Children having a difficult time grasping pencils

It’s being found that children don’t have the hand strength necessary to hold a pencil.

Because of technology.

From TheGuardian.com:

Children struggle to hold pencils due to too much tech, doctors say

by Amelia Hill

Children need opportunities to develop hand strength and dexterity needed to hold pencils

Children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology, senior paediatric doctors have warned.

An overuse of touchscreen phones and tablets is preventing children’s finger muscles from developing sufficiently to enable them to hold a pencil correctly, they say.

“Children are not coming into school with the hand strength and dexterity they had 10 years ago,” said Sally Payne, the head paediatric occupational therapist at the Heart of England foundation NHS Trust. “Children coming into school are being given a pencil but are increasingly not being able to hold it because they don’t have the fundamental movement skills.

Read that again: in a mere ten years, the manual dexterity of children has deteriorated to the point of being challenged to hold a basic writing instrument.

Payne said the nature of play had changed. “It’s easier to give a child an iPad than encouraging them to do muscle-building play such as building blocks, cutting and sticking, or pulling toys and ropes. Because of this, they’re not developing the underlying foundation skills they need to grip and hold a pencil.”

Not only is technology rewiring the brains of our children, it’s diminishing their capability to physically and properly manipulate the world around them.

Why is no one talking about this?

I’ll tell you why. Because technology has been used for too long by lazy parents who throw a device in front of a child in order to occupy them.

So that the parents can themselves do something else.

Something other than watch and monitor their kids.

BZ

 

Thanks to Obama, control of internet leaves US

ICANNFrom TheHill.com:

Internet domain handoff takes major step forward

by Mario Trujillo

A major step was taken Thursday in the U.S. government’s plan to hand off oversight of the Internet domain name system. 

A nonprofit international group approved a plan and forwarded it to the Obama administration Thursday for review and approval.

The group, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), has historically been contracted out to manage the behind-the-scenes workings of the Internet that pair up numerical IP addresses with their familiar Web addresses. 

The ICANN, if you didn’t know, is based in Playa Vista, a community in the city of Los Angeles.

In the past, the GOP expressed fear that the U.S. government’s handoff could allow other nations — specifically those that have a poor track record on Internet freedom — to gain more leverage over the Internet. 

ICANN 2On the other hand Demorats and Leftists, who have no real interest in truly free speech — just look at the average college campus — don’t see a problem with this at all.

The Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration has had oversight of the Internet’s domain name system, and it has historically contracted that role out to ICANN.

Now because of Obama?  No more.

Another example of Mr Obama’s ensuring that America isn’t exceptional, and that America gets placed squarely in her place: lower.

BZ

 

Li-Fi — making Wi-Fi obsolete?

Li-FiIs this the newest and most smoking-hot trend for internet devices?

Quite possibly.

From Yahoo.com:

Internet by light promises to leave Wi-Fi eating dust

by Laurie Fillon

Barcelona (AFP) – Connecting your smartphone to the web with just a lamp — that is the promise of Li-Fi, featuring Internet access 100 times faster than Wi-Fi with revolutionary wireless technology.

French start-up Oledcomm demonstrated the technology at the Mobile World Congress, the world’s biggest mobile fair, in Barcelona. As soon as a smartphone was placed under an office lamp, it started playing a video.

The big advantage of Li-Fi, short for “light fidelity”, is its lightning speed.

Are you ready for this?

Laboratory tests have shown theoretical speeds of over 200 Gbps — fast enough to “download the equivalent of 23 DVDs in one second”, the founder and head of Oledcomm, Suat Topsu, told AFP.

“Li-Fi allows speeds that are 100 times faster than Wi-Fi” which uses radio waves to transmit data, he added.

The technology uses the frequencies generated by LED bulbs — which flicker on and off imperceptibly thousands of times a second — to beam information through the air, leading it to be dubbed the “digital equivalent of Morse Code”

With television and a larger portion of bulk entertainment content going over the internet these days, now to include voice traffic (once held by landline telephones), tablets, smart phones — and soon to include the “internet of things,” bandwidth, production, venue and speed are about to become absolutely critical.

This new technology could be not just ground-breaking but, in a very short time, mandatory.

BZ

 

Kill Technology?

Hieronymus BoschFirst, the question:

Have you ever wanted to Kill Technology?

I mean, not just killing it, but throttling it unconscious, then pulling out your sturdiest baseball bat and beating it until every last electron has been pummeled mightily, thoroughly, and in a way that all of the involved electrons, its forebears and any future like electrons will never forget, then taking the vestigial cracked skeletons of said Technology and bagging it, throwing it under the tracks of a nearby idling D-9 Caterpillar and compressing until beyond recognizability then — further — dousing liberally with Torco 112 racing fuel and setting aflame with a flare?

Like that?

