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July 26, 2002

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Here's our lineup for this final full week of July:



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Family Tech: A careful look at high-tech investment 'helpers'

"Having a plane fly on auto-pilot is only a great idea when it's going in the right direction," writes SafeKids.com Larry Magid in his latest column for the San Jose Mercurcy News. "My auto-pilot has been taking me south when I wanted to fly north." He's referring to the automated payment and investment systems he uses himself and recommended in a column back in 2000, when "the Dow was above 11,000, the NASDAQ nearly 5,000, and there was a consensus that the market was the best place to put your money your kids' college education and your retirement." Since his family had continued to use automated services like Paytrust and ShareBuilder (he explains how they work), he recently "made some radical changes to our longstanding investment plans" and suggests that readers, too, take a careful look at any automated systems they're using under current market and economic conditions.

Making adjustments with Web and software financial tools, with the financial-planning and economics lessons involved, can be a great thing for parents and children to do together. Email us about your family's experiences with these technologies.

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Web News Briefs

  1. Euro children's exposure to e-porn

    In Ireland, 65% of children say they've obtained Net safety information from their parents, but 48% say they've never been supervised while online. In other preliminary findings announced recently by Education and Science Minister Noel Dempsey, 86% of young Irish Internet users who use chatrooms say that they have been asked for a face-to-face meeting with someone they met online. These findings were from the Ireland portion of a European Commission cross-cultural comparative study on children's use and access of the Internet in Ireland, Belgium, the UK, and Greece. Minister Dempsey's announcement came with the launch of FKBKO.net (for "ForKidsByKidsOnline"), designed to "appeal to children's own sense of good practice and acceptable use of the Internet," and Internet safety materials for parents, including (downloadable in pdf format) a new leaflet and an audit of Internet Safety Web sites targeting parents. Our thanks to Nua Internet Surveys for pointing this out.

  2. Net games update

    These are definitely the boom years of online games, the New York Times reports in a very thorough, readable update. "So-called massively multiplayer online games - those capable of supporting thousands of players at once - are one of the fastest-growing segments of the $10.8 billion electronic game industry." For example, the very popular EverQuest, a Sony role-playing game of the Dungeons and Dragons sort "has spawned a cottage industry of sequels, merchandise, and Renaissance-festival-style conventions." Next on Sony's agenda is a version of EverQuest for PlayStation 2 that will be the "first massively multiplayer title for a console game." Of course, Nintendo, with its GameCube, and Microsoft, with its Xbox, will follow suit before the year's out. The companies simply chalk this phenomenon up to market demand - more gamers with powerful computers and fairly high-speed connections at home. The other, more interesting enabler is the "world server." EverQuest players communicate with 45 of these servers that dish up the game's "worlds" (players choose which world, some are more peaceful than others, to join). Each server consists of 26 high-end PCs running Windows NT with one-gigahertz processors and can support 2,500 players at a time. "New sets of servers are already in the works for gamers in Britain, the Netherlands and South Korea." (For three teen gamers' own perspectives on games, including their advice to parents, see a two-part series we had fun putting together last Nov. 16 and 30.)

    Meanwhile, the US Army is using a sophisticated new tactic to attract new recruits - with great success. It put a free computer game on its main recruiting site July 4 and later reported that more than 400,000 copies were downloaded in less than a week, according to CNET. The game was one of a pair called "America's Army" developed at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, Calif. One is "a squad-based shooter [game] imitating military tactics" and the other "a simulation game that replicates a typical Army career path." The Army also announced that "more than 240,000 players already have completed the 'basic training' portion of the game to qualify for online play, forcing the Army to scramble to triple the number of servers dedicated to the game."

  3. Connecting Africa from the inside

    A member of the Egyptian steering committee for SchoolNetAfrica contends that even in African countries where basic necessities are rare, people believe technology helps students become critical thinkers and learners. Twenty-eight African countries participate in SchoolNetAfrica, Wired News reports, the first African-run nonprofit organization focusing on educational technology. The organization, governed by steering committees in 10 of those 28 countries, has impressive goals and programs in several areas. For one, it runs ThinkQuest Africa, a competition in which students and their teachers collaborate over the Internet and across national and cultural borders to build educational Web sites (based on the ThinkQuest philosophy of collaborative learning). Other areas in which SchoolNetAfrica is working include: building a "Knowledgewarehouse" of content developed by African students; identifying and training leaders to head technology initiatives in their own countries; researching different models of funding for computers and connectivity (e.g., the US's federal "e-rate" subsidies) to see what's appropriate for African countries; and facilitating relationships between telecommunications companies and different countries.

  4. Parents' online activism in Chile

    Parents in Chile are calling for the closure of what has become a "hit Web site" in South America. The Spanish-language site predicts the how and when of its visitors' deaths, based on their answers to 23 questions, such as: "Do you like driving fast? Have you ever considered suicide? and Do you own a firearm?" the UK's VNUNET reports. The site told one 14-year-old girl, "You will die in 2018 slashing your wrists in front of a mirror." Another girl said she suffered nightmares after "finding out" she would be strangled by a psychopath, VNUNET says, reporting the site's designers' somewhat callous response to protests: They said that, "by answering truthfully, users will get the answer to one of mankind's most frequently asked questions."

