When Anam Palla started teaching ninth and 10th grades at an all-girls school in Pakistan, her students were performing four years behind grade level and many considered themselves nalaiq (incapable). She set a mission that each of her girls would gain the skills and self-confidence to become contributing members of society. "My first task was to build a sense of responsibility in the girls towards their own learning and success, which would be achieved by collaborating with other members of the class and the community at large," she says. Today, here students are not only thriving academically, they are empowered and independent young women.

Technology has enormous potential to address educational needs more efficiently, help teachers improve their performance and enrich and individualize student learning. Indeed, in places such as India that face massive underserved populations and a shortage of qualified teachers, it's hard to imagine making a dent without leveraging technology in a big way.

In a recent article on this site, Richard Galant asked whether we'd be better off ditching teachers, giving kids computers and leaving them to their own devices to teach themselves and each other. The idea is based on the work of Sugata Mitra, an education professor who set up an experiment in India where he gave children in the slums access to a "computer in the wall" and found that without guidance, they were soon using it to learn on their own.

Research confirms that great teachers change lives. Students with one highly effective elementary school teacher are more likely to go to college, less likely to become pregnant as teens and earn tens of thousands more over their lifetimes. Faced with the choice between giving every child in a school his or her own laptop or putting 30 of them in a classroom with one exceptional teacher, there's no question which is the better investment.

After scanning the search results, one of the young teachers grabbed a mouse and pointed, clicked and scrolled her way through play after play after play. The older teacher was simply flabbergasted. He said something to the effect of, "Now I have seen everything. It has been my dream as an English teacher to be able to read all of Shakespeare's plays. Now all teachers will be able to do this. Education will change forever."

I remember working with teachers in Ghana in the late 1990s as part of a pilot initiative to introduce computers and the Internet into a select number of schools in a few of the major cities. Towards the end of the third day of a five day workshop, we had a teacher show up at the door to our classroom, apologizing for his tardiness and asking if he could join the course. He explained that he had traveled for a few days to reach the small school outside Accra where out training activity was taking place, hitching rides on trucks and then transferring between long haul buses, because he had heard about this thing called the Internet that was going to "change education forever" and just had to see it for himself. Given how many people had wanted to take the course, we had a strict policy not to allow latecomers into the workshop, but we waived it for this gentlemen, because we were so taken by his story and by the hardship he had endured to join us.

In my experience, introducing computers and the Internet into education systems for the first time almost always meets with resistance -- sometimes quite significant resistance -- from certain portions of the teacher population (and often from teachers' unions as well).

When someone mentions using technology in education, the conversation shifts away from education and pedagogy, and transforms into dreams of shiny new gizmos and gadgets filling our classrooms.

A classroom with one iPad or one laptop for every student may offer opportunities that a classroom with one computer for the teacher to use does not. But technology in such abundance is not education’s magic bullet. Instead of having an all-technology-all-the-time classroom, teachers should leverage the technology when it can ameliorate the lesson. You can flip your classroom without relying solely on technology. Project-based learning activities don’t have to happen in totally tech driven environments.

Teachers are not, and cannot be automatons handing out information to students. They are leaders, guides, facilitators, and mentors.

And drone strikes can be counterproductive. In a May 2009 opinion piece in The New York Times, David Kilcullen (a former adviser to General David Petraeus, and Andrew Exum, an Army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan and now a fellow at the Center for a New American Security) observed that many targets are not positively identified and air strikes not always precise.

How would America weigh going to war when it can put robots rather than citizens into harm’s way? “Many people I interviewed worried that it was going to make us more cavalier about the use of force,” Singer said.

Robot-based warfare may change the skills the military seeks in future soldiers. While training an F-15 pilot takes years, drone pilots achieve comparable results in mere months, and they pilot far cheaper aircraft. Indeed, one of the Army’s top drone pilots was a 19-year-old high school dropout—but he was an experienced video gamer.

