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.

“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?

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.

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.

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.

Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?


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

name removed wrote:

Hi All,

Found this today and it seems to be pretty accurate. MSN does some sort of polling and checks gas prices every night. You just enter your Zip code and scroll down and find the stations near you. It actually has a wide radius.

Anyway, it’s fun to play with and you can check out which way to head when looking for your next load approval when you fill up!!!

Best to ALL….     

http://autos.msn.com/everyday/gasstations.aspx?zip=&src=Netx

Hmmm. The difference between the most expensive place on the local list and the least expensive place is 20 cents…

But those are the two extremes. If I look at the possibility of all of the gas stations that are on the list that I’ve ever gone to, and are likely to be the ones that I continue to go to, the difference between most expensive and least expensive is about 8 cents a gallon.

So for my 15 gallon tank, on a fill from empty, I’m looking at paying around $55.80 or $57.00.  That’s a $1.20 difference.  If I’m filling only a half a tank, then that’s a $0.60 difference.  Put a different way, we’re talking about a 2% savings.

Is it even worth the extra effort to consult the map, figure out who’s the cheapest and then make the effort to choose a station that isn’t on your normal path just to save that little?

While the technology is interesting, and the idea that you can pull up the data and give it a quick review, the amount of time you waste in doing so is more than what you’ll probably save.

My suggestion for saving real money on gasoline:  Drive less!!  ;-)

All of the penny pinchers that I know never hesitate to put 20 miles on a car to pick up a gallon of milk!

UPDATE: Within 10 minutes of me writing this, a buddy calls me up and says, “Holy Cow! I can’t believe how much gas is! I just put $62 in my car to fill it up!”

Look… if you need to drive, do you have a choice? You have to buy gas. When it’s basically the same price everywhere, you are going to have to pay the price. Complainin’ ain’t going to do you any good and you just wasted 5 minutes of my time that I could have been off doing something to make some more money so that I can afford gas too!

;-)

That’s why I like the story of Tanya Andersen and how she’s successfully fought back the RIAA and now she’s going after them for their questionable — possibly illegal — legal tactics.

A handful of people who study these types of things were asked if these sites
were as bad as they are made out to be. Their opinions varied
on what the pros and the cons were, but none of what they had to say was
scary in the least, and some were critical of the negative media coverage.

Social networking is about building social capital, and these tools facilitate
that. These virtual worlds aren’t a good place to live your whole life in, but
they are making it easier for kids to make connections with people outside of
their local social circles. In doing so, they learn new things, get exposed
to new ideas, and can blaze new trails. The vast majority of kids are wise enough
to know to stay out of trouble and when trouble finds them, they know how to deal
with it.

If parents help to guide their children in their use of these tools, they
can minimize the chances that the kids will engage in risky behavior, or put too
much personal information online, and then the kids can safely benefit from
the positive aspects of social networking.

Read the article, and then let us know if you agree or disagree?

Parents, school administrators, and teachers can’t seem to effuse enough about the wonders of computers in education. They insist we need to have wired schools; otherwise, a lack of adequate computing resources is going to cripple our kids’ success when they enter the real world.

Computers are beneficial. Their ability to simulate, automate, and communicate is amazing. The Internet can easily retrieve text, sound, video and more, from anywhere in the world in mere milliseconds. Over one-hundred million websites exist, ready to render up information and Google is ready to connect you with it, assuming that you can put the right keywords into the search box and click the mouse.

Some view education as the transfer and buildup of knowledge, so connecting kids with computers seems like the right thing to do, since computers are very adept at storing, retrieving, transferring, and presenting information.

Unfortunately, people start confusing the way computers work with how kids’ brains work. They assume that googling something and getting back information educational. Steve Talbott refers to this as the fact-shoveling model of education. Worse, some people think it’s less important to know things because you can always look it up on demand, later when you need it.

In Steve’s most recent newsletter, he points out that real education involves much more than acquiring facts. Minds also need training to be “capable of attending in a sustained, focused, ever more deeply penetrating way to whatever aspect of the world and its problems we are addressing…” The way that the mind’s cognitive processes and creative, imaginative abilities work is entirely unrelated to the way computers process and deliver information.

He’s concerned, not that we don’t have enough computers in education, but perhaps education has already become too computerized. He’s concerned that in the past couple of decades that education has gotten away from teach kids how to connect the dots, and creative and imaginative problem solving. Education is evolving into fact shoveling, in part due to the influences of the information revolution and people’s blind enthusiasm for technology.

Do you see efforts in your schools to wire them and put technology into the kids’ hands without a real understanding or plan as to how this is actually going to benefit the kids? Do they just see technology as a silver bullet and just assume that it will make the kids smarter because it can just download more facts into their brains?

My feeble little mind understands enough to create worry about some silly things. Take black holes for existence. My working layman’s definition of a black hole is some entity that is so incredibly dense, that its gravity is so strong that he can pull matter into itself, and it’s so strong that even light can’t escape it.

My physics major friends are all laughing at me now.

But when I read stories about the Large Hadron Collider and how it might be used to create microscopic black holes, I then envision the LHC getting immediately sucked into the black hole, followed by the rest of the lab at CERN, followed by Switzerland, and then Europe. Then I figure I’ll hear that sound you get when you snap your cheek with your finger as the whole planet collapses into the black hole.

If you are willing to trust the scientists, this isn’t likely to happen.

