Background TV Found To Have Negative Effect On Parent-child Interactions

A new study looks for the first time at the effect of background TV on interactions between parents and young children. Using an experimental design, researchers found that when a TV was on, both the quantity and quality of interactions between parents and children dropped. This study challenges the common assumption that background TV doesn’t affect very young children if they don’t look at the screen.

More than a third of American infants and toddlers live in homes where the television is on most or all the time, even if no one’s watching. A new study looks for the first time at the effect of background TV on interactions between parents and young children—and finds that the effect is negative.

The study, in the September/October 2009 issue of the journal Child Development, was done by researchers at the University of Massachusetts.

The researchers studied about 50 1-, 2-, and 3-year-olds, each of whom was with one parent, at a university child study center. Half of the one-hour session, parents and children were in a playroom without TV; in the other half-hour, parents chose an adult-directed program to watch (such as Jeopardy!). The researchers observed how often parents and children talked with each other, how actively involved the parents were in their children’s play, and whether parents and children responded to each other’s questions and suggestions.

When the TV was on, the researchers found, both the quantity and the quality of interactions between parents and children dropped. Specifically, parents spent about 20 percent less time talking to their children and the quality of the interactions declined, with parents less active, attentive, and responsive to their youngsters.

“Although previous research found that background television disrupts young children’s solitary play, this is the first study to demonstrate its impact on the quantity and quality of parent-child interactions,” according to the researchers. “Given that high-quality parent-child interaction plays an important role in children’s development, the study challenges the common assumption that background TV doesn’t affect very young children if they don’t look at the screen,” the researchers added. “We need to pay greater

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090915100951.htm

Symantec tool calculates your data’s value to thieves

It’s no secret that criminals are stealing credit card and bank account data and selling it underground. But most people would find it shocking to learn just how little their sensitive personal information costs.

Symantec on Thursday is launching its Norton Online Risk Calculator, a tool that people can use to see how much their online information is worth on the black market. The tool also offers a risk rating based on demographics, online activity, and estimated value of online information.

I tried the tool when I was initially briefed on it a few months ago and was surveyed about my gender and age range; online assets (including credit card and bank account data, brokerage accounts, e-mail accounts, and social network accounts) and an estimated value of all that information; whether I use security software; how cautious I am when online; and how much I think my information is worth.

I use security software (and do my financial transactions mostly on a Mac at home), am fairly cautious while Web surfing, and didn’t put a high dollar figure on the value of my digital information. My security risk turned out to be 37 percent, or medium, and the black market worth of my online assets was calculated to be $11.29. Those figures didn’t change when I modified the gender, age, and estimated value of the data.

A recent Microsoft Research report concludes that stolen data offered for sale in underground IRC channels is difficult to monetize because of all the–get this–con artists there.

Regardless of whether the underground revenue figures are overblown, the data is being harvested, sometimes in huge batches, during data breaches at large payment processors, and there is a market for it.

It’s discomfiting to think a criminal could pay as little as $11 to get access to my sensitive personal data for identity fraud purposes, while I could end up spending lots of energy and time–years even–reporting the crime, trying to fix my credit rating, and getting my life back to normal.

Symantec isn’t trying to scare consumers with the Norton Online Risk Calculator, but to raise awareness of the risks, said Marian Merritt, Internet safety advocate at Symantec.

“We still find consumers who think using just antivirus is sufficient,” she said.

Merritt recommends that people use security suites that offer antivirus, firewall, and intrusion detection and prevention software, as well as keep their operating system and browsers updated.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10258549-245.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

Statistics on Paying Taxes from the NTU

Who Pays Income Taxes? See Who Pays What 

For Tax Year 2007

Percentiles Ranked by AGI	AGI Threshold on Percentiles	Percentage of Federal Personal Income Tax Paid
Top 1%	$410,096	40.42
Top 5%	$160,041	60.63
Top 10%	$113,018	71.22
Top 25%	$66,532	86.59
Top 50%	$32,879	97.11
Bottom 50%	<$32,879	2.89
Note: AGI is Adjusted Gross Income Source: Internal Revenue Service

http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=6

Since it was founded over 35 years ago, the National Taxpayers Union’s Number One job has been helping to protect every single American’s right to keep what they’ve earned. Our guiding principle has always been: “This is your money and the government should return it to you.” We are a nonprofit, non-partisan citizen group whose members work every day for lower taxes and smaller government at all levels.