  5. Leaping the digital divide

    Here's the difference between closing the digital divide and leaping it, as MIT professor Mitchel Resnick sees it: Giving children access to technology so they can *create* computer games, not just play them; make Web pages, not just surf them; and compose MP3 files, not just download them. Creating, Resnick says, is leaping, reports the New York Times. To help kids become creators, the associate professor of learning research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory, started the first Computer Clubhouse in Boston in 1993. There are now nearly 70 of them in 11 countries and 13 US states and the District of Columbia, used by boys and girls, 8-18.

  6. Student hacker gives herself 'As'

    A student at the University of Delaware broke into the school's computer system and, among other things, changed failing grades to "As," the Associated Press reports (via the San Jose Mercury News). Court documents say she broke in by calling university human resources employees and requesting a new password for some of her instructors, as well as by guessing another teacher's password. Currently free on bail as she awaits trial, the 22-year-old student is charged with multiple counts of identity theft, criminal impersonation, unauthorized access of a computer system, and misuse of information on a computer system. This points to a study we'll be reporting on next week, showing that online kids often confuse what is unethical with what is illegal, unaware of how damaging their online behavior can be to themselves and others.

  7. College library Web sites popular

    Fresh research from the Online Computer Library Center shows that US university students make good use of their school libraries' Web sites. According to eMarketer.com, 70% of college students use their campus libraries' sites for some of their assignments and more than 50% use Web-based electronic journals, online library catalogs, and databases. Only 29% of survey respondents said their library's site doesn't have what they need, and 20% did not know their school's library has a Web site. Another study last spring found that 72% of undergraduate students and 83% of graduate students and college faculty use the Net to search for books needed for research projects.

  8. Online job seeking is hot in US

    More than 50 million Americans have used the Web to research jobs and employment, and more than 4 million do so on a typical day, according to the latest study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "Overall, these figures represent a more than 60% jump in the number of online job hunters from March 2000 ... [and] about a 33% hike in the daily traffic related to job searching," Pew reports. The people most likely to conduct online job searches are Net users 18-29. "Some 61% of Internet users in this age category look for jobs online, compared to 42% of those aged between 30-49 and 27% of those aged between 50-64." The study also found that African Americans and Hispanics are more likely to search for jobs online than Caucasions. As for types of jobs, more than 50% of people working in sales who have Net access seek out job info online, compared to 44% of executives and professional, and 49% of clerical and office workers. Our thanks to Nua Internet Surveys for pointing out the study.

  9. The IM phenomenon

    Instant-messaging is taking over workplace communications, if you believe reports from growing numbers of researchers and reporters. This means, of course, that the tech and communications skills of avid teen IMers may actually be an asset after graduation (tech researchers Gartner Group predict that IM-ing will be used more often than email by 2005). But in the workplace as well as the home, IM-ing is seen as both blessing and curse. In thorough treatment of the phenomenon this week, the Washington Post points out that "this medium where people often say things they wouldn't dare write even in emails, let alone on a piece of stationery" needs to be used carefully and with some established rules (not to mention ethical guidance). One source quoted even suggests that people treat each IM as if it'll be on the front page of their local paper tomorrow. That's more for the corporate environment, but parents can find out a lot about how instant-messaging (and IM behavior) works by reading this piece on how employees and companies are dealing with this medium of continuous conversations.

  10. Record child-porn conviction

    Actually, what broke records was the number of images the now jailed man distributed: 600,000. The UK print worker will serve seven years in prison, having admitted to "23 counts of possessing and distributing indecent material," the BBC reports.

  11. Yahoo mangles email attachments

    If you have a Yahoo Mail account and send an attachment along with an email to a friend or colleague, the attachment might look a bit strange to the recipient. Yahoo says it's changing words to keep computer viruses from spreading - it filters and changes words - such as "eval," "mocha," and "expression" - behind which virus writers hide their malicious code. "Unfortunately, the filter does not respect the boundaries of words. This means that when banned text appears inside another word, it gets converted too," the BBC reports. So, for example, Yahoo turns "eval" into "review" and "medieval" - in which "eval" embedded - into "medireview." And "mocha" becomes "espresso" and "expression" becomes "statement." According to Internet News, Yahoo is getting some support from Internet security experts, though the move has sparked some debate, and Internet service providers may follow suit with similarly aggressive text-filtering.

  12. Not to be missed: From PDA to PEA

    "PEA" is short for the currently very handy "personal ethical assistant." Then there's the "shell-checker" and a new type of GPS system providing "global positioning for the conscience" ("using expert triangulation, you can find where your sense of right and wrong has wandered"). All existing in the very funny mind of New York Times columnist Matt Richtel, these devices are in direct response, of course, to corporate America's need for an upgrade in ethics. Shell-Checker has a nice feature for the ethically challenged executive who may also be slightly technically challenged as well. He'll appreciate its similarity to Microsoft Word: "In one version ... an animated creature appears at the top right corner of the screen and says: 'It looks as if you're trying to start a shell corporation. Would you like assistance drafting a letter to the parole board?' " Even the Web has something to offer, with "Altar Vista ... a search engine with soul." We're thinking some of these might appeal in the home and educational markets as well!

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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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