Teenagers without Internet access at home are educationally disadvantaged, UK study suggests

Dec. 30, 2012 — A major in-depth study examining how teenagers in the UK are using the internet and other mobile devices says the benefits of using such technologies far outweigh any perceived risks.

The findings are based on a large-scale study of more than 1,000 randomly selected households in the UK, coupled with regular face-to-face interviews with more than 200 teenagers and their families between 2008 and 2011.

While the study reflects a high level of parental anxiety about the potential of social networking sites to distract their offspring, and shows that some parents despair at their children's tendency to multitask on mobile devices, the research by Oxford University's Department of Education concludes that there are substantial educational advantages in teenagers being able to access the internet at home.

Teenagers who do not have access to the internet in their home have a strong sense of being 'educationally disadvantaged', warns the study. At the time of the study, the researchers estimated that around 10 per cent of the teenagers were without online connectivity at home, with most of this group living in poorer households. While recent figures from the Office of National Statistics suggest this dropped to five per cent in 2012, the researchers say that still leaves around 300,000 children without internet access in their homes.

The researchers' interviews with teenagers reveal that they felt shut out of their peer group socially and also disadvantaged in their studies as so much of the college or school work set for them to do at home required online research or preparation. One teenager, whose parents had separated, explained that he would ring his father who had internet access and any requested materials were then mailed to him through the post.

Researcher Dr Rebecca Eynon commented: 'While it's difficult to state a precise figure for teenagers without access to the internet at home, the fact remains that in the UK, there is something like 300,000 young people who do not -- and that's a significant number. Behind the statistics, our qualitative research shows that these disconnected young people are clearly missing out both educationally and socially.'

In an interview with a researcher, one 14-year old boy said: 'We get coursework now in Year 9 to see what groups we're going to go in Year 10. And people with internet, they can get higher marks because they can like research on the internet…my friends are probably on it [MSN] all the day every day. And like they talk about it in school, what happened on MSN.'

Another teenager, aged 15, commented: 'It was bell gone and I have a lot of things that I could write and I was angry that I haven't got a computer because I might finish it at home when I've got lots of time to do it. But because when I'm at school I need to do it very fast.'

Strikingly, this study contradicts claims that others have made about the potential risks of such technologies adversely affecting the ability of teenagers to concentrate on serious study. The researchers, Dr Chris Davies and Dr Rebecca Eynon, found no evidence to support this claim. Furthermore, their study concludes that the internet has opened up far more opportunities for young people to do their learning at home.

Dr Davies said: 'Parental anxiety about how teenagers might use the very technologies that they have bought their own children at considerable expense is leading some to discourage their children from becoming confident users. The evidence, based on the survey and hundreds of interviews, shows that parents have tended to focus on the negative side -- especially the distracting effects of social networking sites -- without always seeing the positive use that their children often make of being online.'

Teenagers' experiences of the social networking site Facebook appear to be mixed, says the study. Although some regarded Facebook as an integral part of their social life, others were concerned about the number of arguments that had escalated due to others wading in as a result of comments and photographs being posted.

The age of teenagers using Facebook for the first time was found to go down over the three year period from around 16 years old in 2008 to 12 or 13 years old by 2011. Interviews reveal that even the very youngest teenagers who were not particularly interested felt under some peer pressure to join. But the study also suggests that the popularity of Facebook is waning, with teenagers now exploring other forms of social networking.

Dr Davies commented: 'There is no steady state of teenage technology use -- fashions and trends are constantly shifting, and things change very rapidly when they do change.'

The research was part funded by Becta, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, a non-departmental public body formed under the last Labour government. The study findings are contained in a new book entitled, Teenagers and Technology, due to be published by Routledge in January 2013.

Teenagers and Technology: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415684583/

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Cardiovascular disease: The mechanics of prosthetic heart valves

Dec. 20, 2012 — Computer simulations of blood flow through mechanical heart valves could pave the way for more individualized prosthetics.

Every year, over 300,000 heart valve replacement operations are performed worldwide. Diseased valves are often replaced with mechanical heart valves (MHVs), which cannot yet be designed to suit each patient's specific needs. Complications such as blood clots can occur, which can require patients to take blood-thinning medication.

To investigate why such complications occur, Vinh-Tan Nguyen at A*STAR's Institute of High Performance Computing, Singapore, together with scientists at the National University of Singapore and institutions across the USA, have developed a new computer model to simulate the dynamics of blood flow through MHVs1.

