It’s ‘Digital Heroin’: How Screens Turn Kids Into Psychotic Junkies
December 20th, 2016My sons, aged 9 and 6, get 30 minutes of video (that I’ve approved) per day and then 1.5 hours of gaming on Saturdays and Sundays, assuming all homeschool lessons are completed.
As little screen time as this is, I’ve found that they have become obsessed with the stuff they encounter in the small windows of time they’re allowed screen access. We’re hearing about diamond swords and Endermen outside of screen time, for example.
Becky was against giving them any screen time at all, but I was worried that they would eventually grow up, encounter screens and become consumed with the whole mess. I met a guy who wasn’t allowed to watch any TV as a child who became really addicted to it as an adult. Also, they know about video games in the first place because they’ve seen my Crysis, Bioshock, Starcraft, etc. boxes on my bookshelf! If you’re a gamer and you don’t want your kids to be gamers: Definitely throw out the boxes and don’t let them know that you do it!
Misha Pemble-Belkin, from Restrepo, is probably the main reason I chose to dose my boys with small amounts of screen time. Raised by “hippy” pacifists, Belkin wasn’t allowed to play with toy guns or watch violent movies as a kid. He grew up, joined the U.S. Army and was happy to be killing people with a MK-19 automatic grenade launcher in Afghanistan. For parents who implement a lot of bans, I think there’s a lesson to be learned from Belkin.
I decided to try giving my boys modest amounts of screen time (as indicated above), but I wonder if it was the right thing to do. My wife still thinks that zero screen time is the way to go. It might be that there’s no good answer and that some options are just less bad than others. I do get a feeling, however, that outright banning would backfire badly.
Via: New York Post:
There’s a reason that the most tech-cautious parents are tech designers and engineers. Steve Jobs was a notoriously low-tech parent. Silicon Valley tech executives and engineers enroll their kids in no-tech Waldorf Schools. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page went to no-tech Montessori Schools, as did Amazon creator Jeff Bezos and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
Many parents intuitively understand that ubiquitous glowing screens are having a negative effect on kids. We see the aggressive temper tantrums when the devices are taken away and the wandering attention spans when children are not perpetually stimulated by their hyper-arousing devices. Worse, we see children who become bored, apathetic, uninteresting and uninterested when not plugged in.
But it’s even worse than we think.
Related:
Video games are more addictive than ever. This is what happens when kids can’t turn them off.
Donald Trump Wins Electoral College Vote
December 19th, 2016Via: MarketWatch:
Donald Trump was easily affirmed the winner of the 2016 election after the Electoral College met in state capitals across the country Monday, ending last-ditch attempts by activists in both parties to deny him the presidency.
A vote of Texas’ 38 electors in Austin gave Trump the necessary Electoral College votes to become president in January, ensuring his victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton. Despite intense pressure on electors across the country to reject Trump, he easily won more than the 270 electoral votes needed to become president.
Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov Shot in Ankara
December 19th, 2016Via: CBS:
A gunman attacked Andrei Karlov, Russia’s ambassador to Turkey, in the capital of Ankara on Monday.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement he was hospitalized with a gunshot wound. She added that the ministry would soon comment on “the attack on the Russian ambassador in Turkey”
Private NTV news channel reports Turkish police fatally shot the gunman.
The ambassador was several minutes into a speech at an embassy-sponsored photo exhibition in the capital, Ankara, when a man wearing a suit and tie shouted “Allahu Akbar” and fired at least eight shots, according to an AP photographer in the audience. The attacker also said some words in Russian and smashed several of the photos hung for the exhibition.
Hurriyet newspaper reporter Hasim Kilic, who was at the exhibit, said the gunman also shouted “For Aleppo!” when he launched his assault.
Officials have not provided details of the attack yet.
Babies Made from Three People Approved in UK
December 16th, 2016Via: BBC:
Babies made from two women and one man have been approved by the UK’s fertility regulator.
The historic and controversial move is to prevent children being born with deadly genetic diseases.
Doctors in Newcastle – who developed the advanced form of IVF – are expected to be the first to offer the procedure and have already appealed for donor eggs.
The first such child could be born, at the earliest, by the end of 2017.
