Reviews

Study Weighs Benefits of Organizing Recess

While an overwhelming number of elementary school principals believe in the power of recess to improve academic achievement and make students more focused in class, most discipline-related problems happen at school when kids cut loose at recess and lunch, according to surveys.

One of the solutions, according to a study released this week by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: more, and well-trained, staff on the playground.

DD Debates: Chelsea Clinton on NBC

A BuzzFeed article notes Chelsea Clinton’s rough tenure at NBC and raises a key question: why is she on the network? Daily Download debates.

DD: Instagram As a Tool for the Media

DD: Washington Post’s Social Media-Tracking Tool

Kurtz and Ashburn on NewsHour: How Campaigns Are Targeting You

In our regular NewsHour segment, Lauren Ashburn and Howard Kurtz tell PBS’s Jeffrey Brown how the Obama and Romney campaigns are buying up Google search terms to target ads to potential voters. The president’s reelection team is being far more aggressive, buying up such terms as “Obama economy,” “immigration reform” and “Buffett Rule,” while the [...]

Why the Campaign Bites

I was going to write about how the campaign is going to the dogs.

Can you believe we’re still chattering about Mitt Romney’s 30-year-old Irish setter-on-the-roof incident—Diane Sawyer even asked about it last week—and that Mitt’s team has countered with Barack Obama eating dog meat as a 9-year-old in Indonesia?

I mean, is this what the average hard-pressed voter wants to hear about in a presidential election?

But then I thought that no, I should write about Ted Nugent instead. Who really cares what a washed-up rock singer said at the NRA convention, even if he did declare that “we need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November” and drew a visit from the Secret Service?

Speaking of the Secret Service, Obama must somehow be to blame for that sex scandal, huh? And did you see the Daily News photo of that alleged Colombian call girl, and the Facebook page where the agent said he was checking out Sarah Palin, and Palin’s response and…

Hold on.

When did we allow the campaign to be hijacked by these trivialities?

Everybody Chill Out: Apple is a long-term goldmine.

When I left the country–and much of the Internet–to go on vacation three weeks ago, the tech world still seemed halfway sane. Instagram was just a super-cool dozen-or-so-person start-up, not a billion-dollar behemoth. Google’s augmented reality glasses were only a zany rumor, not a confessed roadmap. And beneath it all, Apple was still the surest bet in tech: On the strength of monster sales of the iPhone, the new iPad, and the news that it would begin offering a tiny dividend, AAPL had surged by more than 50 percent since the start of the year, and its future appeared limitless.

It still does. I admit I was under a rock for the past few weeks, but scanning through the headlines, I can’t find a single negative piece of news regarding Apple’s business fundamentals.

Deluged by Devices: The Loneliness Debate

Before I could even wake up, my mother had e-mailed me Sherry Turkle’s New York Times piece titled, “The Flight From Conversation.”

My parents and I had just had a rare lengthy telephone call the day  before, talking everything — and nothing — from my kids’ activities, to a book my dad wrote, to El Convento, a cool hotel in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.
The link to the MIT professor’s article came with a note saying she loved our conversation.  I smiled because my mother has made it clear over the years that she wants to talk more, and email less.   She’s resisted buying an iPhone, despite my prompting, in part, I think, because then she would be condoning the very thing she dislikes –dribs and drabs of text parceled out during the day.

The disconnect comes because that’s how I live my life with colleagues, friends, babysitter, and even my husband. To juggle all the balls that bounce around my life, I reach out quickly and efficiently.  It’s quite rare that I carve out 45 minutes to focus solely on a phone conversation.

Turkle writes that our smartphones and iPads have changed the psychology of conversation – we expect faster answers and “dumb down” our communication and have lost the ability for self-reflection as we are busy telling our “friends” what’s on our mind.  Not necessarily.

Conversation is a key element of a healthy society.  But it’s unfair to paint the mini-computer with its various means of communicating  — texting, emailing, direct messaging on Facebook to name a few – as the Darth Vader of this drama.

Video Debate: Are Gadgets Driving Us Away From Real Conversation?

The Daily Download team discusses Sherry Turkle’s New York Times article, “The Flight From Conversation.”

Google launches ‘Google Drive’

Google is taking the wraps off a long-anticipated product that it views as one of its most important launches of the year, as the Internet giant continues its push toward a future in which users’ photos, spreadsheets and other data primarily live on the Internet “cloud” instead of a PC or some other device.

The launch of “Google Drive” Tuesday has been a poorly kept secret in Silicon Valley, with the name and a rough description of the online storage product widely circulated in recent weeks as Google has worked out the final bugs. Drive will open up to millions of users around the world starting Tuesday, allowing them to sync their files between PCs, smartphones and tablets.

Why Studying the Sex Life of Worms is a Good Investment

A thoughtful piece at the Post makes the case for why even odd-sounding experiments shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Like many small investments, they can pay big returns over the long run.

Fifteen Years of Research: Cell Phones Are Safe

A fifteen year study has found no link between cell phones and health problems. So if you still use your cell for phone calls – go right ahead.

Dumbest Post – The New Red Scare

Beck makes no secret of his feelings about the President. But smearing random people with toxicity in an effort to attack the President definitely earns the title of being dumb.

Miss Dominican Republic Is, At Least, Dominican

Carlina Duran, recently crowned Miss Dominican Republic, has been dethroned. The problem was as basic as it gets: yes, she’s Dominican. But she’s no “Miss.”

How Online Memes Became Big Business

Memes – pictures or gags that spread quickly over the Internet – used to be mostly inside jokes. Now, they’re big business.