"The current practice for heart valve replacement in patients is a one-size-fits-all approach where a patient is implanted with the best-fit valve available on the market," explains Nguyen. "The valves are well designed for general physiological conditions, but may not be suitable for each individual's particular heart condition."

The researchers focused on the blood flow dynamics in a prosthetic valve known as a bileaflet MHV. This type of MHV contains two mobile leaflets, or gates, which are held in place by hinges. The leaflets open and close in response to blood flow pressures through the valve. Little is known about the effect that the hinged leaflets have on blood dynamics, although such designs are suspected of causing blood clots.

The computer model developed by Nguyen and his team simulates pressure flows through bileaflet MHVs by representing blood vessels as a computational mesh, where calculations are performed for individual blocks of the mesh. Their crucial advance was in enabling this mesh to move and evolve in response to the leaflet movements.

The researchers validated their computer model through laboratory experiments with a full 3D reproduction of the heart's circulation system. Particle imaging equipment allowed them to visualize the fluid dynamics under different scenarios including pulsatile flow, which follows the pattern of a typical cardiac cycle.

"We obtained good agreement between our computer simulations and the experiments in terms of the magnitude and velocity of blood flow through the leaflets," states Nguyen. The researchers also found that leaflet hinges might play a vital role in clotting, because individual hinges have different tolerances that can disrupt normal blood flow and cause stress in the vein walls.

This research is a first crucial step in understanding the impact of MHVs on blood flow. "Ultimately we hope to provide doctors with a tool to evaluate blood flow dynamics and other related aspects in patients with newly implanted valves," says Nguyen.

The A*STAR-affiliated researchers contributing to this research are from the Institute of High Performance Computing.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), via ResearchSEA.

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Vinh-Tan Nguyen, Yee Han Kuan, Po-Yu Chen, Liang Ge, Fotis Sotiropoulos, Ajit P. Yoganathan, Hwa Liang Leo. Experimentally Validated Hemodynamics Simulations of Mechanical Heart Valves in Three Dimensions. Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology, 2011; 3 (1): 88 DOI: 10.1007/s13239-011-0077-z

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Data storage: A fast and loose approach improves memory

Dec. 20, 2012 — An unconventional design for a nanoscale memory device uses a freely moving mechanical shuttle to improve performance.

A loose and rattling part in your cell phone is generally a cause for concern. Like most other electronic devices, your phone works by moving electrons through fixed circuit pathways. If electrons are not sufficiently contained within these pathways, the efficiency and speed of a device decrease. However, as the miniature components inside electronic devices shrink with each generation, electrons become harder to contain. Now, a research team led by Vincent Pott at the A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics, Singapore, has designed a memory device using a loose and moving part that actually enhances performance.

The loose part is a tiny metal disk, or shuttle, about 300 nanometers thick and 2 micrometers long, and lies inside a roughly cylindrical metal cage. Because the shuttle is so small, gravity has little effect on it. Instead, the forces of adhesion between the shuttle and its metal cage determine its position. When stuck to the top of its cage, the shuttle completes an electrical circuit between two electrodes, causing current to flow. When it is at the bottom of the cage, the circuit is broken and no current flows. The shuttle can be moved from top to bottom by applying a voltage to a third electrode, known as a gate, underneath the cage.

Pott and co-workers suggested using this binary positioning to encode digital information. They predicted that the forces of adhesion would keep the shuttle in place even when the power is off, allowing the memory device to retain information for long periods of time. In fact, the researchers found that high temperature -- one of the classic causes of electronic memory loss -- should actually increase the duration of data retention by softening the metal that makes up the shuttle memory's disk and cage, thereby strengthening adhesion. The ability to operate in hot environments is a key requirement for military and aerospace applications.

The untethered shuttle also takes up less area than other designs and is not expected to suffer from mechanical fatigue because it avoids the use of components that need to bend or flex -- such as the cantilevers used in competing mechanical memory approaches. In a simulation, Pott and co-workers found that the shuttle memory should be able to switch at speeds in excess of 1 megahertz.

The next steps, the researchers say, include designing arrays of the devices and analyzing fabrication parameters in detail. If all goes well, their novel device could compete head-to-head with the industry-standard FLASH memory.

The A*STAR-affiliated researchers contributing to this research are from the Institute of Microelectronics/

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Vincent Pott, Geng Li Chua, Ramesh Vaddi, Julius Ming-Lin Tsai, Tony T. Kim. The Shuttle Nanoelectromechanical Nonvolatile Memory. IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, 2012; 59 (4): 1137 DOI: 10.1109/TED.2011.2181517

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On-demand synaptic electronics: Circuits that learn and forget

Dec. 20, 2012 — Researchers in Japan and the US propose a nanoionic device with a range of neuromorphic and electrical multifunctions that may allow the fabrication of on-demand configurable circuits, analog memories and digital-neural fused networks in one device architecture.

