English teacher Eleanor Terry started a Facebook page last fall for the High School for Telecommunication Arts and Technology in Brooklyn. She uses it for the school's college office to remind seniors about things like application deadlines. The seniors use it to stay in touch with each other.

"There was a student who got into the University of Chicago," she says, "and the way we found out about it was that they scanned their acceptance letter and then tagged us in it."

Most of the school's 320 seniors have friended the Facebook page, but Terry disables the mechanism that allows her to see their individual profiles.

"So that I'm not seeing their ... personal pictures from their weekend," she says.

Terry and her colleagues came up with that approach on their own, based on what they thought was appropriate. Now, guidelines the city issued this spring make that explicit: Teachers cannot friend or follow their students in open forums like Facebook or Twitter, but they can have professional accounts and pages for students to follow, such as Terry's college office.

The New York City Department of Education issued its first guidelines for how teachers should navigate social media following a rise in the number of complaints involving school employees who inappropriately contact students through Facebook, texting and email.

Terry's principal, Philip Weinberg, calls the guidelines common sense.

"As an old English teacher, even the language of that kind of interaction is problematic," he says. "We know that we're not our students' friends as much as we love them and care about them in genuine ways. We need to establish specific boundaries about the kinds of interactions we have with young people."

Now that everyone is crossing paths through social media, school districts around the country are trying to regulate these interactions. New York copied the approach taken by Los Angeles. Other districts have gone much further to restrict teachers, according to Scott McLeod, an associate professor at the University of Kentucky. He says districts don't need extra policies for social media because they already have discipline codes.

"On the one hand, the people seem to be encouraging educators to use social media with students," says McLeod, who teaches law and technology to aspiring school leaders. "Yet they're putting such tight confines on it that I think what they going to find is that most educators won't take them up on it."

For example, New York requires principals to sign off on any social media page for a school, and students must get family consent to participate. But teachers can still communicate directly with students by phone.

At the High School for Telecommunication Arts and Technology, some teachers say the new guidelines will help clear up any ambiguities — and students agree. Senior Jennifer Tufino, 17, shakes her head when asked if she would ever friend a teacher.

"I think that's kind of weird," she says.

But Tufino and her classmate, 18-year-old Danny Perez, say it's nice that teachers can use social media for classwork and staying in touch.

"Because then they're more accessible to you," Tufino says.

"You feel more confident asking for help — not just schoolwise but more personal," Perez says. "You have an issue, you could talk to them."

New York City says it's trying to clarify these interactions to protect kids and teachers. And if the sometimes blurry line does get crossed, the city says it will rely on its existing discipline code. The city is currently moving to fire several teachers who are accused of having inappropriate sexual contact with students; those cases did not involve social media.

Mobile phones and tablets have put a world of information at our fingertips, even when we're on the go. It would seem natural, then, for smartphones to help make traveling easier and more fun.

But not all apps are created equal — so Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep sought advice from Lauren Goode, a senior editor at All Things D, where she recently reviewed travel apps. Here are some of the tips Goode discussed with Steve:

Pack the Bag (iPad/iPhone) — "It breaks luggage down into categories," Goode says, and includes details like sunscreen and sunglasses. "And you can set a reminder on the app that'll tell you when you're supposed to start packing," Goode says. The app also lets you email a packing list to friends or family.

TuneyFish — Available for many phones, the 99-cent app provides videos and tips on repairing your car — a possible savior if your vehicle breaks down. "It sounds better in theory than I actually found it to work," says Goode, who adds that the videos were sometimes hard to follow.

Google Translate (Android, iOS) — Also known as "the fan favorite," Goode says Google's tool promises to help travelers understand more than 63 languages. But "once you get into more complicated or long blocks of communication," she says, some of the results "might not make that much sense to you." Instead, Goode says, stick with short phrases.

Lonely Planet (Android/iPhone) — "Lonely Planet's travel apps are really, really extensive," Goode says. "These apps are really great. They offer a simpler interface than something like Frommer's." The apps include recommendations for places to eat, where to stay and what to see. They also offer audio walking tours.

Stuck on Earth (iPad) — "This is a really fascinating, unique travel app — I'm not even sure if I would call it a travel app, as I would call it a photographer's dream," Goode says. "It crowdsources all of these photos from Flickr that people around the world have posted to this particular area of Flickr that's designated for Stuck on Earth."

And if your summer travel plans include a trip to the beach, Goode says to be careful about relying on an app to avoid getting a sunburn.

"There are some apps out there that claim to help you monitor your sun exposure" by using your phone's GPS to find data on local UV levels, she says.

But the apps don't have any way of measuring your actual levels of exposure.

"I've tried a couple of these apps before, and at times they've said to me, 'Well, even if you're in the sun, you could still stay in the sun for 4 hours and 39 minutes before reapplying sunscreen,' " Goode says. "I'm thinking to myself, 'I am definitely going to get a sunburn.' "

There are many ways to find a lost or stolen cellphone. You can call the number and see who answers; you can use "Find My Phone" apps that track your phone's GPS. Or, if your camera phone automatically posts photos to your account in "the cloud," you can simply watch your photo feed and look for clues in the strange new images that start popping up. Just be prepared to see anything — like scenes from a cruise ship.

