GAINESVILLE, Fla. — New research at the University of Florida predicts more public school students in kindergarten through 12th grade will take classes online, have longer school days and more of them in the next decade. Academic performance should improve and schools could save money.

While distance education over the Internet is already widespread at colleges and universities, UF educational technology researchers are offering some of the first hard evidence documenting the potential cost-savings of virtual schooling in K-12 schools.

“Policymakers and educators have proposed expanding learning time in elementary through high school grades as a way to improve students’ academic performance, but online coursework hasn’t been on their radar. This should change as we make school and school district leaders more aware of the potential cost savings that virtual schooling offers,” said Catherine Cavanaugh, associate professor at the University of Florida’s College of Education. “Over the next decade, we expect an explosion in the use of virtual schooling as a seamless synthesis between the traditional classroom and online learning.”

UF researchers considered several key factors to calculate and compare the cost of full-time online learning with regular schools. Cavanaugh reported their findings today at an education reform conference and national podcast sponsored by the Washington D.C.-based Center for American Progress. A monograph of her report will be posted on the center’s Web site at http://www.americanprogress.org/events.

Based on a 2008 survey of 20 virtual schools in 14 states, UF researchers found that the average yearly cost of online learning per full-time pupil was about $4,300. This compared with a national average cost per pupil of more than $9,100 for a traditional public school in 2006 (the most recent year in which such data was available). Their cost estimates covered course development and teaching, and administrative and technical expenses.

“Online programs have little or no cost for instructional facilities, transportation and related staff,” Cavanaugh said. “The value of distance education also increases when considering the broad range of available online courses.”

She said investing in virtual education could allow schools to provide instruction before, during and after school — in essence, lengthening the school day and school year — without sinking millions of dollars into new buildings, additional personnel, professional development and other operating costs. Such school reform measures may not be popular with the kids, but America’s education system is falling behind our competitors abroad. Simply put, students in other developed nations are spending more time in school and learning more than our kids do.

“Time is one of the most valuable resources for learning. Even a few days’ difference in learning time can determine whether a school makes adequate yearly progress,” Cavanaugh said.

In her report, Cavanaugh describes various scenarios whereby school days begin early and end late, with students attending traditional classes on designated weekdays and learning online in a flexibly scheduled computer lab on other days. The longer school day allows time for club and enrichment activities and recreation or athletics for a healthier school experience. The boundaries of time and place are removed through Internet-connected mobile devices such as netbooks and smart phones, letting students access online courses while traveling between home, school, work and athletic events. Most homework is done at school under direct teacher supervision or with after-school online coaching.

With two decades of studies supporting the effectiveness of K-12 virtual schools, researchers are moving beyond the question of whether virtual schooling works as well as face-to-face instruction, focusing instead on when and how distance education works best. Partnerships between school districts and state-run virtual schools — including Florida Virtual School, the nation’s largest virtual school, based in Orlando — are expected to play a major role in the emergence of K-12 distance education.

“Virtual schooling and online learning fit in extremely well with the emerging trend to embrace the same technologies that our young people are using in their everyday lives and apply them in education,” Cavanaugh said. “Schools that don’t embrace online learning soon will be viewed as limiting the learning opportunities of their students.”

The better K-12 online programs, she said, will have experienced online teachers and coaches and on-site facilitators, with tailored lesson plans to suit the learning levels and pace of all students.

“Dr. Cavanaugh’s report provides a vision of what schools could look like in the near future, as online courses and programs are developed that not only expand learning time but help educate students with a wide range of academic and learning needs,” said Susan Lowes, director of research and evaluation at the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College, Columbia University.

A team of scientists and engineers from Stanford University, the University of Florida and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is the first to create one of two basic types of semiconductors using an exotic, new, one-atom-thick material called graphene. The findings could help open the door to computer chips that are not only smaller and hold more memory — but are also more adept at uploading large files, downloading movies, and other data- and communication-intensive tasks.

A paper about the findings, co-authored by eight researchers, is set to be published Friday in the journal Science.

“There are still enormous challenges to really put it into products, but I think this really could play an important role,” said Jing Guo, a UF assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and one of two UF authors who contributed.

The team made, modeled and tested what is known in the industry as an “n-type” transistor out of graphene nanoribbon. Graphene is a form of carbon that has been called “atomic chicken wire,” thanks to its honeycomb-like structure of interconnected hexagons. A graphene nanoribbon is a nanometer-wide strip cut from a graphene layer.

The team’s feat is significant because basic transistors come in only two forms — “p-type” and “n-type” — referring to the presence of holes and electrons, respectively. “P-type” graphene semiconductors had already been achieved, so the manufacture of an “n-type” graphene semiconductor completes the fundamental building blocks.

“This work is essentially finding a new way to modify a graphene nanoribbon to make it able to conduct electrons,” Guo said. “This addresses a very fundamental requirement for graphene to be useful in the production of electronics.”

First isolated in 2004, graphene has spurred a great excitement in the chip research community because of its promising electrical properties and bare-minimum atomic size.

Scientists and engineers believe that after decades of development, silicon is fast reaching the upper limits of its physical performance. If the rapid evolution of ever-shrinking, ever-more-powerful, ever-cheaper semiconductors is to continue, they say, new materials must be found to complement or even replace silicon. Graphene is among the leading candidates for these nanoelectronics of the future.

Researchers at a number of institutions have reported using graphene to create a variety of simple transistor devices recently, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reporting in March the successful test of a graphene chip that can multiply electrical signals.

Guo said the team built and modeled the first-ever graphene nanoribbon n-type “field-effect transistor” using a new and novel method that involves affixing nitrogen atoms to the edge of the nanoribbon. The method also has the potential to make the edges of the nanometer-wide ribbon smoother, which is a key factor to make the transistor faster.