Synaptic devices that mimic the learning and memory processes in living organisms are attracting avid interest as an alternative to standard computing elements that may help extend Moore's law beyond current physical limits.

However so far artificial synaptic systems have been hampered by complex fabrication requirements and limitations in the learning and memory functions they mimic. Now Rui Yang, Kazuya Terabe and colleagues at the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan and the University of California, Los Angeles, in the US have developed two-, three-terminal WO3-x-based nanoionic devices capable of a broad range of neuromorphic and electrical functions.

In its initial pristine condition the system has very high resistance values. Sweeping both negative and positive voltages across the system decreases this resistance nonlinearly, but it soon returns to its original state indicating a volatile state. Applying either positive or negative pulses at the top electrode introduces a soft-breakdown, after which sweeping both negative and positive voltages leads to non-volatile states that exhibit bipolar resistance and rectification for longer periods of time.

The researchers draw similarities between the device properties -- volatile and non-volatile states and the current fading process following positive voltage pulses -- with models for neural behaviour -- that is, short- and long-term memory and forgetting processes. They explain the behaviour as the result of oxygen ions migrating within the device in response to the voltage sweeps. Accumulation of the oxygen ions at the electrode leads to Schottky-like potential barriers and the resulting changes in resistance and rectifying characteristics. The stable bipolar switching behaviour at the Pt/WO3-x interface is attributed to the formation of the electric conductive filament and oxygen absorbability of the Pt electrode.

As the researchers conclude, "These capabilities open a new avenue for circuits, analog memories, and artificially fused digital neural networks using on-demand programming by input pulse polarity, magnitude, and repetition history."

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Rui Yang, Kazuya Terabe, Guangqiang Liu, Tohru Tsuruoka, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, James K. Gimzewski, Masakazu Aono. On-Demand Nanodevice with Electrical and Neuromorphic Multifunction Realized by Local Ion Migration. ACS Nano, 2012; 6 (11): 9515 DOI: 10.1021/nn302510e

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Traffic congestion can be alleviated throughout a metropolitan area by altering trips in specific neighborhoods, model shows

Dec. 20, 2012 — In most cities, traffic growth has outpaced road capacity, leading to increased congestion, particularly during the morning and evening commutes. In 2007, congestion on U.S. roads was responsible for 4.2 billion hours of additional travel time, as well as 2.8 billion gallons of fuel consumption and an accompanying increase in air pollution.

One way to prevent traffic tie-ups is to have fewer cars on the road by encouraging alternatives such as public transportation, carpooling, flex time and working from home. But a new study -- by researchers at MIT, Central South University in China, the University of California at Berkeley and the Austrian Institute of Technology -- incorporates data from drivers' cellphones to show that the adoption of these alternatives by a small percentage of people across a metropolitan area might not be very effective. However, if the same number of people, but from a carefully selected segment of the driving population, chooses not to drive at rush hour, this could reduce congestion significantly.

The study, published in the Dec. 20 issue of the journal Scientific Reports, demonstrates that canceling or delaying the trips of 1 percent of all drivers across a road network would reduce delays caused by congestion by only about 3 percent. But canceling the trips of 1 percent of drivers from carefully selected neighborhoods would reduce the extra travel time for all other drivers in a metropolitan area by as much as 18 percent.

"This has an analogy in many other flows in networks," says lead research Marta González, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "Being able to detect and then release the congestion in the most affected arteries improves the functioning of the entire coronary system."

The study, designed by González and former MIT postdoc Pu Wang, now a professor at Central South University, is the first large-scale traffic study to track travel using anonymous cellphone data rather than survey data or information obtained from U.S. Census Bureau travel diaries. Both of these are prone to error because of the time lag between gathering and releasing data and the reliance on self-reporting.

González and Wang used three weeks of cellphone data to obtain information about anonymous drivers' routes and the estimated traffic volume and speed on those routes. They inferred a driver's home neighborhood from the regularity of the route traveled and from the locations of cell towers that handled calls made between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. They combined this with information about population densities and the location and capacity of roads in the networks of two metropolitan areas -- Boston and San Francisco -- to determine which neighborhoods are the largest sources of drivers on each road segment, and which roads these drivers use to connect from home to highways and other major roadways.