Phewww!

The NEA study is ignoring online reading, according to Steven Johnson in his article Dawn of the Digital Natives. He contends, “if you actually read the report, what you find are some startling omissions - omissions that ultimately lead to a heavily distorted view of the Google generation and its prospects.” He points out that “The NEA makes a convincing case that both kids and adults are reading fewer books. “Non-required” reading — ie, picking up a book for the fun of it — is down 7% since 1992 for all adults, and 12% for 18-24 year olds.”

But the NEA report also shows that younger children are making progress in their reading abilities. Teenager’s reading scores have only dropped by about 1% in 15 years. Is that Alarming? It doesn’t seem to be.

Kids as well as adults increasingly read more online, and in Johnson’s estimation, they are “exercising the same cognitive muscles” whether the words are represented in ink or pixels.

The NEA hit back, saying that Steven Johnson misrepresented the report. Sunil Iyengar is the director of the Office of Research & Analysis at the NEA, and he says that they did not exclude online reading from their analysis. He says their data comes from studies “…asking people how frequently they read anything whatsoever for pleasure — a category so broad as to include text of any length in any format through any medium, from books to cereal boxes to, yes, computer screens.”

Then Iyengar parades additional statistics which seem to support the NEA’s claims.

But as you read both of these articles, the notion that Johnson and Iyengar are both cherry picking statistics to support their arguments emerges.

Iyengar ends with some honesty that suggests we need to put this debate on hold for a while because we really don’t have all the answers: “Now is the time for educators and intellectuals to produce sound empirical studies of the risks and benefits of electronic media.”

Perhaps it’s not the medium as much as the quality of the content that makes the true difference in kid’s becoming smart.

Until a clear answer emerges, a policy of moderation in using online media is probably the safest path, and encouraging reading is never a bad thing.

Hat tip to Kevin Arthur for linking to the articles mentioned above. Here are additional book related links from his great blog, Question Technology:

• Books and Emotional Attachments
• Does Kids’ Reading Need to be More Interactive?
• eBooks Better than Traditional Books?

IAD has actually been proposed for inclusion as a psychiatric diagnosis in the next issue of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V).Writing in the new issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. Jerald J. Block, M.D., said that excessive internet and computer usage should be labeled a mental disease, as it has all of the components of a compulsive-impulsive disorder:

1) excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives,

2) withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible,

3) tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use, and

4) negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue

“excessive internet and computer usage should be labeled a mental disease”. Makes sense to me; excessive anything is a problem though, isn’t it?

Everything in moderation.

Despite my infrequent posting here, I do enjoy blogging and want to be doing more of it. I have been sidetracked by a crazy work schedule as well as having to deal with some unpleasant life stuff. The good news is that the unpleasant life stuff is coming to an end, and the crazy work schedule will probably continue for a while, but I’m trying to make a little more room in my life for doing things that I enjoy doing. Blogging here is one of them.

So for those of you still reading my feed or visiting, I want to hear from you, and I’m interested in your thoughts on what you’d like to see here. I plan to continue in the spirit of interesting pros and cons of technology and how it affects families and kids. I will continue to try to avoid hype and I don’t want to be an endless stream of fear-mongering about online predators and the evils of [insert name of popular social networking site here].

When I got out of bed and went to the kitchen, I asked, “What were you showing your brother this morning? Something about birds?”

She said, “Oh ya! I was getting ready for school, and I could hear all these birds singing outside! I can’t remember the last time I heard them. I got excited.”

I laughed at the weirdness of it all — but is it that weird, really? We forget how much nature offers us when we rush around all of the time. We’re so busy with work, school, being connected to gadgets, and stuck indoors during the cold season. When winter wraps up and warmer days bring singing birds back, it really does make us feel better. We welcome back a missing piece of our wellness.

I was happy that she kicked off her morning with the happiness of the chirpy birds, but if nature is so important to the well-being of my kids, I worry a bit. They get a lot less of nature’s positive influences than my generation did as kids. I would easily spend eight to ten hours outdoors with other kids on a weekend day in the summer. The kids I see today probably spend a quarter of that time outdoors on a good day! Computers, video games, cell phones and television contribute to keeping kids indoors.

This is why a coalition of groups, led by the Rio Grande chapter of the Sierra Club, wants lawmakers in New Mexico to implement a one-percent tax on video games, game consoles, and TVs. This would create a fund to help pay for outdoor education.

“We believe that an outdoor education program in New Mexico could be funded through a tax on the very activities that are divorcing kids from nature, promoting more sedentary lifestyles,” said Michael Casaus, Sierra Club’s New Mexico youth representative. “One of those culprits is TV and what we call screen time.” (CNN)

Those are sentiments that most concerned parents share, but is more government intervention, laws, and bureaucracy really the answer? Do we really need to outsource parental responsibilities to the government?

Parents already have a lot on their plates and are stressed, but consider Richard Louv’s point from his book, “Last Child in the Woods“: Nature can be an antidote to the problems parents are experiencing. “Stress reduction, greater physical health, a deeper sense of spirit, more creativity, a sense of play, even a safer life - these are the rewards that await a family when it invites more nature into children’s lives,” he says.

It’s our job as parents to get kids off the computers and video games and get them outdoors. It is also important to be involved with them in nature and encourage it by being good role models. We should also enjoy what nature has to offer to us for our own well-being.