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January 18, 2002

Dear Subscribers:

Here's our lineup for this third week of January:


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Family Tech: Designs on your home

We touched on this before (see "The battle over tech in homes"), but SafeKids.com's Larry Magid has the big picture. In his column for the Los Angeles Times, Larry looks at the two groups - the PC-minded types and the TV-centric folk - that have serious designs on the home media market. The former camp is led by Apple and Microsoft, the latter by Moxie Digital. The device Moxie's selling (which "serves as a personal video recorder, satellite or cable tuner, CD/DVD player and jukebox, as well as a hub ... that can deliver the Internet or data to PCs connect via Ethernet or a wireless network" - whew!) is certainly a computer, but it looks and acts more like a VCR. "Therein lies a lesson," Larry writes. "Convergence between PCs and TVs may sound cool, but it doesn't always make sense." Go to the end of the article to see which camp Larry favors!

And if you already have a bias, do write us about it (and tell us why) - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.

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Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King

Though Americans mark Dr. King's birthday with national holiday this coming Monday, he was born on January 15, 1929. Here are some Web resources that help us remember this great peacemaker:

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University - There are some wonderful resources here: Right on the home page are the Most Frequently Requested Documents, linking to his 4/16/63 letter from the Birmingham, Ala., jail, his "I Have a Dream" speech in multiple languages, his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize (12/10/64), and his last speech, "I've Been to the Mountaintop" (4/3/68). The site also contains a King biography and encyclopedia.

The King Center's own site, "The Beloved Community". The title refers to a phrase "first coined in the early days of the 20th century by the philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce, who founded the Fellowship of Reconciliation. It was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who popularized the term and invested it with a deeper meaning which has captured the imagination of people of good will all over the world." The Beloved Community page goes on to explain that the community Dr. King envisioned "was for him a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence." The page links to King's six principles and six steps of nonviolence. The site also includes moving video and audio clips from interviews with and speeches by King.

The Web Smarts column at the Christian Science Monitor links to its top picks for information on Dr. King, including where you can hear him give his "I Have a Dream" speech and a site providing an online tour of cities touched by his life.

The Seattle Times's Education section maintains a long-running Martin Luther King archive of articles and resources.

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Girl games: Update from an expert

Friend, subscriber, and former game designer Gen Katz, editor and publisher of Games4Girls.com, mentioned in a recent email that more than 40 new game titles came out at the end of 2001. "I got bleary-eyed playing them," she said, referring to all the reviews she suddenly had to write! (She only selects for review games that she feels might appeal to girls, the "overriding criterion" being "that they don't have violence," she said.) We asked her what she discovered as she worked through the new games. Here's her response:

How we got here

"To evaluate this past holiday's batch of games, it helps to know a bit about how games have changed in the last few years. First off, I have a bias in that we review, as our name implies, Games 4 Girls. The site got started in 1996, when game developers considered computer and video games to be a girl-free zone and it was thought that if girls played a game or touched a console it was the kiss of death [for the product].

"Between 1997 and 1999 there was an explosion of girl-oriented games, when developers realized that if they included girls they might double their market. And so, the question asked was, 'What do girls want?' Well, it seemed that girls liked cooperative endeavors, communicating, animals, good stories, no time limits, detailed and attractive graphics, dressing up, clothes, jewelry, productive and creative activities, exploration, music and voices. They didn't like violence, dying in games and having to start over, and they found shooting at things quickly got boring. Games-for-girls didn't necessarily mean *only* for girls (although many of them were), or that girls didn't play other games - they did (and do). During this period we got American Girl adventures; Barbie scuba diving, riding horses, modeling, and being a photo designer; and Rockett agonizing over high school. These were more like activities than games that had the features of competition, score keeping, and time limits.

The new 'girl' games

"Well, the girl market never really developed, so now, instead of making games for girls, the new approach is: to get girls to play boy games.

"Enter the hand-helds. Unlike games on PCs and Macs, which support elaborate graphics and complex story lines, the hand-helds are confined to quick action scrolls or shooters. And the design of console games is determined by the controller configuration, which means kicking, crouching, shooting, jumping - actions best suited for battle. The female characters that have moved into this arcade-style type of game are well-known to girls: Mary Kate and Ashley, Diva Starz, Angelica of Rugrats fame, Sabrina, Buffy the Vampire Killer, and even the venerable Nancy Drew.

"2001 brought fewer story-type games that girls were supposed to love. Some unusual 'games' are being produced by small companies like Iseesoft, producers of World Dance, and companies outside the US, such as Tivola with its Alphabet - so artistic it is sold in museums. As in the movies, sequels abound, thus we got the much-anticipated Zoombinis titles and Myst 3. Games for the consoles are mostly geared to men and boys with shooters, sports, and racing. All in all, it was a lean year."