“This uses chemistry to really address the major challenges of electrical engineering when you get into such these small nanoscale dimensionalities,” he said. “It is very unusual for electrical engineers, who are used to dealing with bulk structures of at least millions of atoms.”

As exciting as the findings are, researchers must overcome many challenges before graphene semiconductors could be manufactured in bulk for use in consumer products, Guo said. For one thing, graphene is extremely expensive, so its cost would have to be reduced substantially. Also, to mimic or exceed silicon, engineers would have to figure out how to build not just one, but billions of transistors, on a tiny graphene fleck.

Five Stanford researchers led by Hongjie Dai, J.G. Jackson-C.J. Wood Professor of Chemistry, did the experimental work behind the findings. Guo and fellow author Youngki Yoon, who earned his doctoral degree from UF last December and is now at the University of California, Berkeley, did the computer modeling and simulation. The team also included Peter Webber of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Said Dai, “This work is just a beginning. It suggests that graphene chemistry and chemistry at the edges are rich areas to explore for both fundamental and practical reasons for this material.”

The UF portion of the research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. The Stanford portion was funded by MARCO MSD, Intel and the Office of Naval Research.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Radar — the technology that tracks enemy bombers and hurricanes — is now being employed to detect another danger: when babies stop breathing.

In a high-tech twist on the remote devices that allow parents to listen to or watch their baby from afar, University of Florida engineering researchers have built a prototype baby monitor that focuses on a baby’s breathing. If his or her chest stops moving, the crib-mounted monitor detects the problem and sends an alarm to a portable unit kept by the parents.

“It’s a step beyond just watching the baby through a video link or hearing it cry,” said Jenshan Lin, a UF professor of electrical and computer engineering and the principal investigator of the Doppler radar technology used in the monitor.

A paper on the system, which works by using Doppler radar to remotely scan the in-and-out movement of the baby’s chest due to respiration, will appear in the February issue of IEEE Microwave Magazine.

Parents buy millions of baby monitors each year in the U.S., but most transmit only sounds or video images of the baby — both useful, but only if a parent is listening or watching. Some recently available monitors also monitor babies’ movements and breathing, but Lin said he is not aware of any on the market that use wireless technology.

UF engineering students Changzhi Li, Julie Cummings, Jeffrey Lam, Eric Graves and Stephanie Jimenez designed the monitor.

The students did the work as part of the College of Engineering’s Integrated Product and Process Design Program, which allows senior-level undergraduates to participate in yearlong design projects of new products or processes. The student team’s goal: to use Lin’s radar technology, first developed three years ago and under continuous refinement since, in a useful product with the potential to be licensed to a company.

The students produced a small-book-sized device that attaches to the crib just like a standard monitor. They also designed a remote station with red, blue, green and yellow lights, variously indicating the status of the baby’s vital signs, the battery life of the station and confirming the station’s wireless connection to the crib monitor. The station emits a loud alarm and flashes a red light when the monitor detects that the baby’s breathing activity has fallen below a preset threshold, or that he or she has stopped breathing.

Future versions could also detect heartbeat, using a higher frequency signal, Lin said.

“It’s the same Doppler radar that police use to catch speeders, but in our case, we don’t measure constant speed, but rather back-and-forth motion — sort of like vibration,” Lin said. “That’s the fundamental principle of this technology.”

The crib monitor’s signals are very low power and not harmful to the baby or parents, Lin added. While a standard cell phone emits about one watt of power, the Doppler radar emits just one ten-thousandth of a watt of power, he said.

Tom Weller, associate dean for research at the University of South Florida College of Engineering, said the baby monitor is a good example of how research and education can come together in a useful product.

“This miniaturized monitor is an example of solid microwave engineering coupled with great innovation, and something with the potential for a very broad societal impact,” Weller said in an e-mail. “It is especially noteworthy that Dr. Lin transferred his research output into the very capable hands of creative undergraduate students.”

Lin is also pursuing other applications for his technology. His best-realized idea so far: a search-and-rescue robot equipped with the Doppler system to determine the presence of living people in structures damaged by earthquakes or explosions. Lin said the system, so far tested in a small working prototype robot, could complement robotic video systems because it requires less power to operate and has greater range. The robot was developed by student Gabriel Reyes as his research project in the University Scholars Program.

“Or the military could use it to find enemy soldiers,” Lin said, noting that the Doppler radar easily penetrates walls or other structural components.

Lin has also reduced the size of the electronics in his system so that they fit on a fruit fly-sized microchip, potentially enabling the remote monitor to be used in cell phones. That could turn the phones into portable life-sign detectors useful, for example, for friends and family who wish to keep tabs on elderly relatives living alone, he said.

Li, who based his dissertation on the research, was awarded a graduate fellowship from the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society for his work.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Diplomats or military envoys making their first trip to China may soon have a chance to visit a Chinese office building, stop in at a traditional teahouse or hop a cab — all before they board a plane.

A team of University of Florida computer engineers and scholars has used the popular online world Second Life to create a virtual Chinese city, one that hands a key to users who want to familiarize themselves with the sights and experiences they will encounter as first-time visitors. The goal of the federally funded research project: To educate and prepare foreign service or other government professionals to arrive in the country prepared and ready to work.

“I think what we hope is that this kind of environment can provide a bridge between knowledge alone and actually being in the real-life environment,” said Julie Henderson, an international program specialist at the UF College of Pharmacy and co-principal investigator and project designer for the effort.

People have long prepared for international travel with language and cultural instruction, role-playing and, in recent years, distance-learning experiences. The “Second China Project” seeks to add another element: Simulated experiences aimed at introducing users not only to typical sights and the Chinese language, but also to expectations of politeness, accepted business practices and cultural norms.

It may not be the real thing, but it’s a lot easier to get there.