In the Boston area, they found that canceling 1 percent of trips by select drivers in the Massachusetts municipalities of Everett, Marlborough, Lawrence, Lowell and Waltham would cut all drivers' additional commuting time caused by traffic congestion by 18 percent. In the San Francisco area, canceling trips by drivers from Dublin, Hayward, San Jose, San Rafael and parts of San Ramon would cut 14 percent from the travel time of other drivers.

"These percentages are averages based on a one-hour commute with additional minutes caused by congestion," Wang says. "The drivers stuck in the roads with worst congestion would see the greatest percentage of time savings, because the selective strategy can more efficiently decrease the traffic flows in congested roads."

To validate the study's methodology, Alexandre Bayen, an associate professor of systems engineering at Berkeley, and graduate student Timothy Hunter compared González and Wang's estimations of travel time based on cellphone data with their own data obtained from GPS sensors in taxis in the San Francisco area. Using GPS data, Bayen and Hunter computed taxis' speed based on travel time from one location to another; from that speed of travel, they then determined congestion levels. Their findings agreed with those of González and Wang.

Because the new methodology requires only three types of data -- population density, topological information about a road network, and cellphone data -- it can be used for almost any urban area.

"In many cities in the developing world, traffic congestion is a major problem and travel surveys don't exist," González says. "So the detailed methodology we developed for using cellphone data to accurately characterize road network use could help traffic managers control congestion and allow planners to create road networks that fit a population's needs."

González and Wang are currently studying road use in the Dominican Republic, France, Portugal, Rwanda and Spain. They treat the anonymous cellphone data with the privacy-protection measures required for the treatment of human subjects under an institutional review board.

Katja Schechtner, head of the Dynamic Transportation Systems group at the Austrian Institute of Technology and a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, is a co-author on the Scientific Reports paper with González, Wang, Bayen and Hunter.

"We are now at a time where it is less difficult to get mobility data, thanks to mobile phones and other devices, and the main problem we have is how to extract useful information from all these data," says Marc Barthelemy, a senior researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at CEA in France. "[González] and her team proposed a very interesting and new idea of constructing the network of road usage, which allows us to understand where individuals on a given road are coming from, and enables us to propose new strategies for mitigating congestion. This approach will certainly open new avenues of research in the very active field of mobility in urban systems."

The study was funded by grants from the New England University Transportation Center, the NEC Corporation Fund, the Solomon Buchsbaum Research Fund and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Wang received funding from the Shenghua Scholar Program of Central South University.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Denise Brehm.

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Journal Reference:

Pu Wang, Timothy Hunter, Alexandre M. Bayen, Katja Schechtner, Marta C. González. Understanding Road Usage Patterns in Urban Areas. Scientific Reports, 2012; 2 DOI: 10.1038/srep01001

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Wireless networks: Mobile devices keep track

Nov. 21, 2012 — A more sensitive technique for determining user position could lead to improved location-based mobile services.

Many mobile-phone applications (apps) use spatial positioning technology to present their user with location-specific information such as directions to nearby amenities. By simultaneously predicting the location of the mobile-user and the data access points, or hotspots, improved accuracy of positioning is now available, thanks to an international research team including Sinno Jialin Pan from the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research1. Software developers expect that such improvements will enable a whole new class of apps that can react to small changes in position.

Traditionally, device position was determined by the Global Positioning System (GPS) that uses satellites to triangulate approximate location, but its accuracy falters when the mobile device is indoors. An alternative approach is to use the 'received signal strength' (RSS) from local transmitters. Attenuation of radio waves by walls can limit accuracy; and, it is difficult to predict signals in complex, obstacle-filled environments.

Software developers have tried to circumvent these problems by using so-called 'learning-based techniques' that identify correlations between RSS values and access-point placement. Such systems do not necessarily require prior knowledge of the hotspot locations; rather they 'learn' from data collected on a mobile device. This also has drawbacks: the amount of data can be large, making calibration time consuming. Changes in the environment can also outdate the calibration.

Pan and his co-workers reduced this calibration effort in an experimental demonstration of a protocol that calculates both the positions of the device and the access points simultaneously -- a process they call colocalization. "Integrating the two location-estimation tasks into a unified mathematical model means that we can fully exploit the correlations between mobile-device and hotspot position," explains Pan.

First, the researchers trained a learning-based system with the signal-strength values received from access points at selected places in the area of interest. They used this information to calibrate a probabilistic 'location-estimation' system. Then, they approximated the location from the learned model using signal strength samples received in real-time from the access points.

