The trial of the Algerian-born man accused of stabbing three children outside a Dublin crèche has begun. The mother of a five year old victim has described her injuries:
Many children like ebooks. Experts cast a wary eye.
They say certain features helpful for developing comprehension skills but can also distract — particular problem in era when kids read less
Liz Mineo
Harvard Staff Writer
June 9, 2026 5 min read
The verdict is mixed on digital books, sometimes called ebooks, when it comes to fostering children’s reading development.
“Ebooks are a lot busier than print books,” said Assistant Professor of Education Ying Xu, who studies the effects of technologies, including AI, on children’s language and literacy development. “If a child is holding a print book, the only thing that they could do is read the text and understand the story … Ebooks open up a lot of opportunities, and they’re also a form of distraction.”
Xu made her observation during the June 3 webinar “Raising a Reader in the Digital Age,” hosted by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Xu and Assistant Professor of Education Phil Capin discussed the opportunities and risks educational technologies pose to children’s reading development, particularly at a time when children are reading less.
“If a child is holding a print book, the only thing that they could do is read the text and understand the story … Ebooks open up a lot of opportunities, and they’re also a form of distraction.”Ying Xu
Ebooks, which are growing in popularity among young readers, offer features such as visual highlighting of words, audio, animation, customizable text options, and others. And they are more and less helpful depending on how they are used.
“In my research, what I have found is that when the audio narration feature is available, most of the kids will turn on the narration and listen to the book,” said Xu. “Other kids find that clicking the interactive features is fun, but it is questionable how much those kinds of interactions really lead to comprehension and development of reading ability.”
And yet, electronic books should not be rejected completely, Xu said.
Digital books offer read-aloud features and larger fonts that can support students who need extra help. Technology can also provide a more personalized and individualized experience for readers, who can complete quizzes and receive immediate feedback.
The impact of technology on children’s reading is a mixed bag, said Xu.
Ebooks have proven effective in supporting parent-child interactions during reading time when they include questions about the stories that parents can pose to their children. Rich conversations between parent and child while they read together tend to occur more with print books, but some ebooks can create a similar environment, said Xu.
Some digital platforms that are designed to support skills such as comprehension, critical thinking, and the ability to interpret and analyze text have proven beneficial for some students. But Xu warned against overestimating the benefits of educational technologies: They are not a singular solution but work best in conjunction with in-person tutoring, teacher involvement, and parental participation.
“Technology is not the only component in an intervention,” said Xu. “They are coupled with in-person tutoring, reading clubs, etc. It’s difficult to distinguish or single out where the positive impact we’re seeing is coming from.”
Data show children are reading less than they did decades ago. Educational experts report a worrisome drop in leisure reading as children spend more time on screens than on books. Social media platforms, which entice users with shorter text and entertainment features, have been blamed for the reading decline.
“The consensus is that kids read less right now as compared to decades ago,” said Xu. “There is no consensus about what drives that decline, but most people think that technology had some role in it.”
The decline in reading time is not only occurring among children, but also among adults, said Xu. “Across all groups, we’re seeing a decline in leisure reading or reading for fun,” she said. “It’s not just children, but also their parents.”
Asked by Capin how AI might support children’s early language and literacy, Xu expressed cautious optimism. AI-enhanced technologies can engage children in conversations with questions related to texts and provide tailored and immediate feedback, which can enhance reading comprehension, an area in which American students are falling behind, according to the 2024 Nation’s Report Card. “There are potential benefits for students and educators if the AI technology is well designed,” said Xu.
An area of concern for Xu is students’ overreliance on AI to generate summaries of reading assignments. This practice may help students save time, but outsourcing their critical thinking can affect their learning and reading comprehension abilities.
But limiting AI usage is hard to do, said Xu, and while educators can urge a more responsible use of AI, they may have to go back to basics and find ways to boost motivation and engagement among students.
“The fundamental thing is finding something kids are genuinely interested in doing,” said Xu, “and also how we could make the education and the learning process fun and motivating and especially more relatable to kids’ everyday life.”
A special series from The State of Us podcast. Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has pleaded not guilty to all 18 charges he faces, including one count of rape. His wife, Lady Eleanor Donaldson, faces a trial of the facts on related charges of aiding and abetting, which she has denied. The court hears Eleanor Donaldson ‘s police interview from when she was arrested in 2024. She told police she was on ‘red alert’ for years regarding her husband.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/AxiosAnthropic is releasing a general-use Mythos-class AI model with better capabilities than anything it’s published before, Axios’ Madison Mills and Sam Sabin report.