As with all Second Life worlds, users’ avatars simply “teleport” in to Second China, a city with both old and new buildings that looks surprisingly similar to some of China’s fastest growing metropolises. There, they can try a number of different activities — including, for example, visiting an office building for a conference.

“We’ve built an environment around learning objectives,” said Paul Fishwick, lead investigator and a professor of computer and information science and engineering.

In the office simulation, the user’s avatar chooses appropriate business attire and a gift, greets a receptionist, and is guided to a conference room to be seated, among other activities. With each scenario, the user gains understanding or awareness: the Chinese formal greeting language and procedure, that it’s traditional to bring a gift to a first meeting, that guests typically are seated facing the door in a Chinese meeting room, and so on.

Supplementing the visual experience: A Web-based tutorial that the user can click on as he or she navigates Second China. The tutorial has much more detail about every experience. For example, it lists appropriate as well as inappropriate gifts — such as clocks, which in China are considered bad luck when presented as gifts.

In the teahouse simulation, a greeter shows the visitor photos of well-known personalities who have visited as patrons, a typical practice in many establishments in China. However, in the simulation the photos include, for example, a photo of Hu Jintao, the president of China. The accompanying Web tutorial provides biographical background on Hu and the other well-known Chinese personalities in the photos.

“It’s important to be able to go to China already familiar with the important historic and political figures,” said Henderson.

In Second Life, users typically control avatars. But in Second China, the teahouse greeter and other avatars in the various scenarios are controlled by computer software. This allows users to enter Second China anytime they wish, while also ensuring that all users have similar experiences, an important trait for an educational tool.

None of the information in Second China is exclusive to the Second Life simulation — it could also be presented in books or other traditional media.

But Fishwick and Henderson think that allowing users to place themselves within Second China’s virtual world may make the information more memorable and pique users’ curiosity and urge to explore. They’ll know more soon: After spending a year developing the project, they’ll spend the next year testing it on users to gauge its effectiveness.

“In terms of knowledge and empathy toward the culture, we don’t yet know the answer to the question of where one medium succeeds and another one fails,” Fishwick said.

The Second China project has been funded with a $1.25 million federal grant. Other co-principal investigators at UF are Elinore Fresh, a senior lecturer in Chinese and Franz Futterknecht, a professor of Germanic and Slavic studies. Amy Jo Coffey and Rasha Kamhawi, both assistant professors of journalism and communications in the department of telecommunication, will participate in the assessment phase.

That’s because every cell phone call, credit card transaction, discount card purchase, Internet site visited, or e-mail sent or received is fair game for information poachers to filch at will and without your knowledge. So states a new book released this month, “Privacy: The Lost Right” (Oxford University Press), authored by Jon Mills, a University of Florida Levin College of Law professor, dean emeritus, and founder of the university’s Center for Governmental Responsibility.

“Technology has moved too fast for the law, which is not totally surprising,” said Mills. “The combination of the Internet and a broad range of scientific advances, like genetic testing, has created information and societal changes with which the law has not been able to keep pace.”

“Privacy: The Lost Right” draws on Mills’ academic, courtroom and legislative experiences and explores examples of privacy intrusions enabled by technology ranging from disclosure of private online video rentals, Internet purchasing habits, spyware that tracks personal online viewing habits, governmental and corporate intrusions, and salacious or defamatory Web postings made by anonymous bloggers. He outlines the legal protections people have — or don’t have — to prevent these intrusions, and offers options to bolster legal protections of privacy.

Mills also relates his personal experiences as an attorney who has made successful arguments in several, high-profile court cases that have defined the First Amendment boundaries of the press’ right to know and an individual’s right to privacy. These included blocking the release of grisly autopsy photos of six young people murdered by serial killer Danny Rolling, preventing the posting of Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s autopsy photos to the Internet, and closing the homicide investigation file containing detailed personal information on murdered fashion mogul Gianni Versace.

These cases were sensationalized in the media and riveted public attention, but the privacy invasions of the information age that don’t garner any attention can do equal harm, said Mills.

“People are unaware of how many intrusions they face during everyday life because it is not in any intruders’ interest to put the public on notice, and when they do it’s usually only in the fine print,” said Mills. “We don’t know when somebody has gathered and sold our private information, we don’t know that somebody looked at our medical records and that it affected the way we were treated in a job search.”

Mills said it is not just government or the press or the anonymous bloggers or the data brokers that have the ability to violate our privacy rights, it’s all of the above together. Although Americans enjoy the conveniences of the Internet, camera phones and online commerce, Mills contends few of us surrendered all privacy for convenience — at least not knowingly.

“Americans cherish their privacy and the legal tools that protect it. At no time in our history have the challenges to personal privacy been so great,” said Janet Reno, former U.S. attorney general. “Jon Mills is uniquely qualified through legal, political and academic experience to address these challenges.”

The University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute in cooperation with King’s alma mater Morehouse College in Atlanta kicked off the first of the webcasts at 10 a.m. EDT on April 4, when experts from UF and Morehouse, along with institutions in China, India, Kenya and South Africa, discussed in real-time King’s meaning for the 21st century, said James Oliverio, director of UF’s Digital Worlds Institute. The other three programs are also scheduled at 10 a.m. on successive Fridays in April, and all can be viewed on the Internet at www.worldhouse.morehouse.edu.

In his “World House” speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, King said “modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think. Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.”

The outreach developed from a collaboration between UF and Morehouse College, the recipient of about 10,000 pieces of Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal writings in 2006. Terry Mills, a former UF dean who moved to Morehouse last year to become the Margaret Mitchell Marsh Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, said the idea came in discussions he had with Oliverio about how the two institutions might use the acquisition in educational programming.