That's what Katy McCaffrey says she's been seeing, after mysterious pictures began appearing in her Photo Stream one month after her iPhone was stolen. McCaffrey says that from the images, she was able to deduce where her phone went — and who its new owner is. She posted a batch of photos from the purloined iPhone on her Facebook page, in an album called "Stolen iPhone Adventures."

As of Tuesday evening, the album had been shared by nearly 500 users. In the page's comments section, McCaffrey gives more details about when her phone went missing:

"It was stolen on board the Disney Wonder cruiseline back in April. His photos are just making it to my photostream," she writes in one comment.

Many of the photos feature a cruise ship employee whose nametag reads "Nelson," enjoying casual off-duty moments. The images seem to have come without captions — so McCaffrey wrote her own, forming a narrative about Nelson's friends and co-workers, and even a woman she identifies as his girlfriend.

"This is Nelson. Nelson has my stolen iPhone," reads one caption. Another finds McCaffrey noting, "And here's a beautiful sunset Nelson had time to capture, all on my stolen iPhone."

McCaffrey also writes that she has contacted Disney Cruise Line:

"I have alerted the officials of the Disney Cruiseline and forwarded them the photos. Hopefully I'll get my phone back and maybe some free passes to Disneyland."

We haven't been able to independently verify all the details of McCaffrey's story; both she and Disney have yet to respond to requests for comment. And while her creative photo captions make the album compelling, they don't include any proof that the man named Nelson was involved with her phone's disappearance. As a post over at New York magazine notes, it's possible that the situation might involve at least one misunderstanding.

Still, McCaffrey's story shares many similarities with other reports of lost and stolen devices beaming images back to their rightful owners. Nearly all of those stories involve Apple's "iCloud," a service that automatically syncs photos and other files across mobile devices and computers.

It seems likely that McCaffrey hopes that the "Stolen iPhone" album might help her get her phone back. On her Facebook profile, the photo album is the only one that's widely available to the public. And in the comments, she writes, "I can't see any reason why people shouldn't share this. feel free."

In what seems to have been a similar situation, a British man received an enigmatic batch of photos after his iPad was stolen back in January. The photos' subjects included a smirking man wearing a wool hat, a cutely attentive brown dog, and two hot-pink rolling suitcases.

Around the same time, a Texas man posted images of two women on his Facebook page after his stolen iPad sent him the pictures. He said he hoped that publishing the photos might help him find his tablet — a strategy that seems to mirror that of McCaffrey.

And in March, police found $35 million worth of crystal meth when they arrived at an apartment to investigate a stolen iPad, whose GPS system was alerting its owner to its whereabouts.

As part of a new tech segment, we're starting a social media advice column in which we'll ask experts your questions about how to behave online. This week's experts are Baratunde Thurston, former digital director of The Onion and author of How To Be Black, and Deanna Zandt, author of Share This! How You Will Change The World With Social Networking.

While we wait for your questions to come in (you can send them to alltech@npr.org or put them in the comments below) we're kicking things off with a question of our own:

Should you friend or accept a friend request from your boss on Facebook?

Deanna Zandt: "There [are] two sides of this. One is that it's interesting to see the different overlaps of parts of our lives intersecting with one another, but, for the most part, friending the boss is a sticky, dangerous kind of situation and I don't advocate for it."

Baratunde Thurston: "I would say do it, but just quarantine that boss into the safe zone on Facebook."

Zandt: "Really?"

Thurston: "I think it actually does depend on who the person is. That boss might take your Facebook friend diss as a diss on their overall corporate leadership skills, as a vote of no confidence, as a signal that you're not a member of the team. And if you're in one of those superteamy-type work environments, you don't want to stick out. You know what I'm saying? So put them in a place so they'll only see the baby pictures and the cat photos."

Zandt: "The other thing to think about is what you're going to actually see of your boss. Chip Conley from Joie de Vivre Hotels in California has a whole ... post about how his employees basically sat him down and said, 'We don't want to see pictures of you running around Burning Man half-naked.' "

Thurston: "I think what we're both agreeing with is that there are some boundaries here. And the fact is Facebook has destroyed the meaning of the word 'friend.' 'Friend' used to mean ... I'll take a bullet for you, I'll take care of your kid or, you know, things with meaning — and now it just means 'connected to.' It's already awkward enough in an office culture to be 'friends' with people who you're actually not. So Facebook formalizes that awkwardness through this button."

Zandt: "Bottom line for me — have a chat. Talk to them about it. You know, like, in person."

Thurston: "Maybe not through Facebook?"

Zandt: "No, no. Maybe just, you know, you and me."

Thurston: "The social network called life."

Inside a plywood shack at a combat outpost in Marjah, in Afghanistan's Helmand province, three Marines sit before a bank of computers provided by the military to help keep up morale. The dingy outpost is made up of a collection of tents where troops live among swarms of flies and the constant hum of generators.

