The first official public draft of the Common Core State Standards Initiative’s K-12 standards has been released by the National Governors Association’s Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The standards, which seek to provide a clear framework to prepare U.S. children for college and the workforce, included computer science as a senior-level high school course for students who meet the “readiness level” by 11th grade. “Given the critical role of computing for our global information society in preparing students with the knowledge and skills they need for the 21st century, this inclusion in the draft Common Core Standards is a huge boost for the field and its future,” says ACM CEO John White, who notes that one of the biggest challenges facing computer science education has been finding a place for it in a high school curriculum. “We are heartened by the inclusion of computer science in this draft,” says White, and encourages “the advisory groups working on these standards to retain that reference in the final version, as well as add a description of what rigorous senior year computer science encompasses.”
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Deakin University robotics engineer James Mullins is leading a research effort to develop haptics technology with the goal of making a simulation as realistic as possible for use in medical training exercises. Haptics “is very processor intensive for developing programs, so we’re just starting to get computers fast enough to simulate stuff that makes it usable,” Mullins says. So far the researchers have developed a three-dimensional input device that enables a user to feel virtual objects for tasks such as tele-surgery. “What we have developed is a way for nurses to pick up a syringe and inject it into a virtual body and feel what it feels like as it goes through the skin and the soft tissue underneath,” Mullins says. He says the technology also can be applied to defense and policing. For example, the research team is working on a large defense project that would enable soldiers to remotely defuse bombs.
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European researchers working on the SUBTLE project have developed a class of electronics that uses noise to enhance the signal, which they say could lead to better and faster electronic devices. “With increasing miniaturization of electronic circuits, an increasing fraction of the applied power is converted into nondeterministic signals that add to the ambient noise,” says University of Wurzburg professor and SUBTLE project coordinator Lukas Worschech. “SUBTLE is a STREP project associated with nanoelectronic devices in which quantum-confined electron channels are so closely spaced to each other that tailored feedback action exists.” The devices employ two phenomena–back action, which is like feedback in an audio system, on the channel gate; and noise-induced switching. The subsequent noise can be used to switch the circuit from one channel to another. The researchers say their work will enable smaller, cheaper, more power-efficient and complex circuits, and could be used to mimic neuron action in artificial networks and serve as sensors for signals usually hidden under the noise.
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Computer and engineering students at the University of Washington have developed five accessibility applications for mobile phones. Janet Hollier and her team developed Braille Learn, a virtual pet game designed to make learning Braille fun for blind children. Players use the touch pad and vibrations in the phone to choose the correct Braille symbols, and earn tokens that can be used to feed, exercise, or play with their pet and keep it happy. Jason Behmer led a team in using Google Maps to develop an application that can help people who are blind, deaf-blind, or have low vision determine their location, the direction they are going, and what points of interest or businesses lie ahead. Other applications include a daily task trainer and scheduler that uses the phone’s camera to read characters for the blind, and the Where Am I? program, which can help blind or low-vision people find nearby people or places.
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The International Cybercrime Reporting and Cooperation Act, recently introduced by U.S. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), would require the U.S. government to study the cybercrime policies of other nations and either aid or punish those countries according to the findings. The bill requires the president to annually report to Congress on the state of countries’ employment of information technology (IT) in critical infrastructure, the scope of cybercrime based in each nation, the sufficiency of each country’s cyberlaw enforcement systems, and countries’ safeguarding of consumers and commerce online. Furthermore, the legislation would require that programs developed to fight cybercrime be prioritized to countries with low IT penetration in order to deter the creation of future cybercrime sanctuaries in these countries. Moreover, efforts to assist in the development of critical infrastructure would be encouraged to feature anti-cybercrime programs.
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Intel researchers have developed a prototype chip that operates in a low-power yet error-prone mode, but can detect and correct its errors. The researchers say this approach is 37 percent more power efficient compared with running in conventional mode and offers comparable performance. To compensate for the errors that occur while running at low voltage, Intel has developed a strategy known as resilient circuits. The prototype chip runs at low voltage, and when an error occurs, a calculation is done at high voltage to correct it. “When you have to correct an error, and reexecute a process more slowly, there is a tiny penalty,” says Intel’s Wen-Hann Wang. However, laboratory tests have shown the chip can either save 37 percent on power consumption, or operate 21 percent faster at a given power level. “They push it as close to the danger zone as they can, and things sometimes go bad, and they correct for it, which is very clever,” says Rice University professor Krishna Palem.
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Tel Aviv University (TAU) researchers are developing nano-sized sensors for microelectromechanical systems that are more sensitive and reliable than existing technology. The researchers say that more sensitive sensors could enhance video games and lead to better functioning prosthetic limbs, cars that can detect crashes before they occur, and missiles that can reach a target much more accurately. The researchers, led by TAU professors Yael Hanein and Slava Krylov, developed a method in which tiny carbon tubes that make up the sensors can arrange themselves on the surface of a silicon chip to accurately sense tiny movements and changes in gravity. “We’ve been able to fabricate a new device where the nano structures are put onto a big surface–and they can be arranged in a process that doesn’t require human intervention, so they’re easier to manufacture,” Hanein says.
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Researchers at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) are designing computational tools to create maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). NERSC’s Julian Borrill, Radek Stompor, and Andrew Jaffe developed the Microwave Anisotropy Dataset Computational Analysis Package (MADCAP) with an emphasis on mapmaking. Mapping the CMB requires accurately accounting for the noise in the data. “To make a map it takes a special code to weigh and account for the noise in each pixel at each point in time,” Borrill says. The special code is called MADmap. Although MADmap was designed with CMB data in mind, “it was always intended to be independent of the specifics of any one experiment,” Borrill says. MADmap has been used in several different experiments, including MAXIMA, which mapped a portion of the northern sky in 1998, BOOMERANG, which circled the South Pole in 1999, and the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite. Another satellite, Herschel, carries a powerful infrared telescope, and two highly sensitive bolometers as part of the Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer.

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Boston University (BU) researchers have developed a method for studying and identifying hubs within social networks. The approach emphasizes the location of the individual within the network as opposed to the number of connections. “In contrast to common belief, the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or the most central people,” says BU’s Maksim Kitsak. The researchers found that if a hub exists at the end of a branch it will have a minimal impact on the core of the network. However, a less connected person strategically placed in the core of a network can have significant effects that lead to dissemination through a large fraction of the population, Kitsak says. By studying a quantity called the network’s k-shell decomposition, researchers can locate these specially placed individuals, which is the key to understanding the dynamics of a network.

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In the event of a disaster that destroys the vast majority of the world, humanity’s legacy will largely reside on data stored on hard drives. However, hard drives were never meant for long-term storage and no one can be sure how long they will last. The Canadian Conservation Institute’s (CCI’s) Joe Iraci says that although the most important data is backed up on magnetic tapes or optical discs, these formats cannot be trusted to last even five years. Iraci has conducted accelerated aging tests by exposing different forms of media to high heat and humidity. The tests found that the most reliable data storage devices are recordable CDs with a reflective layer of gold and a phthalocyanine dye layer. Many experts believe that after a major catastrophe only information that is written on paper will survive. “Even the worst kind of paper can last more than 100 years,” says the CCI’s Season Tse. Proposals to make a paper format that can store digital data for centuries using a system similar to bar codes have been slowed due to a lack of commercial interest. Another option is the Rosetta Disk, which holds descriptions and texts of 1,000 languages. The Rosetta Disk is made out of nickel, etched with text that is only readable at 1,000 times magnification. Each disk holds about 30,000 pages of text or images.

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