Experimental trials showed that this approach not only required less calibration, but it was more accurate than other state-of-the-art systems. "We next want to apply the method to a larger-scale environment," says Pan. "We also want to find ways to make use of the estimated locations to provide more useful information, such as location-based advertising." As this technique could help robots navigate by themselves, it may also have important implications for the burgeoning field of robotics.

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Jeffrey Junfeng Pan, Sinno Jialin Pan, Jie Yin, Lionel M. Ni, Qiang Yang. Tracking Mobile Users in Wireless Networks via Semi-Supervised Colocalization. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2012; 34 (3): 587 DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2011.165

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Flexible, low-voltage circuits made using nanocrystals

Nov. 26, 2012 — Electronic circuits are typically integrated in rigid silicon wafers, but flexibility opens up a wide range of applications. In a world where electronics are becoming more pervasive, flexibility is a highly desirable trait, but finding materials with the right mix of performance and manufacturing cost remains a challenge.

Now a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania has shown that nanoscale particles, or nanocrystals, of the semiconductor cadmium selenide can be "printed" or "coated" on flexible plastics to form high-performance electronics.

The research was led by David Kim, a doctoral student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science; Yuming Lai, a doctoral student in the Engineering School's Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering; and professor Cherie Kagan, who has appointments in both departments as well as in the School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Chemistry. Benjamin Diroll, a doctoral student in chemistry, and Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor Christopher Murray of Materials Science and of Chemistry also collaborated on the research.

Their work was published in the journal Nature Communications.

"We have a performance benchmark in amorphous silicon, which is the material that runs the display in your laptop, among other devices," Kagan said. "Here, we show that these cadmium selenide nanocrystal devices can move electrons 22 times faster than in amorphous silicon."

Besides speed, another advantage cadmium selenide nanocrystals have over amorphous silicon is the temperature at which they are deposited. Whereas amorphous silicon uses a process that operates at several hundred degrees, cadmium selenide nanocrystals can be deposited at room temperature and annealed at mild temperatures, opening up the possibility of using more flexible plastic foundations.

Another innovation that allowed the researchers to use flexible plastic was their choice of ligands, the chemical chains that extend from the nanocrystals' surfaces and helps facilitate conductivity as they are packed together into a film.

"There have been a lot of electron transport studies on cadmium selenide, but until recently we haven't been able to get good performance out of them," Kim said. "The new aspect of our research was that we used ligands that we can translate very easily onto the flexible plastic; other ligands are so caustic that the plastic actually melts."

Because the nanocrystals are dispersed in an ink-like liquid, multiple types of deposition techniques can be used to make circuits. In their study, the researchers used spincoating, where centrifugal force pulls a thin layer of the solution over a surface, but the nanocrystals could be applied through dipping, spraying or ink-jet printing as well.

On a flexible plastic sheet a bottom layer of electrodes was patterned using a shadow mask -- essentially a stencil -- to mark off one level of the circuit. The researchers then used the stencil to define small regions of conducting gold to make the electrical connections to upper levels that would form the circuit. An insulating aluminum oxide layer was introduced and a 30-nanometer layer of nanocrystals was coated from solution. Finally, electrodes on the top level were deposited through shadow masks to ultimately form the circuits.

"The more complex circuits are like buildings with multiple floors," Kagan said. "The gold acts like staircases that the electrons can use to travel between those floors."

Using this process, the researchers built three kinds of circuits to test the nanocrystals performance for circuit applications: an inverter, an amplifier and a ring oscillator.

"An inverter is the fundamental building block for more complex circuits," Lai said. "We can also show amplifiers, which amplify the signal amplitude in analog circuits, and ring oscillators, where 'on' and 'off' signals are properly propagating over multiple stages in digital circuits."

"And all of these circuits operate with a couple of volts," Kagan said. "If you want electronics for portable devices that are going to work with batteries, they have to operate at low voltage or they won't be useful."

With the combination of flexibility, relatively simple fabrication processes and low power requirements, these cadmium selenide nanocrystal circuits could pave the way for new kinds of devices and pervasive sensors, which could have biomedical or security applications.

"This research also opens up the possibility of using other kinds of nanocrystals, as we've shown the materials aspect is not a limitation any more," Kim said.

The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.

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David K. Kim, Yuming Lai, Benjamin T. Diroll, Christopher B. Murray, Cherie R. Kagan. Flexible and low-voltage integrated circuits constructed from high-performance nanocrystal transistors. Nature Communications, 2012; 3: 1216 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2218

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