That’s why it is so vitally important for us to continue our pursuit of institutional change in government. Paramount among these reforms is scrapping the U.S. Tax Code for a better alternative. And it’s time once again to consider adding a Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to keep Congress from spending beyond our means. Also, a Tax Limitation Amendment would prevent our elected representatives from raising our taxes so that they can raise their spending.

Let’s face it–our U.S. Tax Code is a complicated mess, far too complex for average taxpayers to understand. We need sweeping tax reform designed to make this system both fair and comprehensible for the folks who actually pay those taxes. And real reform would also mean an end to the dreaded Internal Revenue Service.

By reforming taxes, we can transform American politics as well. There are hundreds of lobbyists and special interests running around Washington seeking tax breaks and exemptions. Tax reform would end the game of picking winners and losers under the tax laws and break the cycle of dependence between lobbyists and politicians.

We here at NTU promise to fight for these and other important pro-taxpayer causes, so as to ensure that all Americans are able to pursue their dreams without the hand of Big Government holding them back.

http://www.ntu.org/main/misc.php?MiscID=1

Open Source Textbook Company Now BMOC at 400 Colleges

What did you do this summer? Flat World Knowledge stayed busy on campus and now has 40 times as many students and more than 10 times the colleges using their freemium, open-source digital textbooks as they did spring semester. And they did it the old-fashioned way — one professor at a time.

After a sort of beta earlier this year, Flat World is set to announce Thursday that more than 40,000 college students at 400 colleges will use their digital, DRM-free textbooks fall semester, up from 1,000 in 30 colleges in the spring.

Digital textbooks remain a nascent business and a tough market to enter. At an average cost of $100, textbooks command the highest cover prices in publishing, outside of only some art and coffee-table books. Demand is artificially inelastic as students are indentured to cost servitude at the whim of college professors who blithely assign titles a student must own if she hopes to do well in a given course. Now, multiply that by four, five or even six courses a semester and you are talking big bucks.

By comparison, Flat World has a pricing scheme that starts at zero for online access using a browser, and $20 for a PDF, which they believe will be the most popular format. Printed versions of their textbooks cost up to $60.

Perhaps best of all: Textbooks are available a la carte, chapter by chapter.

But the key buy-in has been from teachers who make the assignments and who, in my college days, could not care less how much the textbooks cost. What’s changed?

“There has been a mind shift,” co-founder Eric Frank told Wired.com.  A tipping point came a couple of years ago when faculty began to consider the financial burden on students because many of them (Frank estimates a third) didn’t bother to get the texbook at all.

Perhaps more to the point, open-source textbooks — which are Creative Commons-licensed to allow unencumbered non-commercial use — make it possible to graft supporting material to the curriculum, rather than the other way around.

“Faculty are notorious for wanting to do things their way,” said Frank. “But they always had to cut the foot to fit the shoe. Now, with open source, they can cut the shoe to fit the foot.”

There is virtually no friction involved. A professor can register on Flat World’s site and let students know that the book is available there. No cooperation from a school district or college administration is required.

“Every single class is a fiefdom, and they are kings and queens of their domain,” Frank jokes.

Like any freemium retailer, Flat World depends on enough people buying something, because clearly the business cannot be sustained if everyone just opts for free web access. “What we’re counting on is that people will be willing to pay for different packaging.” (Frank proudly notes his company is on page 160 (.pdf) of Wired magazine editor in chief Chris Anderson’s Free.)

And it will come down to the price points, Frank acknowledges, even when the company develops formats for the Sony e-book reader and Amazon Kindle, as they hope to this year. It makes as much sense to equip students with a device that makes all their reference materials available on demand as to offer a casual reader a complete portable library  — perhaps more. This is a classic chicken-and-egg scenario in which a device-dependent culture needs to evolve alongside new content formats.

For this and a variety of other reasons, including the cost of e-readers and for the media they serve up, Frank thinks the PDF will remain the format of choice for students for some time to come (and the ubiquitous and DRM-free Portable Document Format is readable on the Sony and Amazon devices, anyway).