One Marine talks with his wife on Skype and another is on Facebook. The sites allow troops to keep in touch with their families, but commanders in Afghanistan have mixed feelings about them. Troops' constant access to social media has led to headaches for the military, including the inadvertent release of the names of American dead before families are officially notified, as well as the release of gruesome pictures of war dead to the American public.

Sitting in the outpost's Internet cafe, Sgt. William Garner is charged with keeping his squad members from posting anything that can cause trouble. He says Marines show him their photos and he decides which ones can go online.

"We get a lot of firefights, come [upon] a lot of dead Taliban," Garner says. "So Marines want to take pictures of that, and there's really no point behind it ... It's pretty cut and dried what you can do and not do, common sense-wise."

It's Common Sense

But the Marines' leadership isn't taking any chances. Before they even come to Afghanistan, troops are briefed on what not to post.

"Don't take pictures of detainees; you don't take pictures of dead people; you don't take pictures of Afghan people in compromising positions — and women," says Lt. Col. Michael Styskal, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment. Styskal, the top Marine officer in the area, is paying a visit to the Marjah outpost.

Occasionally, Styskal has one of his officers check online for any potential social media problems. But he says his concern goes beyond pictures of detainees or dead Taliban — they also include the frequent videos of firefights that show up on YouTube. One such video, posted to YouTube in May 2011, shows Styskal's own 2nd Battalion engaged in fighting. The video was taken before Styskal took command, but he says if his Marines posted a video like that today, "I'd probably go to talk to the company and the commander and say, 'What was this guy doing ... videotaping when he should have probably been helping fight?' "

The video is still under investigation, and there's a possibility of disciplinary action against not only the four Marine sergeants involved, officials say, but also their commanders.

'Let Me Make You Proud'

Of course, the military isn't all fighting — there's also plenty of downtime. Back at the plywood Internet cafe, Pvt. Alejandro Francis of Manhattan is logged onto Facebook. He's 19 and on his first deployment. There's a tattoo of St. Michael the archangel on his upper arm.

"I put up pictures that are appropriate," Francis says. "If I have to think about it twice to put it up, then I won't put it up."

That's probably because the message has been drummed home. After a video surfaced in January showing Marines in Afghanistan in 2010 urinating on the corpses of alleged Taliban fighters, Francis says every Marine was required to take a class that discussed why the video was inappropriate and how it gave Marines a bad name.

But Francis isn't even close to giving the Marines a bad name. On this day, he's posting a Mother's Day message to his mom back in New York: "Happy Mother's Day. Words can't explain how I feel about you," Francis writes. "Anything I were to do wouldn't ever amount to things you've done for me. I want to thank you for bringing me into this world and putting up with all my childish acts. It's time for you to sit back and let me make you proud."

And maybe that's the test troops should use when they're thinking about posting something online: Is this something to be proud of?

Facebook's initial public offering is shaping up to be one of the largest in history. This morning the company told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it was expanding its offering ... again.

Now Facebook is planning to raise up to $16 billion from investors by taking a small slice of the company to the public. And it will likely be worth more than $100 billion on its opening day of trading. It could easily go higher.

So this week Zoe Chace at Planet Money and I have been poking through Facebook's business. Really trying to answer one pressing question: Can this company be worth this much? Can it live up to its hype?

Anant Sundaram is a valuation expert at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. He says for Facebook to justify its stock price over the long term, 10 years from now it will need to attract one of every 10 ad dollars spent anywhere on the planet. That's not just on the Internet — that's the planet.

So do Facebook ads work? Are these ads, in the words of Zoe Chace, "going to become the bomb that explodes the advertising industry?"

 

It's a good question — a $100 billion question. And the answer you get depends who you ask.

General Motors says no, these ads don't work. And the company chose this week to pull all its paid advertisements off of the social network — and GM did it publicly.

But drive across Detroit and you get a radically different answer. Ford loves Facebook.

It used Facebook to unveil the 2011 Ford Explorer. Ford says that campaign yielded better results than a Super Bowl ad — for a fraction of the cost. Part of the problem is that the return on investment for brands that advertise on Facebook is hard to measure.

Zoe and I ran our own little test. We recruited a pizza place in New Orleans called Pizza Delicious and watched as it launched a mini-campaign. And while Facebook delivered the ad to a huge number of New Orleanians in a short time — we may never know if the campaign pays off.

Just like on television, advertisers on Facebook struggle to figure out which ads are leading to which customers, but in the digital world this kind of clear return on investment is what many advertisers have grown to expect.

"Google built a great search experience and then they stumbled upon AdWords which turned into the big cash cow for them," says Rob Leathern, the CEO of Optimal, a social media marketing firm. "I don't know that Facebook has found that yet."

Ultimately it's the amount of information about its users that seems to have entranced Wall Street.