For instance, it is well known that the Internet has deep roots in the military’s ARPANET, a packet-switching network developed in the 1960s by the US to allow communications in the event that a nuclear attack disabled the telephone and telegraph circuit-switching networks that were then the principal means of communication. The global positioning system (GPS) was also created by the US Department of Defense in the 1970s as a necessary improvement on navigation systems, especially for ballistic missiles, and is now integrated into automobiles, mobile phones, and other computing devices worldwide.

To appreciate the ethical threads that run through both society and the military, let us first briefly acknowledge the relationship between the two.

The first ethics concern with any new military weapon or system is usually whether its development or use would violate existing international law.

This raises the important ethical question whether it is justifiable at all that machines could make such life and death decisions autonomously and that machines could kill “by themselves,” automatically, without (direct) human intervention.

There is no place for empathy, no knowledge of the suffering one causes, and the distance between killer and target seems unbridgeable. Killing by drone, therefore, seems almost to be a computer game.

Targeted killing more closely resembles assassination, a planned lethal attack on an individual for political or, indeed, military purposes

The first problem, when looking at the ethics of war, concerns the justification of war itself. While most people may think that using violence for individual self-defense when attacked may be ethically acceptable under certain circumstances, it is an entirely different matter to say that the use of violence by military forces operating at the nation-state level is, by definition, justified. Moreover, even if you have no ethical problems with war as such, it is usually not obvious that war is a justifiable act in specific situations. There is a long tradition in political philosophy which attempts to determine what, exactly, constitutes a “just war” – that is, the conditions under which it is legitimate and right to start a war (ius ad bellum) and the ethical principles which should be followed in the course of war activities (ius in bello). (For more on Just War Theory, see here and here.) But imagine, for the sake of argument, that all these principles and conditions are satisfied: suppose that military violence is not wrong in principle, that the specific war in question is justified, and that military actions in this war follow the principles of just war. Is the use of drones for killing people then justified? I argue that it is (still) ethically highly problematic for the following three reasons.

As nurses, we must ask the “powers that be” the following: Can a robot tell when a patient needs a shoulder to cry on or to be left alone?  Can a robot really empathize with a cancer patient?  Can a robot know when it’s time to speak to a patient/family member about palliative care?  Can it be programmed to fearlessly advocate for a patient?  Can a robot learn how to build trust with patients and family members?  It is safe to say that in the near future, no robot can be programed to become the nurse that our patients deserve.  However, when the day comes, I would want a nurse to teach it nursing, not a physician.

Those last comments were troubling, since nursing wages and compensation are a sizeable part of any healthcare organization’s budget.  But, how long do we have before we start being replaced?  What if I told you efforts are in the works that may eventually lead to nurses being replaced by robots worldwide?       

However, when pressed by the interviewer to guarantee that robots will not fully replace nurses as a way for hospitals to save money, she answered:  “You know, when people are in charge all kinds of things can happen…right?  People will be in charge until robots take over, but I don’t see that happening in the next ten years”. 

Nursing is more than just a safe career bet against automation, it's also a growing field with lots of opportunities — nursing shortages have come and go, but the current shortage is expected to grow far worse.

"If you want to become a nurse — and that's for men and women — that's a great profession right now," Jerry Kaplan, author of "Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence," told Tech Insider. Kaplan's not the only who thinks nursing would be a great career choice for people looking to avoid the coming hoard of robot workers.

The Oxford study calculated that nurses have less than a 1% chance of being automated.

Schools are under more financial pressure than ever before, thanks in part to the new school lunch nutrition standards that hit the ground last year, observes Margo Wootan, head of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Although schools can now get six cents more per lunch to help cover the cost of more fruits, vegetables and whole grains to meet new requirements, the increase doesn’t cover all the changes, she notes

Schools are under more financial pressure than ever before, thanks in part to the new school lunch nutrition standards that hit the ground last year, observes Margo Wootan, head of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Although schools can now get six cents more per lunch to help cover the cost of more fruits, vegetables and whole grains to meet new requirements, the increase doesn’t cover all the changes, she notes

'Pink slime'

'Pink slime'