“They’ll move forward,” Frank says of device-specific e-reader formats. “But there is so much irrational pricing right now that they’ll move forward much more slowly than they probably should.”

For now, expect a PDF revolution. And what better back-to-school present can you think of for 40,000 hard-up college students in the midst of a recession?

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/open-source-textbook-company-now-bmoc-at-400-colleges/

How to make strong, easy-to-remember passwords

One of the best ways to protect your online security is to have strong passwords that you change periodically. But that’s easier said than done. Coming up with hard-to-guess passwords is hard enough, but it’s even harder to have separate passwords for different sites and to remember new ones after you change them.

One way to create a password that’s hard to guess but easy to remember is to make up a phrase. You could type in the entire phrase (some sites let you use spaces, others don’t) or you can use the initials of each word in the phrase, for instance, “IgfLESi85″ for “I graduated from Lincoln Elementary School in ‘85.” An even better one would be “MbfihswE&S” for “My best friends in high school were Eric and Steve.” You get the idea–upper case numbers, letters, and symbols that are seemingly meaningless to everyone but you. Microsoft has an excellent primer on passwords and a password strength checker.

But even if you do come up with a clever and hard-to-remember password, don’t use it for every site. Since lots of people do that, there’s the risk that a sleazy site operator–or a sleazy person who works for a legitimate site–could use it to break into your accounts on other sites.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19518_3-10310092-238.html?tag=mncol;title

How Children View And Treat Their Peers With Undesirable Characteristics

A study by Kansas State University researchers is looking at how children perceive and interact with peers who have various undesirable characteristics, such as being overweight or aggressive.

The researchers’ study explored children’s perceptions of the ability of the peer to control or change such traits.

The K-State research team included Mark Barnett, professor of psychology; Rachel Witham, graduate student in counseling and student development, Hutchinson; and Jennifer Livengood, Wamego, Natalie (Brown) Barlett, Ames, Iowa, and Tammy Sonnentag, Edgar, Wis., all graduate students in psychology. Their research was presented in May at the Association for Psychological Science annual convention in San Francisco, Calif.

“This study provides some evidence that if a child feels that an undesirable characteristic is under some sort of personal control, they are less likely to respond favorably to someone who displays that characteristic,” Livengood said. “The study implies that if a child doesn’t have experience with that particular undesirable characteristic, they are less likely to respond favorably to someone with that specific quality.”

The researchers found that children who perceive themselves or a friend as similar to a peer with an undesirable characteristic might experience heightened empathy for that peer, and then might respond in a positive manner toward the peer. The findings also showed that boys, more than girls, tended to have negative attitudes toward peers with undesirable characteristics.

The study included third-graders and sixth-graders who completed questionnaires that had descriptions of hypothetical peers. The peers included a poor student, nonathletic student, obese student, aggressive student, shy student, asthmatic student and a student with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090730111202.htm

Why We Learn More From Our Successes Than Our Failures

Given different images as cues, monkeys were trained to look right or left for rewards. MIT neuroscientists found that neurons responded differently following correct and incorrect responses, with correct responses setting up the brain for additional successes. (Credit: Courtesy / Earl Miller)

If you’ve ever felt doomed to repeat your mistakes, researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory may have explained why: Brain cells may only learn from experience when we do something right and not when we fail.

In the July 30 issue of the journal Neuron, Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience, and MIT colleagues Mark Histed and Anitha Pasupathy have created for the first time a unique snapshot of the learning process that shows how single cells change their responses in real time as a result of information about what is the right action and what is the wrong one.

“We have shown that brain cells keep track of whether recent behaviors were successful or not,” Miller said. Furthermore, when a behavior was successful, cells became more finely tuned to what the animal was learning. After a failure, there was little or no change in the brain — nor was there any improvement in behavior.

The study sheds light on the neural mechanisms linking environmental feedback to neural plasticity — the brain’s ability to change in response to experience. It has implications for understanding how we learn, and understanding and treating learning disorders.

Rewarding success

Monkeys were given the task of looking at two alternating images on a computer screen. For one picture, the animal was rewarded when it shifted its gaze to the right; for another picture it was supposed to look left. The monkeys used trial and error to figure out which images cued which movements.