"When Facebook investors and founders rake in billions of dollars on Friday [the first day of public trading], they are making that money by selling little bits of each of us," says Fred Cate, a distinguished professor and director of the Indiana University Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research. "What Facebook is selling is us. They're selling data, but data that more than 900 million of us volunteer on a daily basis."

This may be Facebook's most valuable asset — the information about us it has and its ability to collect more.

Every week, as part of a new tech segment, we'll be digging into our digital sandbox for some fun. New Yorker cartoonist Matthew Diffee is starting things off with a review of Draw Something, a popular app that works a lot like Pictionary: Players pick a word, draw clues and then watch as their opponents guess the answer. But, as Diffee explains, the app's name is a bit misleading.

First of all, I think the name "Draw Something" isn't entirely accurate; it would be more accurate to call it "Scrawl Something," because that's what I did. Or maybe "Draw Something With Your Foot While Bull Riding On A Boat."

I don't know if I have big fingers or not, but I'm playing it on a phone rather than an iPad, so it's like getting to drive a Ferrari on a racquetball court. It's just frustrating and it's not very responsive. I know how to draw well and so, in my mind, I'm making all these intricate little finger moves. And, in my mind, I'm drawing like a Rembrandt, but what's on the screen looks more like the work of Jimmy, the painting chimp.

I sat down for, I thought, 20 minutes, and suddenly I'd been on there an hour. So I would say as a game, it's fantastic — and as a drawing tool, it's pretty terrible.

But it's actually helped me in a way. Even in cartooning, I tend to draw things better than they need to be and it's really fun to just sort of relax and just draw something badly.

You can share a review of your favorite drawing app in the comments below or send your comments to alltech@npr.org.

This week, All Things Considered is hitting refresh on its All Tech Considered segment — taking you into the changing landscape of technology and how it intersects with everyday life. From Silicon Valley to China, we'll feature stories from around the world, stay on top of innovations that matter — and get you the news you need to know. Every Monday, we'll preview the week's big tech stories.

Today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg turns 28 and gets the ultimate birthday gift: His popular social networking site is expected to go public later this week. The IPO could be valued at nearly $100 billion. Meanwhile, Yahoo, another company that also once had a bright future, continues to undergo upheaval as it struggles to define its mission.

Facebook is expected to start selling stock to the public and begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market on Friday. One of the things that are remarkable is how quickly Facebook became so valuable. Can a company started less than a decade ago in a college dorm really be worth that much?

To put this in perspective, when Facebook goes public it will probably be valued at more than Boeing and Ford combined. But Facebook's profits are relatively minuscule.

So to justify its sky-high stock price, Facebook will need to grow like a weed for the next few years. The amount of money it brings in will have to double and then double again for this deal to make sense for long-term investors.

Right now, more than 80 percent of the money Facebook makes comes from advertising. So that piece of its business needs to expand really quickly. But Facebook doesn't want to clutter up its site with too many ads and annoy its users.

Late last week Facebook gave us one hint about where it might be headed. The company has huge amounts of data about each of its users. It knows your likes, your friends — and where you went to school. Right now it uses those data to sell ads aimed at you, but those ads only appear on its own website.

Friday Facebook tweaked its privacy policy, allowing it to use that information to place ads aimed at its users anywhere on the Web.

Managing privacy expectations of its users could become a huge problem for Facebook.

The company has a long history of pushing people to share more than they might otherwise be comfortable sharing. And there is no indication that trend will change. But there is always the risk that at some point millions of people will simply say they've had enough and quit the service. So far, that hasn't happened.

But there's also another risk — that regulators either in the United States or in Europe get tough and really start putting strict limits on what Facebook can do.

So Facebook has to walk this line, while at the same time adding members, selling ads and figuring out how to collect even more information about us.

If Facebook doesn't figure all of this out, it will be very bad news for investors.

Investors who buy Facebook this week and plan to own this stock for the long haul are betting on a kind of crazy, almost unprecedented growth. Because without that, Facebook begins to look a lot like another Silicon Valley company — Yahoo.

Right now, Yahoo and Facebook sell just about the same number of ads. They both have audience measure in the hundreds of millions. But Yahoo stock is worth one-fifth of Facebook's projected value.

Yahoo just pushed out its new CEO, Scott Thompson, who was hired less than six months ago.

Thompson got caught lying about his background. In documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and on his bio, he claimed a degree in computer science when in fact his college degree was in accounting.

When the news first broke, Thompson claimed it was a misunderstanding — he had never lied. But the more folks dug into it, the less credible it looked. Then over the weekend, Thompson reportedly told Yahoo's board of directors he had thyroid cancer and stepped down.

Yahoo has had five or six CEOs in the past five years, depending on how you count it. And actually this is bigger than losing another chief executive. A group of activist investors used the controversy to land three seats on Yahoo's board of directors. And in the past this group, Third Point, has pushed to break Yahoo up or sell it.

So this week as Facebook goes public, it's worth remembering that Yahoo was once valued by Wall Street at more than $100 billion too.

My favorite movie, Days of Heaven, is at the top of my recommendations list on Netflix. But I've never actually watched it on Netflix, so how did they know I like it?