The company once deemed this new class of model so disruptive that existing safeguards were insufficient, and it restricted access to just a handful of trusted organizations.
Now it’s releasing a public version less than three months later.
The new Fable 5model is better at knowledge work, software engineering, scientific research and more — outscoring competing models from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, Anthropic says. It includes safeguards to prevent coders from using it to hack infrastructure or ask about sensitive biological capabilities.
Dianne Penn, Anthropic’s head of product management, research and labs, says the company ran Fable 5 through internal and external testing to ensure safety.
Penn added that Anthropic is being “deliberately more conservative” at launch.
Some legitimate scientific or security work could be routed to the company’s older, less-capable models — at least for now.
Fable 5 costs twice as much as Anthropic’s Opus models.
That makes it the company’s most expensive offering yet, at a time when some users and companies are facing ballooning AI budgets.
Anthropic argues that the more powerful model translates to a lower cost per task. Go deeper … Get Axios AI+.
World Premiere at Slamdance 2025. Friday, February 21 at 7:15PM in the LA Times Theater at Quixote Studios. Additional screening Saturday, February 22 at 5:30PM at Summer & David at Quixote Studios.
“Disposable Humanity follows Cameron Mitchell’s family, who are Disability Studies scholars and filmmakers that have researched the Nazi Aktion T4 program since the 1990s. Through conversations with memorial directors, disabled people, and relatives of T4 victims, they uncover the horrifying truth: that the Nazi Aktion T4 program, was in fact the program where the Nazis trained killing staff and designed the apparatus of mass murder that led to the Holocaust. Disabled people were the first victims to be killed under the Third Reich and in this investigative documentary, the Mitchells reveal how this history has been covered over and erased from international public memory,” says the synopsis.
============
‘Disposable Humanity’ – New Film Unmasks Horror Of Nazi Euthanasia
Former Contributor. Gus Alexiou is a London-based reporter covering disability inclusion.
Feb 18, 2025, 10:50am EST
Disposable Humanity which has its world premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival this week recounts one of the darkest, most disturbing and yet underreported genocides witnessed in human history.
From 1939 onwards under the auspices of the Aktion T4 program, the Nazis systematically murdered 250,000 disabled people with psychiatric and physical disorders residing in institutions. The so-called “euthanasia program” also targeted many young children who would today be referred to as having learning disabilities or special educational needs. The program was named Aktion T4 after the address of its Berlin headquarters located at 4 Tiergartenstrasse.
At the time, these were dubbed “mercy killings” but the reality was anything but merciful with lethal injections eventually being supplanted by gas chambers and some left to starve to death. The war waged by the Third Reich on disability had its ideological roots in the 1920s writings of German professors Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche who attributed the terms “life unworthy of life” and “human ballast” to people with disabilities.
Disposable Humanity is a directorial debut for Cameron Mitchell whose credits sinc
New study finds that a person’s walking data can help predict their movement priorities
The “ViPer” or visual perturbation headset, developed by Kempner Institute associate faculty member Patrick Slade and his team, was used in a study examining how gait data can be used to predict movement priorities. By precisely manipulating each participant’s visual input during walking tasks, the headset allowed researchers to induce a controlled sense of imbalance. Image credit: Jordan Feldman
At a Glance
Researchers led by Kempner Institute associate faculty member Patrick Slade developed a way to estimate a person’s movement priorities based on gait data, or measurements of a person’s walk.
Using gait data collected from controlled walking tasks, the researchers trained a classical statistical model to predict a person’s relative prioritization of four movement goals — speed, stability, foot placement, and energy use — with high accuracy.
The experimental methods used in the study included a hardware innovation called a “ViPer” (visual perturbation) headset, a device that safely alters a wearer’s visual field, enabling the researchers to cause controlled imbalances during walking. They could then analyze the impact of these perturbations on movement.
Devices that assist movement, including robotic exoskeletons — wearable frames that support and enhance motion — are becoming more common. To work well, these systems must respond to a user’s movement priorities, or the relative importance a person places on competing walking goals — such as speed, stability, foot placement, and energy use — at a given moment in time. If a device can’t detect whether someone is prioritizing speed versus maintaining balance from moment to moment, it might provide the wrong kind of support.
A new Harvard study shows that measurements of a person’s gait can be used to predict their movement priorities. Led by Kempner Institute associate faculty member Patrick Slade, an assistant professor of bioengineering at SEAS, the research team found that simple measures of a person’s gait can shed light on how they rank four key, competing movement priorities: speed, stability, foot placement, and energy use.