The innovativeness of the technology at Digital Worlds Institute, which Mills called the “Imac Theater of Videoconferencing” for its ability to allow multiple partners around the globe to engage in an interactive, unified virtual space, made UF the natural choice to help produce the program, he said. “There are also geographic and historical reasons for the connection, notably Gainesville’s close proximity to St. Augustine where Dr. King had led freedom marches as well as its location near the site of the Rosewood massacre,” Mills said.

The purpose of the global discussions is not only to remind the world of King’s legacy but to keep his vision alive, as his message continues to have relevance today, Oliverio said.

“This is a memorial to Dr. King, not just in the sense of looking backward to some academic papers in a museum, but honoring his life’s work in the hopes that students of today at Morehouse, UF and the other participating institutions will reassess their involvement with their own societies in the same way that Dr. King took a stand against oppression of African Americans in the United States,” he said. “Even at the beginning of the 21st century human kind is still butchering each other in tribal conflicts over economic materialism and resources.”

Although King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is well-known among college students, many are not familiar with the “World House” concept mentioned in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech and his writings where he discusses the need to fight racism, war and poverty, he said.

A group of engineering students at the University of Florida has come up with a method for using an airbrush to make microelectrodes — tiny conductors used in an increasing range of consumer, research and medical products. The technique is simpler than the standard one, at least for small projects that require production of only a few electrodes.

“The idea was to try to find something cheap and quick, that we could do in our own lab without much expense,” said student Corey Walker.

Walker was one of four UF engineering students who worked on the project. Now a doctoral student in biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine, he is the lead author of a paper appearing this month in the online edition of the journal Electroanalysis.

Microelectrodes are highly sensitive, fingernail-sized devices used, for example, in off-the-shelf glucose monitors for diabetics. They are also vital to “lab on a chip” devices under development to identify substances in air, blood or other samples.

The industry standard for manufacturing microelectrodes is screen printing, a technique that, oddly, is also borrowed from the visual arts. But it requires a screen printer, and the students, who were trying to craft a hydrogen sensor, didn’t have one.

So a student who used airbrushes to build model airplanes suggested they try that tool. Trials and tests perfected the approach, with the students eventually using fully airbrushed electrodes to craft a working sensor. The technique works best for small projects because it requires each electrode to be made individually or in small batches.

“A screen-printing machine useful for fabricating microelectrodes might cost $10,000, whereas you can buy an airbrush for less than $200,” said Hugh Fan, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who oversaw the project. “So this is a useful technique for small, custom projects.”

The breakthrough was presented by University of Florida and Texas Instruments engineers today at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

Ken O, a UF professor of electrical and computer engineering and the lead researcher on the project, said his team had demonstrated a 410-gigahertz circuit using complementary metal oxide silicon, or CMOS, technology — the technology used to make many of the components in personal computers, cell phones and handheld electronic devices.

Measured in a UF laboratory using a circuit equipped with an on-circuit antenna the size of a pen tip, 410 gigahertz eclipses the previous record for CMOS circuits set in February 2006 by 200 gigahertz. More important, it is about 60 gigahertz higher than the previous record set using alternative but more expensive indium phosphide technology. Texas Instruments’ advanced manufacturing technology, known as the 45-nanometer CMOS process, serves as the foundation for the new circuit.

“This is probably the first time in 30 years that a silicon-based circuit has been shown to have a higher operating frequency than one based on indium phosphide and similar compounds,” O said. “This is exciting because if you can build these circuits, then you can build inexpensive detection and imaging systems for a range of applications. The result could reduce the cost for these systems by a factor of 100 or more.”

Ultra-high-frequency circuits have been created in the past, but only with exotic materials that are costly to manufacture. CMOS, by contrast, is the standard process used to make the majority of the circuits in the integrated circuit industry. That opens the door to widespread manufacture and distribution of the high-frequency circuits.

“There is a very rich applications space that is available, but nobody has been able to get there in the high-volume sense,” O said. “By leveraging Texas Instruments’ advanced process technology for manufacturing this circuit, the University of Florida and Texas Instruments demonstrate that through CMOS there is real possibility we will be able to do it in the next five years.”

These applications include, for example, always-on environmental monitoring equipment acutely sensitive to pollution, noxious gases or bioterrorism agents. In imaging, high-frequency circuits make possible techniques that can penetrate clothing to ”see” hidden weapons or plastic explosives. The circuit also can be used in medical equipment designed to facilitate early detection of skin and other cancers, and in industrial systems that monitor the coatings on pills to ensure they have the proper thickness and uniformity.

The other authors of the paper that is the source of Wednesday’s announcement are Eun-Young Seok, Changhua Cao, Dongha Shim, Daniel Arenas, and David Tanner, all of the University of Florida, and Chih-Ming Hung of Texas Instruments.

“University research is critical for moving the technology industry forward, and Texas Instruments is proud to be part of University of Florida’s ground-breaking work,” said Bill Krenik, chief technology officer of TI’s wireless terminals business unit. “By leveraging the high performance and low-power consumption that CMOS process technology delivers, the circuit demonstrates very compelling results that hold great potential for future safety, medical and environmental applications.”

The circuit was demonstrated on Texas Instruments’ low-power 45-nanometer process technology. The process includes a number of techniques to deliver cost-effective multimillion transistor, system-on-circuit processors with the performance and lower power consumption required for processing advanced applications. While designed to extend battery life in portable products, the technology also offers the performance to handle advanced multimedia functionality in a tightly integrated design.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Good news about that annoying jumble of electronic device charger power cords — it may soon be history.

University of Florida engineering researchers have built and successfully tested a pad that can charge cell phones, PDAs, laptops and other electronic devices via wireless technology. Rather than plug in the electronics to different cords and outlets, users simply place them anywhere atop the flat, thin pad, where they begin charging automatically.

The researchers are not the first to design a wireless charging device — in fact, at least four small companies, including one based around the UF research — are competing to bring a charger to market. Some products are expected to reach store shelves as soon as next year.