I have.  Today.  Just now.

Okay, here’s the picture:

I’m a fan of Michael Connelly books, whose main character is Hieronymus Bosch, Michael Connellyknown as Harry Bosch.  He’s a detective who works homicides for LAPD.  In the books, he’s a Vietnam veteran who worked a number of years for the department, once retired, but has come back as something of a retired annuitant, working more homicide cases.  Connelly has 21 books currently published featuring Detective Harry Bosch, with a 22nd due in November of this year.

Titus WelliverThen I heard that Connelly’s Bosch novels were being turned into a series featuring Titus Welliver, an underappreciated actor whom I happen to particularly enjoy.  When you see Mr Welliver, you’ll exclaim to yourself: “yes, I know that guyI’ve seen him before.”  You’ve also heard him in any number of voiceovers for various commercials.

A friend of mine at work had acquired the pilot episode for the series Bosch, which we watched on his tablet.  It should have been a clue but it wasn’t.  That said, however, I knew the series was going to be excellent and remarkably faithful to the work of Michael Connelly, since he was also helping to produce the series and co-wrote the pilot.

I thought: when the first season comes out, I’ve got to see it.  The pilot was vastly entertaining.

I failed to Grok, however, that the series was going to be released on Amazon Prime.

This past weekend I stated to my Wifely Wife: “we need to see the series Bosch,” as she is likewise a great fan of Connelly books.

In order to see the series, which we both committed to do this weekend, we had to figure out if the venues to which we already subscribed, Netflix, Apple’s iTV, Roku, blah blah blah, would enable us to pick up Bosch.

Of course it wouldn’t.  No fucking way.  Everything is going proprietary these days.  That would be way way way too simple.

We went to a Box Store.  “Sure,” the employees said, “you can get it on Amazon Prime.  That’s where it’s released.”  I already was a member of Amazon Prime.  Bingo.  I was In Like Flint.  So we can get that on Netflix, right?  “Of course not,” the employees responded.  “It’s on Amazon.”  We were both proffered the You’re Fucking Blockheads look.  As in: we clearly don’t deserve to draw further breath.

We asked: okay, maybe you can get it on Apple iTV?  The employee clandestinely spoke softy through her in-store comm system.  I’m fairly certain I heard the word “fucktard” used in a sentence.  While waiting, she assured us we could pick it up as an app in the Apple Store, no problem.  One minute later, frowning, she said “nope.  Apple won’t do it.”

About this point the Techno-Savvy amongst you are thinking: “you dolts.  Just hook up through your flatscreen at home.”  And yes, you would be right, my wife has a large, beautiful LG flatscreen I purchased for her a few years ago.  Read: a few years ago.  Unlike today’s flatscreens which hook up to everything but NORAD, hers did not. *** Hence our requiring a Roku box and Apple iTV.

Sufficiently confused yet?

Oboy, I’m just getting started.

“Look,” I whined, “all we want to do is watch the series ‘Bosch‘ this weekend.  That’s my only goal.”

She rolled her eyes.  “Why don’t you just buy ChromeCast?  That will do it.”

I asked, in my all-knowing best sly manner (because I wanted to sound like I actually had a semblance of a brain): “Isn’t that one of those devices that plug into the TV, like a USB?”

Again, more eye-rolling, a blatant You Fucking Blockhead look: “uh, no.  That’s an HDMI.”

One ChromeCast box purchase later, my tail between my legs, we went home.  And, after checking all sorts of thingies on YouTube, the Wifely Wife concluded: “we have to subscribe to a whole bunch of stuff.  That’s why it’s called a ChromeCAST.  It gets sent from your phone to the stick to the TV.”

Huh?

I let her figure it out.  I was beyond facile.  My brain was completely used up at this point.  I barely had locomotor functions.

Yes.  In order to watch one stupid TV series on Amazon Prime, I had to subscribe.  Then your subscription has to be recognized on your Smart Device, like a smart phone or a tablet.  And you have to have wi-fi wired up in your house.  You have to download the app.  You have to download the Amazon Prime app.  Then the ChromeCast app.  Then it gets “cast” from your device to the HDMI device on the back of your TV and then to the flatscreen.

You’re no better than your wi-fi system.  And trust me, it’ll look better on your smart device than it will on your big flatscreen.  On the flatscreen it staggered and pixelated and buffered.

All I wanted to do is watch the TV series Bosch on an actual TV, and have it look good.

Fuck me.

Rabbit ears.

BZ

*** NOTE:

Ol’ BZ does not have a flatscreen TV at home.  Instead, he has a 36″ Toshiba CRT HDTV-capable unit purchased in 2004, which is roughly 3′ deep, weighs about 45,000 pounds and required a Grove TMS9000E crane truck to install.  You can now see that this one fact alone dissuades BZ from upgrading.