For further reading

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Web News Briefs

  1. E-rate's 5th birthday

    Remember the e-rate? Without it, there'd certainly be no court battles over the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA), requiring e-rate funded US schools and to install filtering or blocking software on their connected computers. Well, the e-rate's five now, and the Benton Foundation and Center for Children & Technology offers an in-depth look at how we're doing in "Leveraging America's Investment in Education Technology." As for that investment, Benton reports in its executive summary, "over the past 10 years, the United States has invested $38 billion to bring technology and Internet connectivity to the nation's schools. After the current funding cycle ends, e-rate telecommunications discounts will have resulted in a total of $10 billion in critical resources." Here's the complete, 50+-page report in pdf format, including an assessment of how the e-rate's "taking hold" in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. (Our thanks to ConnectforKids.org for pointing out this resource.)

  2. From music to video piracy

    For anyone new to this - or wanting a clearer picture of why media companies, artists, and file-sharing Web publishers have been embroiled in copyright litigation for years now - see the New York Times's "Black Hawk Download: Pirated Videos Thrive Online". It explains how one fan of an MTV comedy show could collect and view all 24 episodes that have aired over the past three years without any ads (they'd been edited out) and without MTV in his cable-TV subscription. He used Morpheus file-sharing software (found on MusicCity.com). Similar interest in pirating films, not just TV shows, is on the rise, too, of course - as more and more computer users have 40-gigabyte hard drives able to store as many as 50 movies.

    The Times piece gives multiple perspectives, from that of the film industry to university network administrators trying to limit the volume of files students can download. Just for fun, here's a recent inventory of the files amassed by three 20-something housemates in Ann Arbor, Mich.: "23 episodes of 'That '70s Show,' 11 episodes of 'Jackass,' 15 'Saturday Night Live' clips, 18 installments of 'South Park,' all 11 of the 'Enterprise' episodes broadcast so far, 20 or so episodes of the animated 'Star Trek' series and one or two from the original show." Writer Amy Harmon explains that they networked several computers to gain 300 gigs of storage space - though they recently had to move some movies onto CDs to make room for more on their "communal hard drive."

    For anyone following Internet law and litigation in general, here's a look-ahead at what 2002 is likely to hold, courtesy of 10 legal experts (BTW, this was Carl Kaplan's final Cyber Law Journal column for the New York Times).

  3. UK online-safety update

    There's something kind of ingenious about using an acting troupe to burn into kids' memories what can happen on the Internet if they're not thinking clearly. That's the basic idea, it appears, behind the KidSmart road show, just starting its 20-city tour in the UK. For school assemblies, two actors present the everyday life of a widower and his teenage daughter before and after a move to another city that leaves the girl lonely and seeking companionship via Internet chat. She comes close to running into trouble with an apparent sexual predator, and both father and daughter learn important lessons.

    This is London provides some details. The paper's coverage of KidSmart is part of a fairly complete overview of online-safety measures and programs now available or in the works in the United Kingdom - many of which are perfectly relevant to English-speaking families anywhere.

  4. The teen e-tail market

    New York Times writer Bob Tedeschi likens the way Internet retailers view teens to the way marketers everywhere view the Chinese market. "Both are huge and largely inaccessible because the targets speak completely different languages than most mainstream American merchants." But e-tailers, Bob continues, want clear those hurdles because people under 18, he reports, spend "roughly $155 billion a year in the United States," and 80% of them are already online. The piece offers a very complete snapshot of current plans for teens that credit card companies and e-tailers have.

  5. Asia's wireless youth

    The data keep confirming it: Young people's interest in using wireless Internet connections to download email and music and send (SMS) text messages is quite universal. According to the South China Morning Post, International Data Corp recently surveyed 4,000 urban Net users in Australia, Hong Kong, China, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. Telecommunications companies want to know where their markets are for next-generation mobile phones that "allow for high-speed mobile links to the Internet." The survey found that two groups - youth and frequent travelers - "are set to lead in the adoption of next-generation mobile data services in the region." The early adopters are "young, averaging about 28 years old, mostly male, and more likely to travel than the average mobile-phone user," the South China Morning Post reports, along with another finding that "young people were particularly keen on applications such as downloading music and email."

  6. Filter for TV

    It's a slim black box that connects like a VCR to any television set and it's called ProtecTV, now selling only on the Web for $69.95, reports Wired News. What it does is filter out 400 "nasty to naughty words," including swear words, all of which it "mutes and barricades with Xs in closed caption. The technology is the brainchild of a Canadian mother of four boys.

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That does it for this week. Have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Anne Collier, Editor

Net Family News


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