But the UF team says its device is unusually efficient, transmitting an average of about 70 percent of the power flowing from the outlet to the devices’ batteries. The team has filed paperwork for seven patents on the technology in the past three months.

“Our advantage is that thanks to a new transmitter design, we can achieve high power charging with high efficiency,” said Jenshan Lin, a UF professor of electrical engineering.

With today’s electronic devices requiring separate cords, consumers are all too familiar with confronting a tangled mess of wires, not to mention the inconvenience that comes with forgetting one cord or another while traveling. That’s why researchers and companies are working so hard to design and market a universal charging device that requires only one plug — for its own power. It’s anticipated that companies could sell as many as 1.9 billion chargers each year, according to one company official.

But the technical challenges are significant.

Electrical engineers have to figure out how to transmit power uniformly to a broad range of devices that operate at different power levels. They also have to design receivers that are cheap, small and uniform enough to be added on — and eventually fit into — everything from the tiniest cell phone to the most powerful laptop.

The UF researchers began working on the problem in 2006, when Ryan Tseng, a former electrical and computer engineering undergraduate, made it a senior design project and his honors thesis research. Lin was Tseng’s adviser on his research.

Tseng, now an MBA student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, later founded a company, Florida-based WiPower Inc., to sell a charge pad device. WiPower has provided funds to sponsor the continued UF research, with the Florida High Tech Corridor contributing matching funds.

Lin said his research team, led by UF doctoral student Zhen Ning Low, have made rapid progress on the charge pad, broadening its charging ability from cell phones to laptops while also making it considerably more efficient.

Key steps have included a redesign of the internal electronic architecture of the transmitter, as well as an adaptive power control mechanism that varies charging power based on the type of device and distance from the pad, Lin said.

The researchers demonstrated the device using a digital picture frame that displays photos stored in a memory stick. A video showed how the frame — which usually has to be plugged in to turn on — began displaying pictures and videos once it was moved to within an inch or so above the pad. The researchers also demonstrated the pad charging a standard cell phone and a receiver-equipped light bulb that turned on when placed near the pad

Lin said the UF charger differs from others because it transmits nearly as much power as its standard wired counterparts. The most efficient wired transmitter sends about 90 percent of the power tapped from the wall, while the UF wireless transmitter can average 70 percent. Lin said he thinks he will be able to boost that average, even eclipsing the wired level. The more efficient the devices, the less consumers will pay for electricity.

Hurdles include making the pads — and the needed receivers — hardier and useful in a bigger variety of devices. The chargers and receivers must be standardized, a difficult problem because it will require cooperation among scores of electronic-device manufacturers. To sell their chargers, companies will have to persuade manufacturers to include receivers.

“The biggest problem is standardization,” Tseng said. “If you can standardize, the chicken-and-egg issues should be minimized. Look at Bluetooth and WiFi.”

Those challenges aside, Lin said he envisions a day when charge pads could be included in, for example, desk furniture or seat back tray tables in airliners. “Hopefully in the future we can create something like WiFi,” he said, “except it becomes wireless power.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Always on, connected, cheap and on sale everywhere.

What people have come to expect in cell phones and personal communicators may soon become common in health-care devices and products at home and in medical offices, thanks to new technology announced today by the University of Florida and IBM.

The technology creates the first-ever roadmap for widespread commercial development of “smart” devices that, for example, take a person’s blood pressure, temperature or respiration rate the minute a person steps into his or her house – then transmit it immediately and automatically to doctors or family.

That could eliminate the need for many doctor’s visits, which are often difficult for the elderly or sick. By enabling regular updates via text message or e-mail, the technology also could pave the way for people to share real-time information on their health or well-being with absent loved ones. And it could prove useful for doctors who need to keep tabs on many patients at one time by helping the doctors to prioritize whom to treat first.

“We call it quality-of-life engineering,” said Sumi Helal, professor of computer engineering and the project’s lead UF researcher. “It’s really a change of mindset.”

The idea of using technology to provide medical care at a distance is nothing new. Doctors have relied on “telemedicine” to communicate with specialists for years. More recently, telemedicine has been expanded to include, for example, surgeons performing robotic procedures on distant patients.

But the UF-IBM advance goes a step further: It provides the technological
“stepstones” to make it easy for any company to manufacture and sell smart networked devices — while also making them more user-friendly for consumers.

“UF and IBM both see the need and the opportunity to integrate the physical world of sensors and other devices directly into enterprise systems,” said Richard Bakalar, Chief Medical Officer for IBM. “Doing so in an open environment will remove market inhibitors that impede innovation in critical industries like health care and open a broader device market that’s fueled by uninterrupted networking.”

Helal has devoted the past several years to developing smart devices for the elderly in a model home known as the “Gator Tech Smart Home” in Gainesville.

He and his students pioneered the “Smart Wave” microwave oven that can automatically determine how much time to cook a frozen meal or keep track of how much salt it contains. Among other devices, they also created an instrument that records how many steps a person takes, information that can tell absent caregivers how active its occupants are.

But these and other devices currently have a major shortcoming: They require “a team of engineers” to install them, Helal said. In a world where consumers are accustomed to electronics that require no more than a power outlet, that dramatically limits their appeal. “We decided to create a technology that self integrates,” Helal said. “When you bring it in to the house and plug it in, it automatically provides its service and finds a path to the outside world.”

With $60,000 in research funding from IBM, Helal designed “middleware,” or software and hardware that glues together different systems, that can give his and any similar health-aid devices this independence and connectivity. Importantly, the software is based on open standards, or publicly available specifications useable by anyone, such as those now being made available by consortiums of technology companies including Eclipse, W3C and OSGi.

Open standards make it easy for product developers to tap the technology in any new smart assistive devices, Helal said. That, in turn, will make the devices more common.

