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August 23, 2007
Links for the day 08-23-2007
How Not to Raise a Genius and Baby Einsteins: Not So Smart After All. My experience, both from our own kids and from seeing others in similar situations, is that many parents feel guilty about using TV as a babysitter. Baby/Little Einsteins acts as a means to assuage that guilt by making the TV-time "educational."
Our kids have learned a few things from Baby and Little Einsteins. Inevitably, though, that is because my wife is sitting there watching the show with them, talking about what is happening, and making the experience active rather than passive. So, of course, in the end, the only way for toddlers to really learn is for parents to interact with them. Any situation where the parent(s) have given up on that and turned over the entire job of parenting to PBS, Cartoon Network, the Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon is a bad situation.
At the same time, the APA pronouncement that children under 2 should never watch TV sounds either like an effort to swing the pendulum in the other direction, or a pronouncement from detached academics and researchers who have never had the pleasure of attempting to put a meal together with an 18-month old screaming bloody murder for no good reason.
Anyway, in other links:
Arthur Miller's Missing Act. Much like "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson
Google Apps no match for MS Office, report says. Say what you will about Microsoft, there simply are not that many other solutions suitable for enterprise-level needs.
On the other side of the ideological spectrum: Apple Laptops Transforming PC Sales?. The trend away from low prices as the determining mark and towards customer service and reliability also seems to be a good thing.
misc , tech | By maphet | 11:07 AM