"Every time a Netflix member streams a title from us, we learn a little bit more about what's interesting to them," says John Ciancutti, vice president of engineering at Netflix. Netflix has algorithms that mix customer information with other algorithms that group shows together. So if I enjoy Mad Men, it guesses that I might like other dramas with complicated male leads, like Breaking Bad — and it's right.

If the Industrial Revolution was about extending the power of human muscle with inventions like the car, then the computer revolution is about extending the power of the human mind — and algorithms are the key to its success. These formulas find search results, pick the top story on the news feed of your Facebook page, and determine things like your credit score and trades on Wall Street.

Every day Netflix has dozens of engineers improving its algorithms. A huge whiteboard in the hallway of Netflix headquarters displays numbers in a grid, part of a contest to see who can come up with the best algorithms.

"Just in the last couple of months, we've run tests where we've improved overall streaming hours for members with a new algorithm that's just a little bit better at making recommendations, which means it's so powerful as far as delighting members that they are more likely to stay with the service versus not," Ciancutti says.

Political Potential

For Netflix, it's about keeping customers. But algorithms tailored to figure out individual tastes and interests are also being applied to the political arena. When Mitt Romney is on local TV in Ohio, it's no surprise that he'd talk about local interests, like manufacturing jobs. But it would be even better if he could target his message directly to people who lost those jobs.

In this coming election, that's exactly what Democrats and Republicans will be able to do.

"There's been this explosion of data available over the last decade, frankly, at the individual level from voter files, from consumer sources, from other sources," says Tom Bonier, co-founder of Clarity Campaign Labs, a company that uses algorithms to help Democrats target voters. "You can send one piece of mail about choice to one household, and to their neighbors you can send a piece of mail about the environment."

In other words, there are more computers hoarding more data about us than ever before.

Algorithm As Crystal Ball

Sean Gourley is co-founder and CTO of Quid, a company that gets hired by governments and business to create algorithms. He says, "From an algorithms perspective, this is a great time to be alive. Algorithms are just frolicking in the mountains of data that they can play with."

Gourley uses algorithms to predict insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan and help banks map developing markets for new technologies. As an experiment for NPR, he maps the development of the Occupy Wall Street movement. He uses algorithms to sort through about 40,000 blogs and articles written since the movement began and group similar ideas together.

"You can't read all this as a human or even necessarily get what's going on, so you start to apply algorithms to help kind of cluster, sort, put topics around them and ultimately visualize [it]," he says. What Gourley's algorithm helps visualize is how ideas from the initial Occupy Wall Street rallies in New York spread to other groups and other parts of the country.

Gurley points to a computer screen. It's filled with dots that are grouped into color clusters and connected by thin lines. One cluster represents politicians talking about taxing the wealthy. It's far from the cluster that represents protesters.

"When the politicians talk about Occupy Wall Street, they're not really talking in Occupy Wall Street," Gourley says. "They're not talking within the cluster — they're talking separately. And so when they talk about taxes and they talk about inequality it's not really resonating [in the Occupy Wall Street cluster], or at least the language is quite different."

Gourley clicks on another smallish cluster that represents "Bank Transfer Day," an activist initiative that calls for people to move their accounts out of larger banks and into credit unions — you can see that people aren't saying much about it anymore. A more recent cluster represents the issue of the courts using Twitter feeds as evidence in cases against protesters, and yet another tracks the conversation around Occupy Oakland, which is dominated by talk of police violence.

Proceed With Caution

Gourley imagines that information like this might be useful to politicians, police and political activists.

"We can start to think about where it's come from," he says. "We can start to think about how it's evolved and we can start to think about where we want it to go and if we want to change the direction."

But Gourley has concerns about other possible uses of algorithms. Netflix is just trying to keep its customers watching movies, which isn't so bad, but he wonders what would happen if Google Maps knew that you were looking for a new car. Maybe when you looked up directions to a party, it would suggest a route that passes right past a dealership.

"[Has] it got your interest at heart or has it got making money from ads at heart?" Gourley says.

What worries him most is that we humans haven't yet evolved to be as wary of algorithms as we are of used car salesmen.

I'm standing in the Manhattan office of Andrew Farnsworth, a research associate at Cornell University's ornithology lab. Farnsworth is using meteorological data, radar data, crowd-sourced eBird data and acoustic data from the flight calls of migrating birds to predict where birds are going and when they'll be there.

It's all part of BirdCast, a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Eventually, it will be a website and an app, but you can see the posts now on Cornell's eBird site. I tell Farnsworth that I'm going bird watching in Central Park in a few days – what can I expect? He tells me southerly winds will be favorable to migrating birds that day, and there will be no rain.

A Pastoral Pastime Gets Plugged In

Two days later, I am in Central Park with Starr Saphir, who's been an avid birder for more than six decades. She arrived early that morning because, she says, "We knew that this would be an absolutely great day."

But here's the difference technology makes: Twenty years ago, if you saw a good bird, you might tell other people in the park or call someone to tell them about it later that night. Now, with cell phones, text messages and email, you can hear about a bird sighting across the park and be there to see it for yourself in just a few minutes.