The hardware component of the system is an inexpensive sensor platform about half the size of a business card. Developed at UF and licensed to Pervasa, a Gainesville-based UF spinoff company headed by Helal, the “Atlas” platform makes it easy to create a network of sensors and make their information available on a computer network.

The advance is crucial given the increasing number of elderly Americans. The number of people 85 and over is expected to rise from 4.2 million in 2000 to 6.1 million in 2010 and 9.6 million by 2030, according to federal government statistics. Meanwhile, the percentage of older Americans living alone will either remain high or continue to grow: About half of women and nearly a quarter of men aged 75 and older currently live alone.

But the UF-IBM technology may also prove useful in many other medical settings. For example, Helal said, it could help emergency rooms operate more safely. Rather than a standard waiting list, patients could be equipped with networked wireless monitors of their vital signs, allowing doctors to determine who in a waiting room needs the most immediate care.

“The conventional wisdom is that Internet service providers would have greater incentive to expand their service capabilities if they were allowed to charge,” said Kenneth Cheng, a professor in UF’s department of decision and information sciences. Cheng and his co-authors are scheduled to present the findings at the International Conference on Information, Technology and Management in New Delhi, India, next week. “That was completely the opposite of what we found.”

The research discovered that cable and telephone companies providing broadband to deliver the content of companies such as Google and Yahoo! are more likely to expand their infrastructure — resulting in quicker loading and response in a customer’s personal computer — if they don’t charge these companies for preferential treatment, Cheng said.

The findings are timely because of industry pressure on Congress to consider legislation that would allow broadband service providers to give preferential Internet service to online content providers willing to pay a fee. That would, in effect, end the current practice of “net neutrality,” he said.

“Abandoning net neutrality has far-reaching and rippling effects when you consider how the Internet has become part of our daily life experience,” said Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay, a professor in UF’s department of decision and information sciences, who did the study with Cheng. “If the broadband service providers are allowed to charge the content providers and my favorite content provider does not happen to pay my local broadband service provider, would I have to switch favorites in order to have a faster Internet experience?”

The UF researchers, who took no position on the issue, developed an analytical model based on game theory to determine the winners and losers if net neutrality were abandoned, as well as whether the practice’s demise would give broadband service providers greater incentive to expand capacity.

Not surprisingly, they found that broadband service providers were the ones to gain the most from ending net neutrality because they could collect fees from content providers. The content providers such as Yahoo! and Google, in turn, would be the biggest losers.

Consumers will “win” if their favorite online provider is the one paying a fee to the telephone or cable company because it comes with a guarantee that its site would have the opportunity to load faster than its competitors, Cheng said. But those consumers who prefer a content provider that paid no such fee will “lose” in having to endure slower service, he said.

More important, the researchers found that the incentive for broadband service providers to expand and upgrade their service actually declines if net neutrality ends. Improving the infrastructure reduces the need for online content providers to pay for preferential treatment, Bandyopadhyay said.

“The whole purpose of charging for preferential treatment to content providers is that one content provider gains some edge over the other,” he said. “But when the capacity is expanded, this advantage becomes negligible.”

He gave the analogy of the expansion of a two-lane highway where drivers willing to pay a toll to subsidize road improvements are rewarded with exclusive use of a faster lane.

“If the road is upgraded from two to four lanes, with one express lane, these drivers might say ‘Three lanes are good enough for me. I don’t want to have to pay a toll any longer,’” he said. “So the desire to pay a toll when the road is expanded gets lesser.”

The experience of other countries also suggests that better service – up to three times faster – results when there is greater competition, Cheng said.

“In Japan and Korea, where there is net neutrality and much greater competition among broadband providers than in the United States, there are also higher broadband speeds,” he said.”

Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor who is credited with popularizing the term ‘network neutrality,’ praised the study. “Kenneth Cheng is doing important research on a topic that is vital to the future of networking,” he said.

That’s because students can just teleport in.

Fishwick, a computer science and engineering professor, is teaching one of at least two classes offered at UF this semester largely in cyberspace — specifically, the trendy three-dimensional online world called Second Life. There, Fishwick’s “avatar,” the character that represents each player in Second Life, leads discussions among some 30 other avatars controlled by upper-level UF undergraduate and graduate students in CAP 4403/CAP 6402, Aesthetic Computing.

“I like the potential for collaboration, immersion, aesthetics, creativity, social interaction,” Fishwick said. “There are a lot of different dimensions I think are valuable to educators.”

With distance learning decades old, classes on computer are nothing new. But Second Life, which has more than 2 million users worldwide, opens a wealth of fresh possibilities, one educators nationwide are increasingly experimenting with.

At the heart of the potential, these educators say, is the online world’s canny blend of real life, science fiction and fantasy, one that creates a place at once familiar and very strange. There are trees, rivers and buildings, and most avatars look like people — albeit tall, thin, attractive and highly stylized versions. (Fishwick’s is hardly professorial: He’s bushy-tailed and has a raccoon face.) But unlike their human counterparts, avatars can fly, teleport and change their appearance at will … or hop on a unicorn and gallop up to a pentagon-shaped building hovering over a glimmering city.

Two other UF professors began co-teaching a Second Life interdisciplinary research class this semester, and others are considering the possibility. UF has at least two islands in the Second Life “grid” as well as several buildings. The Biomedical Sciences Building, under construction in real life, is already in use on Second Life’s Gator Nation Island.

Attending class in Second Life is, well … otherworldly.

Students assembled for one of Fishwick’s classes recently by teleporting in to Aesthetica, a small island that Fishwick created. Although anyone can create an avatar and participate in Second Life for free, some activities cost money, and creating islands or buying land is one. UF paid Linden Labs, the company that created and supports Second Life, about $1,000 for Aesthetica and maintains the island with a $150 monthly fee.

