One would think that giving every child a laptop would provide tremendous educational benefit, but the evidence suggests otherwise, reports Randall Stross in the New York Times (7/11/10). In fact, the effect often is just the opposite: "We found a negative effect on academic achievement," says Ofer Malamud of the University of Chicago, who co-authored "a study that investigated educational outcomes after low-income families received vouchers to help them buy computers." Ofer says he was surprised by this, but other studies report similar findings.

A pair of Duke University professors, in a report called "Scaling the Digital Divide," studied "the arrival of broadband service in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005 and its effect on middle school test scores during that period." Math scores dropped significantly after the first provider appeared, and reading dropped "when the number of broadband providers passed four." The decline "was largely confined to lower-income households, in which, the authors hypothesized, parental supervision might be spottier."

In Texas, a four-year, $20 million experiment in "technology immersion" used federal money to distribute laptops to 21 middle schools (link). The kids were allowed to bring the laptops home. Another 21 schools that didn't get the laptops were the control. In this case, results were mixed, with test scores in some subjects improving "slightly," but results "included lower scores for writing" among the laptopped kids. The machines blocked "email, chat, games" as well as objectionable keyword searches -- but only in English, not Spanish. So, at least one educational benefit was teaching themselves how to circumvent the blocks, or maybe learning some Spanish.

IBM is working with the New Jersey Turnpike Authority to make traffic as predictable as the weather, reports Ken Belson in the New York Times (6/6/10). The initiative uses "complex algorithms and analytics ... to predict traffic patterns up to an hour into the future on state roads." It will not only alert "drivers to accidents, bottlenecks and dangerous conditions but also estimate what traffic will be like in 10, 20 or more minutes, helping drivers to make choices."

The application uses a combination of "incoming data and historical patterns" to forecast "how traffic will react on various roads under differing conditions." Brian Gorman, director of information technology for the authority, "equated the software's predictions with a weather map that shows approaching thunderstorms -- rather than producing a single prediction for all areas, it provides traffic forecasts for a series of locations."

The updates will be communicated to drivers via "variable message signs in the state," of which New Jersey plans to have 200 by 2012. The authority also plans to expand its number of advisory radio transmitters from 19 to 26. The goal is "to use the prediction software to get drivers out of their cars and into buses and trains, reducing traffic." As traffic expert Tom Gustafson explains, "To the extent you can move individuals to other routes off highways, then freight will have fewer obstacles in its way as well."

That voice on your GPS might belong to Karen Jacobsen -- popularly known as Australian Karen, reports Bruce Feiler in the New York Times (6/27/10). The odds are pretty good because Karen's voice turns up on GPS devices made by Garmin, Tom Tom and others. Her voice-over philosophy is simple: "When you're in the car, alone at night, on a dark road, and you don't know where you're going, this voice, even though it's coming from a machine, becomes a human being you trust ... It becomes a member of the family," she says.

For some men, that voice becomes all that and something more. There are even a couple of websites (gpspassion and pdastreet) whose forums reveal a certain male infatuation not only with Australian Karen, but also American Jill. Karen acknowledges "a few snarky comments" but is more concerned with trying to turn her navigatrix following into a singing and inspirational speaking career. Her message: "You can 'recalculate' anytime in life." She also suggests that her GPS work helps people's marriages because she takes "the focus off blaming one person or the other."

The early GPS systems featured mostly male voices. "When the key dimension is competence, the male voice is better," says Clifford I. Nass, a communications professor. "When the key dimension is likability, the female voice is better." As confidence in GPS technology increased, the likability became more important than competence. Female voices have also been traditionally preferred in airplane navigation devices and warning systems because they stood out from among the male crewmembers and men tend to pay more attention to them, although pilots commonly refer to the voice as "Bitching Betty."

Clive Thompson of Wired sees a future in which reading books is a social experience, reports Nick Bilton in the New York Times (6/28/10). "You'll be able to cut, paste and exchange your favorite passages using them in the same ... way we now use online text and video to argue, think or express how we're feeling," he says. "E-books will display their social and informational life ... On which pages do readers most linger? What are the world's best comments for this passage?"