Saphir's phone rings. There's a male Cape May warbler just up ahead. Soon our group is walking quickly in the direction of the warbler. Earlier, we were led to a Prothonotary warbler, where we ran into 30 birders — news of the sighting had spread fast.

The Shazam Of Bird Watching

An easy way to find birds is to know their calls. There have long been recordings of bird songs, but what's different now, Farnsworth says, is that apps allow you to carry thousands of those bird songs in your pocket.

"You can bring it into the field and compare it to what you're actually hearing and seeing," he says.

The National Audubon Society app, for example, has seven different calls for a scarlet tanager. In the future, you'll also be able to do the reverse — hear a bird song and identify it with an app, just like people identify music with apps like Shazam.

That's exactly what Mark Berres, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is trying to do with WeBird. But Berres says identifying bird calls is much harder than identifying popular songs.

"When I turned it onto bird songs, it just failed miserably," he says. But, after a year of work, Berres expects the app to be ready next spring.

But Does It Make Bird Watching More Accessible?

You can find bar charts on Cornell's eBird website that tell you when a species migrates to your area and when it will arrive. The technology has "lowered the barriers to entry and made it easier for people to quickly get the information that they [want] when they see a bird," says Chris Wood, who runs the eBird project at Cornell's ornithology lab.

He says when he started bird watching in Colorado, he was sure that he had a tricolored blackbird in his backyard because it looked a lot like the bird in the book. It took him three years to realize that there are no records of tricolored blackbirds appearing outside the West Coast. Today, that might only take an hour.

Meanwhile, Farnsworth dreams of the day when the Weather Channel provides a daily bird report. He hopes computer models for forecasting bird migration will one day be so sophisticated that conservationists will be able to tell a city to turn its lights off when a wave of birds is coming through. (City lights can disorient migrating birds.)

Saphir doesn't own a computer, but she says the downside to all this technology is that it puts an inexpensive hobby out of reach for many. "You have to have thousands of dollars worth of equipment," she says, such as cameras, computers and smartphones.

Saphir makes do with very good binoculars and, yes, a cell phone. It rings again — there's been another sighting. "OK, I'll be right there," Shapir says, and off we go.

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are teaming up in a $60 million venture to provide classes online for free. The move is the latest by top universities to expand their intellectual reach through the Internet — a trend that is changing higher education.

Last month, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan announced that they were working with Coursera, a Silicon Valley startup, to put more than a dozen classes online this year in subjects ranging from computer science to public health to poetry.

Earlier this year, Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun, one of the inventors of Google's self-driving car, announced he was leaving the school to start a company called Udacity, which would hire world-class professors from leading universities to create free online classes.

Coursera and Udacity, which are set up as for-profits, said they are committed to keeping their classes free and have each raised millions from venture capitalists.

NPR's Steve Henn tells All Things Considered host Robert Siegel that the companies grew out of an experiment at Stanford last year that allowed anyone to take computer science classes online — and get graded — for free. The classes attracted hundreds of thousands of students from all over the world.

Wednesday's announcement was a bit different. Harvard and MIT are creating a nonprofit called edX; the universities are investing $30 million each — significantly more than what has been raised by their West Coast for-profit competitors.

Henn says Harvard and MIT also pledged to release their software for free when it's fully developed, as an open-source product for anyone to use.

"They're inviting other universities to use the platform and put their own classes online for free," he says.

For now, students can get a grade, but the schools won't count the class toward a degree if a student wants to matriculate.

"None of these universities are offering a degree program unless you pay," Henn says.

He says interest in online courses has exploded because it's become much cheaper and easier to put a class online. "That has combined with using technologies in new ways to make these online classes better."

Interactive quizzes and other tools have made it possible to deliver a class that really has value to hundreds of thousands of students, Henn says.

"In the early days of online education," he says, "basically you had a camera in the back of a lecture hall videotaping a lecture. This is really quite different."

The classes present an opportunity to students who wouldn't otherwise be able to take classes — for health, money or geography reasons.

"Perhaps some day there may be people who never leave their basement," Henn says. "I think at this point, there are many thousands more people around the world [for whom this provides] a window that opens and allows them to see a bigger, broader piece of the world than they could before."

For decades, Olympics fans have loathed two words: "tape" and "delay." But this summer, things will be different: For the first time, NBC will stream live video of the London Games, online and via mobile.

If you think that decision is overdue, you're not alone. Sports Business Daily media reporter John Ourand says he is shocked it has taken this long for the network to put live video of all Olympic events online.

"I'm surprised it didn't happen four years ago, or even eight years ago," Ourand tells Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep.

"People are watching video online," he says. "And people also are rejecting tape-delayed broadcasts — which is what NBC had done" in previous years.

For the 2012 London Games, NBC plans to stream video of all 302 Olympic events, allowing online viewers to choose what they want to watch. Fans will have options for watching broad highlights, or following one discipline's events.

