

Since then, no problems with lions. Other people nearby heard about it and had similar problems, so they asked him to install lights for them. Now it’s used all across Kenya to scare various predators. Because of this, he received a scholarship to the best college in Kenya, where he now studies.

“A year ago,” says Turere, “I was a boy in a savannah grassland. I saw planes fly over and I said I’d be inside one day. I had a chance to come by plane for the first time for TED. I got to come by plane to come to TED. My dream is to become an aircraft engineer and pilot when I grow up.”

And for now, he lives with the lions without conflict. It’s a wonderful sentiment to end an extraordinary talk, and the audience responds with a full, enthusiastic standing ovation.

We had the opportunity to tour the Ford booth on Tuesday at Mobile World Congress, and were treated to a first-hand walk-through of the newest version of the company’s Sync in-car media and voice command technology. Chief among the new features is Spotify integration, giving subscribers ubiquitous access to the streaming music service by way of a few simple voice commands.

Continue reading…

TED’s own Lisa Bu takes the TED2013 stage now to tell a very personal tale of a journey through literature that began, well, with a shattered dream. Growing up in Hunan, China, in the 1970s, Bu’s parents (yes, she had a Tiger Mother) believed there was only one sure way to happiness: a safe and well-paid job; no matter whether she actually liked it or not. She, in contrast, dreamed of making a career as a Chinese opera singer. But no adults would take her seriously, and when she reached the age of 15, she knew that she was too old to be trained. Her dream was not to be. “I was afraid that for the rest of my life, second-class happiness would be the best I could hope for,” she says. “But that was so unfair! I was determined to find another calling.”

With no one around to teach her, she turned to books, and what follows is her fresh take on some old favorites, including what she took from titles such as Jane Eyre, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, a book banned in China she was only able to read after she moved to the US in 1995. “The Bible,” she comments, “is interesting, but strange.” A big laugh here — “that’s a topic for a different day,” she adds wryly.

Moving to a new culture, Bu developed a new habit: Comparative reading, a standard practice in academia that she took to with alacrity. She read books in pairs, to understand the same tale from different perspectives. She read books written by friends such as Katharine Graham and Warren Buffett to compare shared experiences. She read books on different religions. She read books in different languages–finding herself not lost but found in translation.

“Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present,” says Bu. “I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again. Having your dream shattered is nothing compared to what many others have suffered. I have come to believe that coming true is not the only purpose of a dream. Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from. Even a shattered dream can do that for you.”

It is because of books, she concludes, that she is on the TED stage today. “I live happy, with purpose and clarity (most of the time). May books be always with you,” she says, to applause from many more than just her TED colleagues.

Here are the books only available in Mandarin:

Correspondence in the Family of Fou Lei 傅雷家书

Complete Works of Sanmao 三毛全集

Lessons from History 历史的经验，by Nan Huaijin 南怀瑾

In her 20s, Meg Jay saw her first psychotherapy client, Alex, who was there to talk about her guy problems. Jay didn’t take the sessions all too seriously at first. But then her supervisor gave her a wakeup call. While Jay said, “Sure she’s dating down and sleeping with a knucklehead. But she’s not gonna marry the guy.” Her supervisor responded, “Not yet. But she might marry the next one. The best time to work on Alex’s marriage is before she has one.”

For Jay, it was an a-ha moment. She realized that 30 is not the new 20. The 20s are not a throwaway decade — they’re a developmental sweet spot as it is when the seeds of marriage, family and career are planted.

There are 50 million 20-somethings in the US — that’s 15% of population. And Jay wants them to consider themselves adults, and know that this period is as important for their development as the first five years of life. Because the first 10 years of a career have an exponential impact on how much money a person is going to earn. Love is the same way: Half of Americans are with their future partner by the age of 30.

“Claiming your 20s is one of simplest things you can do for work, happiness, love, maybe even for the world,” says Jay. ”We know your brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood. Which means whatever you want to change, now is the time to change it.”

Jay worries that messages in the media about the changing timetable of adulthood, and the 20s being an “extended adolescence,” are trivializing this important decade. These messages encourage 20-somethings not to take action on the things that matter to them most. It leads them to think,  ”As long as I get good job by 30, I’m fine.” Or that dating is just a game, and that they should stay with someone who is just “fun.” The result: they waste valuable time.

Jay also takes issue with the phrase “you can’t pick your family, but can pick your friends.” Because you can pick your family — your own. Jay notices that many people feel pressured by time on this big decision. “Grabbing whoever you’re living with or sleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle is not progress,” she says. She wants 20-somethings to be as intentional with love as they are with work.

“Too many 30-somethings and 40-somethings look at themselves and say about their 20s, ‘What was I doing? What was I thinking?’” says Jay. “When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous 30-something pressure to start a family, have your career, pick a city. Many of these things are incompatible to do all at once.”

