What kids searched for this summer. Seeing “sex” and “porn” at #4 and #6 reminds me of how, from age 10 to 15, I looked up “fuck” every time I picked up a dictionary. Some terms you might also need to Google:
• Webkinz (#16)
• Runescape (#37)
• Nigahiga (#99)
• Miniclip (#18)
• Poptropica (#54)
• Hoedown Throwdown (#61)
• naked girls (#86)
I have heard that higher IQ people tend to have less children in modern times than lower IQ people. And if larger family size makes the offspring less capable, than we are pioneering interesting times.
{ 1 | 2 | Unrelated: The strange link between spherium and helium }
Usually when you see people who have been stung by box jellyfish with that number of the tentacle contacts on their body, it’s usually in a morgue. (…) The creature didn’t just sting the 10-year-old girl. It enveloped her: Its tentacles wrapped around her limbs and wouldn’t let go. She couldn’t see or breathe. The creature, which is capable of killing an adult in four minutes, wrapped its tentacles tighter and knocked her unconscious. (…) After several weeks in the hospital Shardlow is still feeling the effects - but the fact she is feeling anything at all - let alone doing as well as she is baffles Seymour. For now, besides scarring and memory loss, she is doing well.
related { Nomura jellyfish }
Mobile Phone Harrassment: An exploration of students’ perceptions of intrusive texting behavior
Limited research has explored the link between mobile phone use and harassment behaviors. This paper details the findings from a preliminary study that examined perceptions of unwanted communication. (…)
Findings indicated that harassment by text is more prevalent than other forms of off-line stalking and, despite recipients reporting being distressed, there was still a higher level of acceptance of this form of harassment than other forms.
Furthermore, responses to text harassment were associated with a high frequency of behaviors perceived as not actively discouraging further texts, therefore having the effect of prolonging unwanted contact.
As long as we’re on the topic of impulsivity, a brief remark about the word ‘manipulative,’ which I’ve found to be a remarkably overused, overrated explanation for the behavior of inflexible-explosive children. To me, the act of manipulation requires a fair amount of forethought, planning, affective modulation, and calculation — qualities that are in short supply in the vast majority of the inflexible-explosive children I know. Given that few of us enjoy being manipulated, believing that a child is being manipulative often causes adults to behave in counterproductive ways and hinders their consideration of more accurate explanations.
{ Ross Greene, The Explosive Child, 1998 | Thanks Blue M.! }
{ A 32-year-old Kentucky woman who said she didn’t know that she was pregnant delivered her newborn son on the floor of her laundry room by herself and even cut the umbilical cord. | AP/The Advocate-Messenger | Continue reading }
It’s with some courage that Melanie Glenwright and Penny Pexman have chosen to investigate the tricky issue of when exactly children learn the distinction between sarcasm and irony. Their finding is that nine- to ten-year-olds can tell the difference, although they can’t yet explicitly explain it. Four- to five-year-olds, by contrast, understand that sarcasm and irony are non-literal forms of language, but they can’t tell the difference between the two.
photo { Mando Alvarez }
{ sorry, unsourced photos/email }
A 17-year-old boy, caught sending text messages in class, was recently sent to the vice principal’s office at Millwood High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The vice principal, Steve Gallagher, told the boy he needed to focus on the teacher, not his cellphone. The boy listened politely and nodded, and that’s when Mr. Gallagher noticed the student’s fingers moving on his lap.
He was texting while being reprimanded for texting.
“It was a subconscious act,” says Mr. Gallagher, who took the phone away. “Young people today are connected socially from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until they close their eyes at night. It’s compulsive.”
Because so many people in their teens and early 20s are in this constant whir of socializing—accessible to each other every minute of the day via cellphone, instant messaging and social-networking Web sites—there are a host of new questions that need to be addressed in schools, in the workplace and at home. Chief among them: How much work can “hyper-socializing” students or employees really accomplish if they are holding multiple conversations with friends via text-messaging, or are obsessively checking Facebook? (…)
While their older colleagues waste time holding meetings or engaging in long phone conversations, young people have an ability to sum things up in one-sentence text messages, Mr. Bajarin says. “They know how to optimize and prioritize. They will call or set up a meeting if it’s needed. If not, they text.” And given their vast network of online acquaintances, they discover people who can become true friends or valued business colleagues—people they wouldn’t have been able to find in the pre-Internet era.
{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }
In this era of media bombardment, the ability to multitask has been seen as an asset. But people who commonly have simultaneous input from several types of media—surfing the Web while texting and listening to music, for instance—may in fact find it harder to filter out extraneous information. “We embarked on the research thinking that people who multitasked must be good at it,” says Clifford Nass, a psychologist at Stanford University who studies human-computer interaction. “So we were enormously surprised.”
illustration { Richard Wilkinson }
{ Babies with an accent. Newborns cry differently depending on their mother tongue. | Max Planck Society | Full article }
related { Babies’ language learning starts from the womb }