Some families have lost multiple children to incurable mitochondrial diseases, which can leave people with insufficient energy to keep their heart beating.
The diseases are passed down from only the mother so a technique using a donor egg as well as the mother’s egg and father’s sperm has been developed.
The resulting child has a tiny amount of their DNA from the donor, but the procedure is legal and reviews say it is ethical and scientifically ready.
Research Credit: Jb
World Energy Hits a Turning Point: Solar That’s Cheaper Than Wind
December 16th, 2016Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
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Via: Bloomberg:
Emerging markets are leapfrogging the developed world thanks to cheap panels.
A transformation is happening in global energy markets that’s worth noting as 2016 comes to an end: Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity.
This has happened in isolated projects in the past: an especially competitive auction in the Middle East, for example, resulting in record-cheap solar costs. But now unsubsidized solar is beginning to outcompete coal and natural gas on a larger scale, and notably, new solar projects in emerging markets are costing less to build than wind projects, according to fresh data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
The chart below shows the average cost of new wind and solar from 58 emerging-market economies, including China, India, and Brazil. While solar was bound to fall below wind eventually, given its steeper price declines, few predicted it would happen this soon.
“Putin Personally Involved in U.S. Election Hack”
December 15th, 2016Oh sure.
A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by ‘disgusted’ whisteblowers – and not hacked by Russia.
Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.
‘Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,’ said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. ‘The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.’
His account contradicts directly the version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election being advanced by U.S. intelligence.
Was Seth Rich involved?
Via: NBC:
U.S. intelligence officials now believe with “a high level of confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.
Putin’s objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a “vendetta” against Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to “split off key American allies by creating the image that [other countries] couldn’t depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore,” the official said.
Execs Representing Companies Worth $3 Trillion Met with Trump
December 15th, 2016Via: CNBC:
Whoa, that’s a lot of dough walking around in Trump Tower.
President-elect Donald Trump’s mega technology summit in New York on Wednesday hosted leaders of companies that have a combined market value of more than $3 trillion.
That’s more than the GDP of many countries, including, the United Kingdom, France and India, according to data from the World Bank Group. Trump’s tech guests would rank as the fifth-largest country in the world based on GDP.
Apple, of course, came at the top of the list with a market value of $616 billion. Alphabet and Microsoft followed with values of $555 billion and $489 billion, respectively.
Here’s the full list:
Apple — $616 billion
Alphabet — $555 billion
Microsoft — $489 billion
Amazon — $366 billion
Facebook — $347 billion
Intel — $173 billion
Oracle — $167 billion
IBM — $160 billion
Cisco — $154 billion
Tesla — $32 billion
SpaceX — $15 billion
Total — $3.074 trillion
No Internet Access
December 14th, 2016My ISP has had an outage requiring a helicopter to get guys to a remote site. Not ETA for a fix.
I might take the night off.
Amazon Drone Makes First Delivery to Customer
December 14th, 2016Via: Engadget:
It’s already been three years since Amazon first revealed its somewhat audacious plan to make deliveries by drone. But the company is quite serious about this, and today it is announcing that it complete the first Amazon Prime Air drone-powered delivery. The company recently launched a trial in Cambridge, England — and on December 7th, Amazon completed its first drone-powered delivery. It took 13 minutes from order to delivery, with the drone departing a custom-built fulfillment center nearby.
150 Filmmakers Ask Nikon and Canon to Sell Encrypted Cameras
December 14th, 2016Yeah, well, then you’d have the old rubber hose cryptanalysis issue to contend with.
Via: Wired:
Nearly all smartphones today encrypt their storage by default, and encrypted storage software for PCs is free and reliable. But cameras, even the ones in the hands of photojournalists and documentary filmmakers capturing sensitive images and video, still don’t offer encrypted storage of video and images as a feature.
Now Poitras and 150 other documentary filmmakers have signed an open letter from the non-profit Freedom of the Press Foundation to camera-makers Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, Fuji, Kodak and Ricoh. The foundation, which has both Poitras and Snowden on its board of directors, is asking those companies to add the encryption features missing from virtually every standalone camera on the market, so that no thief, cop, or border agent can access their footage simply by grabbing the device out of their hands.