It's a world that could evolve along with tablet computers, which some developers say will be "so flexible that you will literally be able to roll them up and slip them in your bag or pocket -- just as you would do with a newspaper or magazine today -- and then unfurl them on the train." That evolution actually is being led by the U.S. Army, which is working with Arizona State University's Flexible Display Center "to build flexible, nonbreakable screens and devices for use on the battlefield."

Nicholas Negroponte, of M.I.T. and One Laptop Per Child fame, is meanwhile readying for market an iPad-like device that's made of plastic and "will use so little power you should be able to shake it or wind it up to give it power." It is scheduled for a 2012 release at a price less than $100. However, the future of social reading may be as much about such devices as it is the potential to make books available on any platform, anytime, anywhere. Indeed, Clive Thompson envisions a future in which publishers offer "single chapters of some books for 99 cents each, the price for which iTunes sells single songs today."

In "Extra Lives," Tom Bissell "wonders why, despite their technical sophistication, videogames are so bad at telling stories," reports Jonathan V. Last in the Wall Street Journal (6/11/10). Perhaps it's that videogames are participatory and good storytelling is inherently authoritarian. Having control while also giving it up could be mutually exclusive where "the best narrative art forms" are concerned.

Jonathan Blow, a videogame designer, thinks a "central problem with storytelling in videogames is that the actual mechanics of playing a game -- moving your character to jump over a barrel, or eat a power pellet or punch an enemy -- are divorced from the stories that videogames are trying to tell." However, Chris Suellentrop, in a New York Times review of Extra Lives, points in the opposite direction.

Chris quotes Tom as writing that videogame interactivity can be "as gripping as any fiction I have come across." He cites Grand Theft Auto IV, in which players have to dump dead bodies, for example, as creating "an engine of a far more intimate process of implication" than a book or movie ever could, turning "narrative into active experience." And despite the lack of quality of the storytelling in most videogames, he thinks the interactivity enables "a form of storytelling that is, in many ways, completely unprecedented."

A new book by William Powers called Hamlet's BlackBerry takes its title from a Shakespearean reference to technology, reports David Harsanyi in the Wall Street Journal (6/30/10). Here's the money quote: "Yea, from the table of my memory / I'll wipe away all trivial fond records." It's from Hamlet and it "refers to an Elizabethan technical advance: specially coated paper or parchment that could be wiped clean. A book that included heavy, blank, erasable pages made from such paper ... was called a 'table.'"

William's book is about the many ways in which our addiction to devices like the BlackBerry have cluttered our minds, and our lives. He's no Luddite, though. He admits to being as addicted to digital connectivity as the rest of us. His argument is "that the distractions of manic connectivity often lead to a lack of productivity and, if allowed to permeate too deeply, to an assault on the beauty and meaning of everyday life." William's not saying we should give it up, just that we should seek more balance.

He convinced his family to log off during the weekend, a practice he calls the "Internet Sabbath." They discover it's not so bad, spending "more time face-to-face than Facebooking." The mild surprise is that "friends and relatives quickly adapt to the family's digital disconnect" as well. Kind of like an internet virus in reverse. Some proof, perhaps, of William's theory that we have both a "need to connect outward, as well as the opposite need for time and space apart." Or at least a nice thought that we might "be happier freeing ourselves for genuine, unfiltered experience and then reflecting on it, not tweeting about it."

The real battle for loyalty between mobile phone carriers isn't the one centered on Apple, Android and BlackBerry, reports Damon Darlin in the New York Times (6/13/10). While it's true that some "55 million people worldwide use iPhones ... there are billions of feature-phone users worldwide." Feature phones are the basic models that can place a call but can't connect to the internet, and "are discounted by carriers or offered at no cost."

This reality was recently noted by Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist, who writes a blog called abovethecrowd. The thing is that these billions of feature-phone users "will make the move up to smartphones as the cost of both the phones and the service drops (And it will. The cost of delivering bits drops about 50 percent with every generation of network technology)." Because of this, Bill suggests that the Android doesn't need to be as good as the iPhone to prevail.

"It only needs to be as good as an Apple phone to entice new customers," he writes. "Which it is." Once Android has those customers, chances are it will keep them, not necessarily by making improvements to the phone, but by raising the barriers to switching to a point where, for one reason or another, it's too bothersome to switch. And as soon as they've got you hooked, they can raise their prices on you. Economists refer to this little trick as "switching costs," while marketers probably would call it "loyalty marketing."

