Your iPhone kills jobs

Like teenagers who enjoy the social benefits of a mobile phone but rue their parent’s newfound ability to contact them at any time, workers who perform their tasks on-the-go can now be monitored step-by-step by their managers with the help of smartphone applications Read more: Your iPhone kills jobs

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Baby-by-Number: Parents’ New Obsession With Data

"Allen Fawcett admits he and his wife are mildly addicted to keeping track of their babies’ schedules. The pair of economists have been recording every diaper, feeding and nap since they became parents.

With the help of the Trixie Tracker website, they know they’ve changed exactly 7,367 diapers for their three-year-old son and 969 for their three-month-old daughter. They also have a graph of precisely how many minutes each of their children slept on nearly every day since birth. During their daughter’s first month, the data shows she averaged 15 hours of sleep a day, which is two hours more than her brother at the same age and well above average for other Trixie Tracker babies.

“People look at us and say, ‘My goodness, how do you spend so much time on this?’” Fawcett said. “But each record takes just a few iPhone clicks, so it’s really not as time-consuming as it looks.”

The Fawcett family may take schedule tracking to the extreme, but they’re certainly not the only parents who are measuring, recording and comparing minute details of their kids’ lives.

Fifteen years ago, tracking your baby’s development meant going to the pediatrician every few months and recording his growth on a simple height and weight chart. Today, baby tracking is a booming business. In addition to websites that let you track your infant’s schedule, there are iPhone apps that translate and record your baby’s cries, wearable devices that keep track of how much you talk to your child, and even electronic toys that record how your child plays with them, so you can compare his progress to developmental norms.

As a soon-to-be mom expecting my first child in less than a month, I sympathize with the desire to keep close tabs on a baby. Almost the instant a second line appeared on my pregnancy pee stick, I found myself seized by a strong desire to make sure my baby was developing normally.

I managed to refrain from buying a home Doppler device to monitor my kid’s heartbeat, and I skipped the special Kickbee belt that detects fetal kicks and tweets every time baby wiggles in the womb. But once my first son makes his appearance, I know I’ll be tempted to try some of the infant-tracking technology. Who wouldn’t want more ways to record their child’s health and well-being?

According to pediatricians and child development experts, however, this new obsession with quantifying our kids has a potential downside, especially when parents cross the line from merely tracking an infant’s schedule to obsessing over developmental milestones and worrying about how baby measures up to her peers."

Read the full story at Wired by Hadley Leggett

TechTV Geeks make good: Leo Laporte Makes $1.5 Million Per Year from Podcasting

Leo Laporte shares his views on podcasting, the Internet and how the little guy is beating up big mainstream TV media. The talk was given at the Online News Association Conference in San Francisco and it's forty minutes long.

Is technology ruining children?

Technology is moulding a generation of children unable to think for themselves or empathise with others, says the leading brain scientist Susan Greenfield. Is it time to switch off? Susan Greenfield’s theory goes like this. The more we play games, the less time there is for learning specific facts and working out how those facts relate to each other. This can result, she maintains, in a failure to build highly personalised individual conceptual frameworks – the whole point of education and the basis of individual identity. If the purpose of a game, for instance, is to free the princess from the tower, it is the thrill of attaining the goal, the process, that counts. What does not count is the content – the personality of the princess and the narrative as to why and how she is there, as in a storybook. Greenfield avers that emphasis on process in isolation becomes addictive and profoundly mind-changing.Here is her hypothesis. A natural brain chemical called dopamine is involved in all forms of addiction. Dopamine contributes to feelings of wellbeing on attaining a goal, especially when gratification repeatedly deferred is finally delivered. Falling levels of dopamine accompany the opposite situations, when gratification has been frustrated (for example, waiting for a phone call that never comes).

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