The researchers found that whether the animals’ answers were right or wrong, signals within certain parts of their brains “resonated” with the repercussions of their answers for several seconds. The neural activity following a correct answer and a reward helped the monkeys do better on the trial that popped up a few seconds later.

“If the monkey just got a correct answer, a signal lingered in its brain that said, ‘You did the right thing.’ Right after a correct answer, neurons processed information more sharply and effectively, and the monkey was more likely to get the next answer correct as well,” Miller said, “But after an error there was no improvement. In other words, only after successes, not failures, did brain processing and the monkeys’ behavior improve.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090729121557.htm

Learning Is Both Social And Computational, Supported By Neural Systems Linking People

Using magnetoencephalography, a non-invasive technique, neuroscientists have studied baby brain activity and have found a link between the listening and speaking areas of the brain in newborns, 6-month and one-year old infants. (Credit: UW Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences)

Education is on the cusp of a transformation because of recent scientific findings in neuroscience, psychology, and machine learning that are converging to create foundations for a new science of learning.

Writing in the July 17 edition of the journal Science, researchers report that this shift is being driven by three principles that are emerging from cross-disciplinary work: learning is computational, learning is social, and learning is supported by brain circuits linking perception and action that connect people to one another. This new science of learning, the researchers believe, may shed light into the origins of human intelligence.

“We are not left alone to understand the world like Robinson Crusoe was on his island,” said Andrew Meltzoff, lead author of the paper and co-director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. “These principles support learning across the life span and are particularly important in explaining children’s rapid learning in two unique domains of human intelligence, language and social understanding.

“Social interaction is more important than we previously thought and underpins early learning. Research has shown that humans learn best from other humans, and a large part of this is timing, sensitive timing between a parent or a tutor and the child,” said Meltzoff, who is a developmental psychologist.

“We are trying to understand how the child’s brain works – how computational abilities are changed in the presence of another person, and trying to use these three principles as leverage for learning and improving education,” added co-author Patricia Kuhl, a neuroscientist and co-director of the UW’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.

 

….”A person can get more information by looking at another person face to face,” she said. “We are digging to understand the social element and what does it mean about us and our evolution.”

Apparently babies need other people to learn. They take in more information by looking at another person face to face than by looking at that person on a big plasma TV screen,” she said. “We are now trying to understand why the brain works this way, and what it means about us and our evolution.”

Meltzoff said an important component of human intelligence is that humans are built so they don’t have to figure out everything by themselves.

“A major role we play as parents is teaching children where the important things are for them to learn,” he said. “One way we do this is through joint visual attention or eye-gaze. This is a social mechanism and children can find what’s important – we call them informational ‘hot spots’ – by following the gaze of another person. By being connected to others we also learn by example and imitation.”….

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090716141134.htm

The calorie delusion: Why food labels are wrong

STANDING in line at the coffee shop you feel a little peckish. So what will you choose to keep you going until lunchtime? Will it be that scrumptious-looking chocolate brownie or perhaps a small, nut-based muesli bar. You check the labels: the brownie contains around 250 kilocalories (kcal), while the muesli bar contains more than 300. Surprised at the higher calorie count of what looks like the healthy option, you go for the brownie.

This is the kind of decision that people watching their weight – or even just keeping a casual eye on it – make every day. As long as we keep our calorie intake at around the recommended daily values of 2000 for women and 2500 for men, and get a good mix of nutrients, surely we can eat whatever we like?

This is broadly true; after all, maintaining a healthy weight is largely a matter of balancing calories in and calories out. Yet according to a small band of researchers, using the information on food labels to estimate calorie intake could be a very bad idea. They argue that calorie estimates on food labels are based on flawed and outdated science, and provide misleading information on how much energy your body will actually get from a food. Some food labels may over or underestimate this figure by as much as 25 per cent, enough to foil any diet, and over time even lead to obesity. As the western world’s waistlines expand at an alarming rate, they argue, it is time consumers were told the true value of their food.

Calorie counts on food labels around the world are based on a system developed in the late 19th century by American chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater. Atwater calculated the energy content of various foods by burning small samples in controlled conditions and measuring the amount of energy released in the form of heat. To estimate the proportion of this raw energy that was used by the body, Atwater calculated the amount of energy lost as undigested food in faeces, and as chemical energy in the form of urea, ammonia and organic acids found in urine, and then he subtracted these figures from the total. Using this method, Atwater estimated that carbohydrates and protein provide an average of 4 kcal per gram, while fat provides 9 kcal per gram. With a few modifications, these measurements of what is known as metabolisable energy have been the currency of food ever since.