The network will also release apps to allow live video and other features on tablets and smartphones. It's a far cry from the years the network spent cloistering the most popular events into a prime-time package that aired hours later.

But that doesn't mean NBC will be giving open access to just anyone who wants to watch the Olympics online. To get full access, you must be a cable or satellite subscriber. And you'll need a user ID and password from your TV provider to log in, according to a guide posted last week on NBC's video site.

That could be bad news for anyone who's gone "off the grid" by rejecting cable and satellite subscriber plans, who may be forced to find other options to watch favorite events live. And the network still plans to save most of its interviews and features for prime time.

Ourand says that for NBC, the lure of advertising revenue is only one reason to try to control access to its online Olympic content. He points to the network's widely available cable channels — USA, CNBC and MSNBC.

"One of the reasons that they're widely distributed is because they carry that Olympic programming," he says. "And cable operators didn't want to do without that programming."

As Ourand tells Inskeep, "TV is still driving the bus here. There's a cliche in the media business: 'Digital dimes for TV dollars.' And that's still in effect here."

Even so, Ourand says that NBC's online coverage, which will be hosted at the network's newly relaunched Olympics site, signals a new approach at the network — and in the sports media.

"What ESPN and other networks have found is that, when you broadcast things live online, it doesn't erode the broadcast at all," he says. "In fact, it draws a lot of people to want to see it on their hi-def TVs in their living rooms."

Ourand says that NBC received a vivid demonstration of how hard it is to keep sports fans from watching an event live online during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when sprinter Usain Bolt turned in an electrifying world-record performance in the 100-meter dash.

"People watched it online, via foreign websites, via pirated websites — and NBC didn't get any of that," says Ourand, who recalls watching the race on the BBC's website.

Despite that burst of online interest during the event, the network's programming didn't suffer. Ourand says that "the rating for Usain Bolt for NBC on prime time was still very good" — something he attributes to buzz about Bolt's record, as well as fans' desire to watch the race on large high-definition televisions, even if they'd seen it earlier on a computer.

The Bolt race seems to have been a big moment for NBC, which had previously been unwilling to put many high-profile events online as they happened.

"They were so worried," Ourand says. "They wanted to protect their TV rights, and they wanted to protect advertisers who were advertising on TV, and they didn't want to dilute the viewers."

Another thing that'll be different about this year's Olympics is the timing of the men's 100-meter sprint final. If Bolt repeats his gold-medal performance of four years ago, he would do so on Aug. 5, a Sunday. That means that here in the U.S., the race would start around 4:50 p.m. EDT.

Computers have been grading multiple-choice tests in schools for years. To the relief of English teachers everywhere, essays have been tougher to gauge. But look out, teachers: A new study finds that software designed to automatically read and grade essays can do as good a job as humans — maybe even better.

The study, conducted at the University of Akron, ran more than 16,000 essays from both middle school and high school tests through automated systems developed by nine companies. The essays, from six different states, had originally been graded by humans.

In a piece in The New York Times, education columnist Michael Winerip described the outcome:

Computer scoring produced "virtually identical levels of accuracy, with the software in some cases proving to be more reliable," according to a University of Akron news release.

"In terms of consistency, the automated readers might have done a little better even," Winerip tells All Things Considered host Melissa Block.

 

The automated systems look for a number of things in order to grade, or rate, an essay, Winerip says. Among them are sentence structure, syntax, word usage and subject-verb agreements.

"[It's] a lot of the same things a human editor or reader would look for," he says.

What the automated readers aren't good at, he says, is comprehension and whether a sentence is factually true or not. They also have a hard time with other forms of writing, like poetry. One example is the software e-rater, by Educational Testing Service.

Les Perelman, a director of writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was allowed to test e-rater. He told Winerip that the system has biases that can be easily gamed.

E-Rater prefers long essays. A 716-word essay [Perelman] wrote that was padded with more than a dozen nonsensical sentences received a top score of 6; a well-argued, well-written essay of 567 words was scored a 5.

"You could say the War of 1812 started in 1925," Winerip says. "There are all kinds of things you could say that have little or nothing to do in reality that could receive a high score."

Efficiency is where the automated readers excel, Winerip says. The e-rater engine can grade 16,000 essays in about 20 seconds, according to ETS. An average teacher might spend an entire weekend grading 150 essays, he says, and that efficiency is what drives more education companies to create automated systems.

"Virtually every education company has a model, and there's lots of money to be made on this stuff," he says.

A greater focus on standardized testing and homogenized education only serves to increase the development of automated readers to keep up with demand, Winerip says.

Winerip says that what worries him is that if automated readers become the standard way of grading essays, then teachers will begin teaching to them, removing a lot of the "juice" of the English language.

"If you're not allowed to use a sentence fragment ... [or] a short paragraph ... then you're going to get a very homogenized form of writing," he says. "The joy of writing is surprise."

Social networking sites have been at the vanguard of the Arab uprisings over the past year. Egyptians used online pages to organize protests, and Syrian activists have posted frequent YouTube videos showing government forces shelling civilian areas.