So what can 20-somethings do? They can own their adulthood. They can invest in identity capital—courses, skills, friends—that add value toward who they might want to be. They can work on building a wide social network, instead of a tightknit one that doesn’t allow for outside opportunities.

Jay explains, “Twenty-somethings are like airplanes, just taking off from LAX heading for somewhere west. A slight change in course on takeoff is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji.”

Freeman Hrabowski is president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), which has made an extraordinary name for itself educating students of all types in science and engineering. “What makes our story especially important,” says Hrabowski, “is that we have learned so much from students who are typically not at the top of the academic ladder.” And they have graduated a tremendous number who go on to PhDs and faculty positions at top universities.

Hrabowski himself participated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Children’s Crusade.” He marched and was arrested in support of his right to a good education. As he waited in the prison, at 12 years old, Dr. King came over and said to them, ”What you children do this day will impact children not yet born.” The lesson Hrabowski learned? “Children can be empowered to take ownership of their education.”

UMBC was founded that very year. What made it especially important to Hrabowski is: “It was the first university founded at a time when students of all races could go there.” For him it was an experiment. Is it possible to have institutions where people of all backgrounds can come and learn to work together? They found they could do a lot in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The problem was the same problem America continues to face: in science & engineering. African American students were not succeeding. Furthermore, ”It’s not just minorities that don’t do well in science and engineering.” Twenty percent of African American students who start a science degree will complete it. But the number for white students is 32%, and 42% for Asian Americans. This is a problem for all of America. He thought, ”So many students are smart and can do it. We need to find ways of making it happen.”

So here are the things they did:

1. Set high expectations. It takes both a drive, and an understanding that it’s going to be hard work. They had one student who made a C in a core course. They made him re-take it, and he went on to be the first black student to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He now works at Harvard.
2. Building community among the students. We tend to think cutthroat when it comes to excellence. But, as Hrabowski notes, “It’s one thing to earn an A yourself, it’s another thing to help someone else do well.”
3. It takes researchers to produce researchers. He says they need scientists to pull the students into the work, and the students at UMBC are actively involved in the research in the labs.
4. Faculty need to be willing to get involved with the students, even in the classroom. Observing every student to see what was wrong with them. One professor wrote, “I have this young black guy in class; he’s not excited about it, he’s not taking notes.” Hrabowski notes that the important part is that the faculty member was observing every student, and, “That young man is now a faculty member, at Duke.”

So many students, says Hrabowski, are bored in class. That’s why UMBC puts emphasis on collaboration, on using technology. Not just teaching theories, but letting students struggle with those theories. And it’s needed. For example, there has been a 79% decline in women majoring in computer science since 2000. He believes that what will work to combat that is building community, and faculty pulling students into the work.

Most important, says Hrabowski, “If a student has a sense of self, it’s amazing how their dreams and values can make all the difference in the world.”

Just yesterday Twitter announced a planned app for the Firefox OS phones when they begin shipping, but the company is bringing that same functionality to Windows Phone, so do not feel left out. Today Microsoft’s Michael Stroh did the honors of making the announcement.

The update is not much different than what has been promised for the Mozilla mobile OS. Customers will receive four new navigation tabs — Home, Connect, Discover and Me.

Home, much as you would expect, shows tweets. These can be tapped to expand, at which point it will display in-line photos, video and even web site summaries.

Connect simply keeps you up-to-date with @ mentions, as well as allowing you to see who has followed or retweeted you, while Discover allows you to observe trends, and find new content, as well as browse categories, find friends, or see suggestions for accounts you may want to follow.

Finally, Me simply provides access for users to read and respond to direct messages, but according to Stroh “you can also see your lists and favorites or view and update your profile”.

However, that is not all. Twitter users can also get status updates right on the lock screen, receive better Live Tile support, compose a tweet or search from anywhere in the app, and even use speech recognition to compose messages.

All of this is available now from the Windows Phone Store. If you have Twitter installed already then you should receive the update automatically. If not, it is a small 2 MB download.

An indefinable quality lies at the heart of any successful idea or project … a spark of intuition, genius or insight that acts as the driver of all later action. Our speakers in this session all possess such a spark, from the educator who’s made it his mission to help high-achieving minority students to a young inventor who figured out a novel and effective way to protect his family’s animals from attacks by lions.

Here are the speakers from this session. Click on their name for a recap of their talk:

Freeman Hrabowski creates opportunities for students of all backgrounds to pursue advanced degrees.

Real life begins at 30? Well, no, says Meg Jay. Her research in her new book shows us why 30 is not the new 20.

TED’s own Lisa Bu has built a career helping people find great stories. Now she tells her own story.

Young inventor Richard Turere invented “lion lights,” an elegant way to protect his family’s cattle from lion attacks.

Announcing the TED Prize Winner, Sugata Mitra, and his bold wish, funded by $1 million from the TED community.

The Sleepy Man Banjo Boys is made up of 10-year-old banjo sensation Jonny Mizzone and his brothers Robbie, 14, on fiddle, and Tommy, 15, on guitar.