Students in Fishwick’s class also meet in a real world classroom. But for this class, Fishwick’s avatar, Frederich Courier, assembled everyone at an airy platform levitating over an ocean marked with a sign, “University of Florida Simulation Gallery.”

There, Courier led a tour and discussion of digital objects students created for the class, which is devoted to the idea of making abstract ideas “real” through physical or graphically generated devices. Avatars examined a collection of cylinders, squares and cones built to represent a finite state machine, a set of commands used in computer programming. Some avatars occasionally zoomed skyward, evidently testing their flight abilities.

Fishwick said the possibility for collaboration is one of Second Life’s biggest attractions.
“The reason it’s different than what I did last year is that everyone can join in projects. We can all collaboratively build a computer program,” he said.

Also, he said, Second Life’s feature allowing users to create objects makes it uniquely suited for his class. In most computer games, the game world is established and the character deals with what he or she finds, he said. “It’s ‘I can create a dragon, I can create people, I can move around in space … I can do all these things I maybe couldn’t do before,’” he said.

The other UF class in Second Life — taught by James Oliverio, a professor and director of the UF Digital Worlds Institute, and Bill Ditto, a professor and chairman of the UF Biomedical Engineering Department — taps the program for entirely different purposes. The goal of BME 5937/DIG 5930, or Interdisciplinary Research Seminar, is to bring together upper-level students in biomedical engineering, business, film and the arts to work collaboratively on research, Oliverio said. In one recent real-life meeting, students divided into two groups discussed plans to open a bank in Second Life and start a club there.

“Second Life,” said Ditto, “will make you think about the real world rules and possibilities a little bit differently.”

Indiana was rated the best state in providing information about sex offenders on the Internet while Hawaii, Nebraska and South Dakota were rated the least forthcoming by the Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project in UF’s College of Journalism and Communications. Florida was rated 35th.

“Parents can look at the project’s Web site and say ‘this is a state that provides more information than anyone else’ or ‘these states don’t provide information,” said Bill Chamberlin, director of the Citizen Access Project and Joseph Brechner Eminent Scholar of Freedom of Information. “We tracked distribution of sex offender information because it was the subject of a recent Supreme Court opinion and we knew it was a topic a lot of citizens are interested in.”

The UF project is the first to systematically rate state laws on the accessibility to information about sex offenders, Chamberlin said.

States were ranked on a scale of one to seven, with one being “completely closed” and seven being “completely open.” Indiana rated a five, “somewhat open.” While no state received a rating of one, the three lowest – Hawaii, Nebraska and South Dakota — scored a two and were described as “mostly closed.” Florida, where there has been several highly publicized cases involving sex offenders in recent years, rated a “four,” which is “neither more open nor more closed.”

Indiana, the state rated most open, requires sex offender information to be posted on-line with stringent language, such as “must” or “shall” instead of “may,” said Courtney Barclay, a UF doctoral student in media law who helped prepare the Web site.

Whether the data about sex offenders “had to be posted,” or was simply allowed to be posted, was one of the four subcategories making up the overall rating. States also were rated on the kind of personal information available about an offender, such as a physical description, current address and occupation; administration and procedures, which among other things specifies which government agency is responsible for developing and maintaining the Web site; and sex offender classification, the types of offenders who have their information placed online.

North Carolina, Colorado and Arizona ranked most open for the mandate to distribute sex offender information. They received a five for “somewhat open.” Indiana, Wisconsin and New Jersey placed highest in maximizing the personal information available and received a six for “mostly open.” Indiana, Kansas and Kentucky had the best scores – six and “mostly open” – for providing information about sex offenders. In the administration and procedures category, all of the states received either a four for “neither more open nor more closed,” or three for “somewhat closed.”

“All our project does is rate laws according to whether they are more open or closed,” Chamberlin said. “We don’t pretend to make a value judgment on the best or worst laws because this is a very complicated subject.

“More information about sex offenders may not be necessarily better, depending on each individual’s values,” he said. “On the one hand it certainly is a compelling argument that parents need to know when repeat sex offenders are living nearby so they can take adequate precautions, but in some states a person can be classified as a sex offender for having had a consensual intimate relationship with someone under age 30 years ago.

“Society also has a real interest in rehabilitation of sex offenders and we don’t want to drive people who make one mistake many years ago into a position where they have no way to live a new life because they can’t get beyond their past,” he said.

In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that photos of convicted sex offenders could be posted online, refuting claims that such publicity was unconstitutional because it constituted a second punishment and was a form of double jeopardy.

A federal law passed in August goes beyond what many states have required to be posted on the Internet. States have three years to conform to the federal law. In the meantime, substantial differences exist in various state requirements, which are spelled out on the project’s Web site, Chamberlin said.

The Marion Brechner Citizen Access Project is funded by a grant from Marion Brechner, an Orlando broadcast executive and philanthropist. More information and individual state rankings can be found at www.citizenaccess.org.

For most people, heeding these warnings in hospitals or at the movies is as simple as pressing a button. But for a growing number of people across the globe, the idea of being out of touch, even just for a 90-minute movie, is enough to induce anxiety, says a University of Florida psychologist who studies addictions to the Internet and other technologies.

Although cellular phones and personal digital assistants such as the BlackBerry were created to make modern life more convenient, they’re actually beginning to interfere in the lives of users who don’t know when to turn them off, says Lisa Merlo, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the UF College of Medicine.

“It’s not so much talking on the phone that’s typically the problem although that can have consequences too,” Merlo said. “(It’s) this need to be connected, to know what’s going on and be available to other people. That’s one of the hallmarks of cell phone addiction.”

Unlike addictions to alcohol, drugs or even gambling, it can be hard to pinpoint problematic cell phone use. Almost everyone has a cell phone and uses it regularly. But if someone can’t get through dinner without sending text messages or furiously typing on a personal digital assistant during a meeting, it may be time to take a step back, Merlo said.

