Funny video: Watch Frank tell it like it is.

Posted: September 29th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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…or technology makes our lives better… worse… better… worse…

The recent post on television made a point that people will disagree until the cows come home about if television is good or bad. Or if it makes us smarter or dumber. But it’s not about the technology. It’s about how the technology is used. Television can bring educational material to you that you just can’t get in your local schools. That’s fantastic. But you can also get 24/7, inane Disney channel programming that can sap the life out of your family and reduce the kids to zombies who come back alive and freak out when you yank the plug. That’s horrible.

People continue to argue for one side or the other of that debate as if devices can change you, and as if there is one right answer.

Perhaps it’s not the devices (TV, computers, video games, cell phones) that actually change people. Maybe those devices merely accentuate or exacerbate a person’s preexisting tendencies to be distracted, waste time, and avoid doing other important and more productive things. If the person’s tendencies are towards being responsible and being focused on the right things, then they will make good use of the device.

A laptop, in the hands of an intelligent, motivated, focused person will allow the person to do wonders as they work towards goals. The same laptop in the hands of an unmotivated slacker that suffers from ADD will probably only get used playing online games, watching YouTube videos, and IMing their friends all day long.

In the end, they’re just tools to be used, and then can be used positively or negatively. Does it make sense to blame the tool for the outcome?

Posted: September 23rd, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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Godfrey Reggio’s, Evidence.

The blank, comatose look. I’ve seen it myself. You can easily witness it too. Just watch your kids watching TV. Give them a few minutes to settle into it. It’s like watching a person go under hypnosis. I know that feeling too. I used to watch more TV myself years ago, even as an adult.

The debate always seems to be raging if television is good or bad for you and your family. What is it that people are looking for as proof? Dead brain cells? Some measure in the drop in intelligence that can be correlated with television watching? Given the number of variables that influences a persons cognitive ability, I don’t know that we could ever isolate television as an influence.

I certainly don’t want to subject my kids to being part of that study at any rate.

Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics co-author) blogged yesterday about What TV Does to You, with an image of a kid silhouetted against a glowing TV.

I am inclined to agree with him that educational TV has benefits. I like the technology. But the average American isn’t watching over 4.5 hours of educational TV daily. Most of them are watching crap. And most kids who spend hours in front of the TV are watching Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, and Cartoon Network.

The highlight of Dubner’s post is this excerpt which he took from a friends book:

That last year in New Haven, I could go out to friends’ houses more or less when I wanted to and watch television as often as I liked, only to find that now I agreed with my mother about TV. I had begun not to like what happened to me when I watched.

Given the chance, I stared like a guppy, immobilized for hours in somebody’s den on an increasingly itchy wall-to-wall carpet, intent on things I didn’t even enjoy, passive and yet also anxious, too aware of how soon the hour would be up when the little world in front of me would evaporate and I’d have nothing left but an uneasy regret and another new show beginning that I couldn’t get up and walk away from.

It was so easy not to resist because television was doing all the work for me, making all the decisions. That was especially true, I noticed, when I watched baseball. The field became reduced to the fragment that fit on the screen, minimizing the game into a fraction of itself, implying that everything happening off-camera was irrelevant. The players were minimized as well, because they did not exist unless the ball came their way. Then the lens swooped into their faces and there was too much of them — which weirdly created distance.

This nails it. I’ve had the same feelings. After turning off the TV after being sucked into a few hours of aimless channel surfing, I would think to myself, “Wow. I just wasted a few hours.” Things seemed interesting at first, and I would land on a channel, watch for a bit, move on to another channel. Maybe I did get sucked into something for a full hour. But when it was over, I thought, “That was lame.” I would recognize that I felt a bit drained. I bit disappointed that I wasted that time. I finally realized this and just about gave up TV. I still maintain a Netflix account and will watch the occasional movie. I still watch educational shows with my kids. But I still have to limit and sometimes pry my son off of Nickelodeon, Disney and Cartoon Network.

I still tell him that it’s going to shrink his brain. I don’t care what the researchers say on this one. I know it in my gut. I know what TV can do to a person in the short term if they watch low quality programming, so-called entertainment, or sit in front of it for too long even watching the better programming.

Instead of debating good or bad, maybe all we really need to do is ask ourselves, “Is there something my kid can be doing for these one or two hours that would be much better for them than watching TV?”

Posted: September 20th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

The Wii has been great from my own perspective. All of the games I’ve played with my kids (or at least watched them play) have all been in the realm of fantasy, action, sports… or just clean fun.

Innocence will be lost soon, as Sega is planning to release an “ultra-violent” game for the Wii.

From Sega’s website, you get a sense that a total immersion in violence is the primary goal.

In this age of 1080p resolution, the best [way to] stress the idea of “blood” was to immerse users in a game wrapped in black and white.

MadWorld revolves around the themes of brutality and exhilaration. To give MadWorld the graphical edge to match its brutal theme, we tried removing all color from the world except for blood. As a result, we decided the best way to convey blood, and thus brutality, was against this black and white backdrop. Knowing that there are no other action games with this sort of avant-garde graphical style, our course was set.

Often times, brutality is expressed in a spiteful nature. There are already plenty of games out there that hit this mark; however, we decided that MADWORLD’s brutality should be aimed at providing the user with a sense of exhilaration during play.

To give you an example from gameplay, we have a scene where you can pull a street sign from the ground and shove it into a enemy’s head.