The study, published in the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, establishes an approach for estimating movement priorities in young, healthy adults using simple gait metrics and provides a framework that could inform the development of future assistive technologies.
“With exoskeletons and similar devices, we typically pick a performance objective such as reducing energy use or increasing people’s walking speed,” explains Jordan N. Feldman, a PhD student in bioengineering at SEAS and first author of the study. “But we don’t actually know what the person cares most about at a given point in time, and we want to be able to assist them with what they do care most about. So, if we had a quantitative way to predict what they care about, we could assist them in that objective specifically.”
Deciphering human intentions from movement data
What a person cares about during movement is a combination of conscious goals and unconscious decisions made automatically in response to changing conditions. Slade and his team used a unique study design to gather movement data, and then built a statistical model that could predict both deliberate choices and automatic ones. In tests, the model’s error rate was as low as 11 percent.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/_S07KmOIPWQ?feature=oembedThis short clip shows how the study was carried out, including what participants saw through the ViPer headset and a volunteer completing the three practice tasks at the start of the session. The participant segment is for illustration only and does not display every sensor used in the experiment. Video credit: Jordan Feldman.
“When we’re moving, we’re either planning and carefully deciding things — like step placement — or our bodies implicitly make decisions,” said Slade.
To measure different “dimensions” of movement — distinct measurements picked up by wearable sensors — the researchers asked 12 participants to complete walking tasks modeled on everyday situations such as rushing for a bus or walking under conditions that challenged their balance. To create these varied conditions, the researchers developed a device called the visual perturbation, or “ViPer,” headset. It subtly shifts a person’s visual field as they walk, creating a controlled sense of imbalance in a safe, natural setting, as opposed to within a virtual environment, where such studies are typically conducted.
Each task emphasized one of four priorities: speed, stability, foot placement, or energy use.Because participants could not prioritize all four at once, they had to make trade-offs. The researchers carefully controlled the demands of each task, including aspects of the participants’ perception using the ViPer. This control enabled them to better analyze how participants adjusted their movement priorities in response to task demands.
As participants performed each task, the researchers recorded a range of gait measurements using wearable sensors. These sensors captured many dimensions of muscle activity and breathing. Together, these dimensions created a detailed, high-dimensional picture of each person’s movement patterns.
The team then used this detailed dataset to train a simple statistical model to predict participants’ priorities in each task. The model successfully used gait data to estimate how each person ranked the four movement goals.
Toward more responsive assistive technologies
According to Slade and Feldman, the study’s findings suggest that in the future, assistive systems could adapt in real time by deciphering a user’s priorities from wearable sensor data. An exoskeleton, for example, might provide more support for balance when a user focuses on stability, or boost speed when they try to move faster.
“You’re helping them walk faster, or in an older adult case, maintain balance when they clearly seem unstable,” explains Slade.
In addition to suggesting a way to enhance assistive systems, the study’s approach could help with movement therapy and rehabilitation. According to Slade, clinicians could use the approach to assess how patients approach movement — whether they emphasize safety, speed, or energy efficiency — and adjust their therapeutic methods accordingly.
Next, the researchers plan to incorporate additional data, including brain signals they have already begun recording, to build a more detailed system for prediction of movement goals.
“We’re going to take all of these signals that we collected and try to build a more comprehensive model,” said Slade, who says that incorporating these additional sources of data could potentially enable more accurate predictions of movement priorities.
Beyond enhancing predictive power, Slade sees an opportunity for a more comprehensive model to shed light on how humans decide among competing movement priorities: a key aspect of human intelligence. “We could potentially use this sort of idea for a human level model to understand the neuroscience behind decision-making for human movement.”
TRUMP THREATENS IRAN: They will have to pay the price
“Iran’s Military is a complete and total mess. Much of it, like their Navy and Air Force, doesn’t even exist anymore – They have been completely defeated. Iran is all talk and no action.
The Bully of the Middle East is DEAD!!! They’ve taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!”
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/AxiosAnthropic is releasing a general-use Mythos-class AI model with better capabilities than anything it’s published before, Axios’ Madison Mills and Sam Sabin report.
The new Fable 5 model is better at knowledge work, software engineering, scientific research and more — outscoring competing models from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, Anthropic says. It includes safeguards to prevent coders from using it to hack infrastructure or ask about sensitive biological capabilities.
Dianne Penn, Anthropic’s head of product management, research and labs, says the company ran Fable 5 through internal and external testing to ensure safety.
Fable 5 costs twice as much as Anthropic’s Opus models.
canisgallicus 