How people respond to being separated from their cell phones or PDAs is another clue. Frequent users often become anxious when they are forced to turn off the phone or if they forget it at home, so much so that they can’t enjoy whatever they’re doing, Merlo added. Often, cell phone “addicts” compulsively check their phones for voicemails and text messages, she said.

“When (cell phone overuse) really becomes problematic for a lot of people is if they have underlying anxiety or depression,” she said. “This can really exacerbate it or (cause) their symptoms to manifest themselves.”

For example, someone who already worries about what others think of them could become easily agitated if their phone calls or messages aren’t returned right away.

“This is something that is going to affect them on a day-to-day basis,” Merlo said.

The problem seems to be growing. A Japanese study revealed that children with cell phones often don’t make friends with their less tech-savvy peers, a Hungarian study found that three-fourths of children had mobile phones and an Italian study showed that one quarter of adolescents owned multiple phones and many claimed to be somewhat addicted to them. A British study also recently found that 36 percent of college students surveyed said they could not get by without cell phones. But this may be more a sign that students view cell phones as a modern necessity like a car, said David Sheffield, a psychologist who conducted the study at Staffordshire University in England.

“The most shocking figure was that 7 percent said the use of mobile phones had caused them to lose a relationship or a job,” Sheffield said.

Although experts have pinpointed these problems in frequent cell phone users, studies have yet to show if a bad cell phone habit constitutes an actual addiction. Yet as with traditional addictions, excessive cell phone use is associated with certain hallmark patterns of behavior, including using something to feel good, building up a tolerance and needing more of it over time to get the same feeling, and going through withdrawal if deprived of it, Merlo said.

Cell phone users could start out with one phone and switch to newer models with more advanced features or PDAs that act like mini-computers over time to get the same feeling they had with their first phone, she said. Although withdrawal is typically considered a physical response that occurs when the body goes without a chemical, the anxiety cell phone users feel without their phone could simply be another form of withdrawal.

“Those things lend toward the idea that maybe this is an addiction, but maybe it’s manifesting in a little bit different way than you would think of a chemical substance,” Merlo said.

Addiction also causes changes in the brain, but scientists have yet to measure what happens in the brains of cell phone users, she said. Even eating and other behaviors have been shown to produce the same effects in the brain as drugs and alcohol in some people, UF studies have shown.

For frequent phoners who do think they have a problem or for parents of children obsessed with their cells, Merlo advises downgrading to a basic phone with fewer features and setting limits about where and when to use the phone.

“Cell phones are a great technology,” Merlo said. “They’re useful in a lot of situations. (But) one of the most important things is making sure you have some cell phone free time in your day. It’s OK to turn it off. Focus on family, homework, knowing that cell phone message will still be there.”

As coveted as these new video game systems and other models are, some parents may want to think twice before buying them for their children and teens, a University of Florida child psychologist says.

With more educational games hitting store shelves and one system, the Nintendo Wii, actually requiring players to peel themselves off the couch to use it, video game makers seem to be addressing concerns about how playing affects children. But too much gaming still puts children more at-risk for behavioral and health problems, which is why parents should consider how they will control children’s playing before they buy a system, said Eric Storch, a UF assistant professor of pediatrics and psychiatry.

“If you’re concerned it is going to be difficult to control how much your child is playing, then one recommendation would be not to tempt them,” Storch said. “Don’t purchase one of these systems.”

Video games can be a good outlet for children who like them, but they shouldn’t consume their lives, Storch added. Setting limits on playing time may help prevent casual gaming from spiraling into hours spent in front of a television screen with a controller.

Children and teens who play excessively often do so at the expense of homework, and playing solo can isolate children from their peers, potentially causing problems for them later in life, Storch said.

“Social interactions teach you how to deal with other people as well as what’s appropriate and what’s not,” he said. “You learn how to handle situations. Social interaction is also one way of coping with stress and receiving emotional support.”

Serious gamers who spend hours sitting in front of a TV also risk becoming obese and developing associated health problems, such as cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, Storch said. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises parents to limit children’s total TV, video game and computer time to two hours each day.

Unlike typical gaming systems, the new Nintendo Wii uses a wandlike controller that requires players to physically perform the action they want to see on-screen. The system gets users off the couch, but it’s still not like playing soccer or jogging, Storch said.

On the other hand, research has shown that Dance Dance Revolution, a game that requires players to dance on a mat to mimic moves they see on their TV, elicits the same level of motion in children as other forms of exercise. But the game is a solo activity, Storch said. Dancing with friends or playing sports would get kids moving and give them a chance to spend time with peers, he said.

Although gamers lose time to participate in sports and other physical activities, video games aren’t the sole reason many aren’t more active, said Elizabeth Vandewater, an assistant professor of human development and family sciences and director of the Center for Research on Interactive Technology, Television and Children at the University of Texas. If the video games weren’t there, many children would simply find something else to do inside, in part because crime and traffic increasingly hamper their ability to play outside, she said.

“Children in America are definitely less active,” Vandewater said. “The question is whether (TV, computers and video games) are to blame.”

Most parents know to watch out for violent and graphic video games, but even educational games may not be as beneficial as they seem in commercials. Many games that claim to be educational aren’t evaluated to find out if children are actually learning from them, Vandewater said.

“Parents need to know they are being marketed to,” she said.

Each family is different, so deciding whether to game is best left up to parents, Storch said. The key: Parents who do allow video games should establish limits and rules and stick with them. Those concerned about their children abiding by the limits can remove controllers or install a new swipe-card system that only allows them to play for a programmed amount of time, automatically shutting off the system when it lapses. Another good strategy — have children do homework and play outside first, Storch said.

“There are certainly some positives to (video game playing),” Storch said. “For many kids it’s really enjoyable. But moderation is the key.”