We know these values are approximate. Nutritionists are well aware that our bodies don’t incinerate food, they digest it. And digestion – from chewing food to moving it through the gut and chemically breaking it down along the way – takes a different amount of energy for different foods. According to Geoffrey Livesey, an independent nutritionist based in Norfolk, UK, this can lower the number of calories your body extracts from a meal by anywhere between 5 and 25 per cent depending on the food eaten. “These energy costs are quite significant,” he says, yet are not reflected on any food label.

Dietary fibre is one example. As well as being more resistant to mechanical and chemical digestion than other forms of carbohydrate, dietary fibre provides energy for gut microbes, and they take their cut before we get our share. Livesey has calculated that all these factors reduce the energy derived from dietary fibre by 25 per cent – down from the current estimate of 2 kcal per gram to 1.5 kcal per gram (The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol 51, p 617).

Similarly, the number of calories attributed to protein should be reduced from 4 kcal per gram to 3.2 kcal per gram, a 20 per cent decrease, Livesey says. That’s because it takes energy to convert ammonia to urea when protein is broken down into its constituent amino acids (British Journal of Nutrition, vol 85, p 271).

Put into the context of real life, these relatively small errors may make a measurable difference. In the case of the brownie versus the muesli bar, the label will overestimate the calories derived from the fibre and protein-packed muesli bar, perhaps by enough to make it lower in calories than the brownie. Just 20 kcal per day more than you need can add up to roughly a kilogram of fat over a year.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327171.200-the-calorie-delusion-why-food-labels-are-wrong.html

Winning the ultimate battle: How humans could end war

OPTIMISTS called the first world war “the war to end all wars”. Philosopher George Santayana demurred. In its aftermath he declared: “Only the dead have seen the end of war”. History has proved him right, of course. What’s more, today virtually nobody believes that humankind will ever transcend the violence and bloodshed of warfare. I know this because for years I have conducted numerous surveys asking people if they think war is inevitable. Whether male or female, liberal or conservative, old or young, most people believe it is. For example, when I asked students at my university “Will humans ever stop fighting wars?” more than 90 per cent answered “No”. Many justified their assertion by adding that war is “part of human nature” or “in our genes”. But is it really?

Such views certainly seem to chime with recent research on the roots of warfare. Just a few decades ago, many scholars believed that prior to civilisation, humans were “noble savages” living in harmony with each other and with nature. Not any more. Ethnographic studies, together with some archaeological evidence, suggest that tribal societies engaged in lethal group conflict, at least occasionally, long before the emergence of states with professional armies (see our timeline of weapons technology). Meanwhile, the discovery that male chimpanzees from one troop sometimes beat to death those from another has encouraged popular perceptions that warfare is part of our biological heritage.

These findings about violence among our ancestors and primate cousins (see “When apes attack”) have perpetuated what anthropologist Robert Sussman from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, calls the “5 o’clock news” view of human nature. Just as evening news shows follow the dictum “if it bleeds, it leads”, so many accounts of human behaviour emphasise conflict. However, Sussman believes the popular focus on violence and warfare is disproportionate. “Statistically, it is more common for humans to be cooperative and to attempt to get along than it is for them to be uncooperative and aggressive towards one another,” he says. And he is not alone in this view. A growing number of experts are now arguing that the urge to wage war is not innate, and that humanity is already moving in a direction that could make war a thing of the past.

Among the revisionists are anthropologists Carolyn and Melvin Ember from Yale University, who argue that biology alone cannot explain documented patterns of warfare. They oversee the Human Relations Area Files, a database of information on some 360 cultures, past and present. More than nine-tenths of these societies have engaged in warfare, but some fight constantly, others rarely, and a few have never been observed fighting. “There is variation in the frequency of warfare when you look around the world at any given time,” says Melvin Ember. “That suggests to me that we are not dealing with genes or a biological propensity.”

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327151.500-winning-the-ultimate-battle-how-humans-could-end-war.html