"Abnormality can become a feature," says Jonathan Berger, commenting on a growing consumer preference for low-fidelity music, reports Joseph Plambeck in the New York Times (5/10/10). Jonathan, a music professor at Stanford, is commenting on "an informal study among his students that found that, over the roughly seven years of the study, an increasing number of them preferred the sound of files with less data over the high-fidelity recordings."

Ironically, amid "an explosion in dazzling technological advances ... in surround sound, high definition and 3-D ... the quality of what people hear -- how well the playback reflects the original sound has taken a step back. To many expert ears, compressed music files produce crackly, tinnier and thinner sound than music on CDs and certainly on vinyl. And to compete with other songs, tracks are engineered to be much louder as well."

This has everything to do with the rise of iTunes and the demand for quick downloads and jam-packed MP3 players. "It would have been very difficult for the iTunes store to launch with high-quality files if it took an hour to download a single song," notes David Dorn of Rhino Records. However, Apple last year "upgraded the standard quality for a song to 256 kilobits per second from 128 killobits ... preserving more details." And a few services, such as HDtracks, are now offering higher-fidelity downloads, but so far mostly only for "classical or jazz music."

In a delicious turn of events, the tanking economy made possible the resurrection of the late, great Polaroid instant camera, reports Eric Felton in the Wall Street Journal (3/26/10). The last plant making Polaroid instant film -- outside Amsterdam of all places -- was set to be demolished, and its machinery dismantled. But because of the economy, plans to bulldoze the factory and construct a new building were cancelled. And, as fate would have it, Florian Kaps, a Polaroid enthusiast, happened to catch wind of this, um, development, the day before workers were to begin destroying the machinery.

Florian, who had been selling remaining stock of Polaroid film online, managed to delay the destruction for a week while he raised enough funds "to lease the factory, acquire the equipment and get to work." Even though Florian had the equipment, he still didn't have the requisite chemicals for that very special Polaroid process. However, working with former Polaroid engineers, a new formulation was developed using readily available ingredients and "a sepia-tinted black-and-white film usable in the standard old Polaroid cameras" is now available online, at theimpossibleproject dot-com. Color film is promised this summer.

The remaining question is whether there's a sufficient market for Polaroid film, which once commanded the instant-pictures category, but fell on hard times with the advent of digital cameras. Still, some people -- artists largely -- have remained enchanted by "the film's otherworldly effects and quirky unpredictability." Some hobbyists meanwhile "were hooked on the strange, ethereal lull as the image seeps into existence before one's eyes." It's not likely that Polaroid's revival will put a "dent in the digital juggernaut," but, as Eric Felton notes, it's a happy moment "when the market increases our choices instead of narrowing them."

"The iPhone is a fantastic device but it's a device perfectly tuned for zero miles per hour," says K. Prasad Venkatesh of Ford Motor in a Wall Street Journal essay by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. (3/17/10). Prasad is the chief of electronic research and advanced engineering at Ford, and this is his way of saying that some of the innovations introduced into automobiles could be distracting to drivers. Of course, Ford takes great care to ensure that bringing one's digital life into the car doesn't cause accidents, but the dangers can't be denied.

"We've gone from one [computer] module in the car to 30 in a generation," says Prasad, adding that "the number of potential interactions grows exponentially." For example: "A system that parallel parks the car for you has to interact with the drivetrain, brakes, steering and cameras or other sensors." Ford, meanwhile, is currently advertising Ford Sync, which, among other things, "lets a driver summon up music or hear his text messages without taking his eyes off the road, with more features (navigation, diagnostics, etc.) being added all the time."

Prasad thinks such innovations will render highway billboards irrelevant, as drivers will instead get their pit-stop suggestions from "the cloud." Ford calls this "the American Journey 2.0." Drivers might also receive warnings about dangerous intersections ahead from a social networking site, perhaps citing accidents involving friends. Prasad also sees smaller cars ahead because "small is tech, small is cool." Maybe no seats for other passengers, but plenty of room for "virtual buddies." Fantastic, at any speed.