The same growing Arab online awareness that made the Internet part of the pro-democracy movements has also created a mini-revolution for Arab technological business.

Due to regulation, limited infrastructure and governments wary of the Internet, the Middle East has not been the easiest place to launch a tech startup.

Omar Christidis founded ArabNet in 2010 to address what he said was a lack of communication among Arab tech entrepreneurs.

"People were not talking to each other, from Egypt from Saudi from Syria, and there were no real online places where you could find out what was going on," he said.

Summit In Lebanon

ArabNet has been hosting a "digital summit" to showcase new ideas and create a networking space for techies. This year, it was held at the Habtoor Hotel just outside Beirut, Lebanon.

Young men and women wearing the unofficial tech entrepreneur uniform – button-down shirt, no tie, jeans, and a blazer – gathered around Christidis and chatted eagerly with investors from Gulf states wearing white robes and head scarves.

There is an enormous opportunity for growth in homegrown digital startups in the Arab world, Christidis explained.

"When we started the conference in 2010 there were about 35 million users [in Arab countries], today there are over 70 million users of the Internet."

Abraham Kamarck, an American working for a tech firm based in Qatar, said ArabNet is "the hot place right now" to meet other techies and investors in the Middle East.

Kamarck is optimistic about the future of the Middle East tech industry. Since tech investors look at the long picture, he said, even a country like Egypt – whose economy has cratered since last year's revolution – is still fertile ground for venture capital firms.

"If you look at the demographics of the youth, if you look at the Internet penetration and the mobile penetration, it's a very attractive market in that sense from a growth standpoint," Kamarck said.

An Incubator Finds Strong Demand

Hany al-Sonbaty, co-founder of a Cairo venture capital firm called Sawari Ventures, agrees.

His firm set up a tech business incubator called Flat6Labs with the hope of making it easier for young entrepreneurs to start tech businesses in Egypt.

Flat6 received 60 applications for just seven spots. The accepted firms got around $12,000 and 12 weeks to hire a staff, start a company, and secure investors.

When Egypt's former president, Hosni Mubarak, stepped down in February 2011 in the face of an uprising, the company held a meeting to discuss the upheaval, but saw no reason to change its plans.

Now in its second cycle, Flat6 is humming with the clicks of keyboards and excited conversation. Carved out of an ornate old apartment building beside the Nile River, the incubator is intended to be like a second home for the entrepreneurs, who may find that long days at the keyboard turn into a night of sleeping on one of the bright red and white couches.

A Range Of Ideas

The company ideas are diverse.

One in the current Flat6 class is Nefham. Founders Hashem Aly and Mostafa Farahat hope to set up an online video learning database for Egyptian students.

Another, GyroLabs, sees a future for interactive television in the Middle East. Ahmad Fathalla's company is trying to develop apps for smart televisions.

AskNative, founded by Abdelmoniem Ragab and Seif Sallam, is developing a mobile phone application that uses Twitter, online translation, and crowd sourcing to connect tourists with locals to answer questions while traveling.

Sonbaty says, "there's a big difference between somebody who's clever at doing a product and somebody who's running a company. This is where they learn it."

Egyptians are uncertain about what their country's future holds. But Sonbaty sees one way the revolution changed this class of entrepreneurial techies.

"It emboldened them," he said. "Some of them said, 'You know what? Let's just do this.'"

Internet surfers have long worried that they have insufficient control over their online privacy — despite the privacy policies many people agree to when they visit websites or use online services.

There are data to support the surfers' feelings: Online privacy policies are so cumbersome and onerous that it would take the average person about 250 working hours every year — about 30 full working days — to actually read the privacy policies of the websites they visit in a year, according to an analysis by researchers Aleecia M. McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor.

The Federal Trade Commission has recently announced it is exploring whether to give consumers greater control over their online privacy. Online privacy is currently not regulated in the United States. Authorities have encouraged companies to disclose information to users, based on the idea that users will then read the policies and make enlightened decisions about which companies to trust with their information.

But the proliferation of long, onerous and often difficult-to-follow privacy policies has led to a situation where most people consent to privacy policies without reading or understanding them, Cranor says.

"If people were to actually stop and read all of them for every website that they visited, they could spend on the order of 200 to 250 hours a year — about a month of time at work each year that you could spend reading privacy policies," she says. "It's insane."

 

Privacy policies are so onerous that Cranor's graduate students moan in protest when she asks them to read three policies for class.

Cranor said most Americans do not understand the full extent to which their personal information is being captured and mined.

"When you go into a shopping mall, there's nobody following you around," she says. "Imagine that as you go around your shopping mall, you have someone who is not only looking and commenting — but actually recording everything that you look at, every time you hesitate, every time you remark about something. And then, after you leave the shopping mall, and you go to your dentist's office, you go to the doctor's, you go to pick your kids up from school, they continue to follow you around, and everything is being recorded. I think that is what you have on the Internet."

If people actually were to read the policies placed before them, Cranor says, the total cost — in time alone — would be around $781 billion a year.