I really don’t know if and/or how this is affecting people, especially the younger generations. Still waiting for that definitive study on how violent games affect brains, but in the meantime, I plan to continue to keep things “safe” and stick with the non-violent games.

Posted: August 19th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 2

My friend Gary writes me just now:

Right near the ‘ice house’ on Route 1 there is a bridge over the Hammonasset River.  Tonight around dusk I’m driving towards the bridge and see three boys sitting on the railing in bathing suits.  I figure they’ve been jumping into the river.  As I drive by I realize that they’ve got they drawers dropped and are mooning the traffic.  It’s nice to see kids away from the video games and having fun in the real world.

It is refreshing to see kids doing the normal kid stuff that we grew up doing, and it’s apparently unusual enough to warrant special notice and comment from Gary.

Posted: July 15th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

Where are the Children?:

“Of all the things that make me feel as though my time was in the past and I don’t understand this world today, first on my list is the absence of children playing outdoors in suburban neighborhoods.

“Here in Madison, I go for walks past 20 or 30 blocks of houses — good-sized houses with lovely yards and neat sidewalks. Big shade trees line streets that are too narrow to attract any through traffic. And I don’t see any children playing. I see an occasional toy vehicle like the one in the photograph, but not one child. No one rides by on a bike or a tricycle or scooter. Swing sets are empty. No one is playing hopscotch or jumping rope. There are no ball games or frisbees. No kids are running around and yelling. Nothing! Where are they?”

Yes, probably indoors, watching the Disney channel, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, or playing video games, or IMing their friends for hours on end.

When I was a kid, Mom and Dad said, “Get out of the house!!!”. They didn’t want to see us during the day and if they did, they were trying to get us out of their sight. We’d disappear in the woods and be gone for hours doing all sorts of things that we were likely to get hurt doing.

Today’s parent is more likely to say, “Wait, I’ll go outside with you in a minute… I don’t want you out of my sight.”

Do you think parental fear is out of control? How do you think this is affecting kids today?

Posted: July 1st, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

Has your Roomba been looking at you funny, or making threatening movements towards you?

HUAR – Humans United Against Robots – was designed to educate and aware the citizenry of the world of the impending attack that computers and robots will put into effect against humans. HUAR is the collection of human beings that spread the word of this opposing doom as well as doing what they can to help minimize the threat.

Posted: June 27th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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“Something profound seems to be happening to the human brain,” says Susan Greenfield, Oxford professor and head of the Royal Institution of Great Britian, “and what really worries me is that we could be sleepwalking into a new world of technology without even considering what it is doing to our brains.”

Hours spent in front of computer screens and TV everyday increase dopamine production in our brains, she contends, and other scientists suggest that these higher dopamine levels can result in changes in how the brain works.

Are the changes good or bad? Perhaps a little of both. On the negative side, shorter attention spans and being more risk-averse are some of the changes that she’s noted. This might be playing into afflictions that are on the rise in young people, such as obesity, gambling, drinking and violence.

She adds, speaking of the generations attached to screens, “They will be people who are more hedonistic and tend to live for the moment, a life that is more sensory and less cognitive.”

On the positive side, some people can actually benefit from being less cautious or more risk-averse, she admits. She’s not against the use of technology. She strongly advocates research and large-scale studies to determine how technology affects our brains. So far, all we seem to have is mostly anecdotal evidence; we need some science to back up our observations.

Parents do not want to wait five to ten years for science to provide an unequivocal answer. There seems to be plenty of anecdotal evidence to convince any parent that too much screen time isn’t good for kids.

“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” That’s how Nicholas Carr describes how heavy use of the Net has changed his reading ability. “The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” he says. He also has anecdotes from his friends — including a medical blogger, and a literature major — who say that they’ve experienced the same changes in reading habits.

“I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)”

Even though we are on the Internet, we’re still reading. It’s just a web browser instead of a book, and some studies suggest that kids are reading more because of the Internet. While that may be true, online reading is less focused, people read short snippets before they click on a link and are zipped off to read another snippet, and there are a lot of distractions online.

Reading differently results in us thinking differently. We’re not reading as deeply. We aren’t as engaged and we’re easily distracted. This new reading style favors efficiency and immediacy rather than depth, reflection, and contemplation.

So what’s the takeaway from all of this? Like wine and chocolate, the Internet is good for you, but only if you use it moderately.

References:

• Is Google Making Us Stupid?, by Nicholas Carr for The Atlantic.
• Society hard-wired for a fall, by Pete Wilson for The Australian.

Hat Tip to Kevin Arthur who brought one of the articles to my attention.

Posted: June 27th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

A 12-year-old girl spends too much time online, posts inappropriate pictures of herself, gets grounded, and then takes her dad to court… and wins!!

The father’s attorney says what every parent ought to know as common sense:

“She’s a child,” Beaudoin told AFP. “At her age, children test their limits and it’s up to their parent to set boundaries. I started an appeal of the decision today to reestablish parental authority, and to ensure that this case doesn’t set a precedent.”

But Justice Suzanne Tessier might be off her rocker:

According to court documents, the girl’s Internet usage was the latest in a rash of disciplinary problems. But Justice Suzanne Tessier, who was presiding over the case, found the punishment too severe.

That’s right… Grounding your child for a rash of disciplinary problems, including excessive computer use and posting inappropriate pictures online is considered too severe.

Posted: June 20th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 3

This cracked me up, and some of the “reviews” have some additional humor in them as well.

Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?


Apparently a marketing stunt by Microsoft to promote their Home Server product.

Posted: May 13th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 2