Full article in today's New York Times.

This just blows me away. Wow.

My social networking is done via Flickr, this blog, IM and Twitter -- if you want to know what I’m doing then follow me on those services or chat me up in IM or email.

A few years ago, a parenting magazine asked me to write an article about the dangers that children face when they go online. As it turns out, I was the wrong author for the article they had in mind.

The editor was deeply disappointed by my initial draft. Its chief message was this: “Sure, there are dangers. But they’re hugely overhyped by the media. The tales of pedophiles luring children out of their homes are like plane crashes: they happen extremely rarely, but when they do, they make headlines everywhere. The Internet is just another facet of socialization for the new generation; as always, common sense and a level head are the best safeguards.”

My editor, however, was looking for something more sensational. He asked, for example, if I could dig up an opening anecdote about, say, an eight-year-old getting killed by a chat-room stalker.

Read the full article here.

Combining Alpharetta, Georgia-based ChoicePoint with the LexisNexis Risk Information and Analytics Group will create a risk-management business with $1.5 billion in sales, Reed Elsevier said today.

Reed Elsevier said it will sell Reed Business Information, which publishes Variety, Publishers Weekly, New Scientist and Australian Doctor. The unit depends on advertising revenue and tracks the ups and downs of the economy, while the company is trying to move to more subscription-based businesses, Reed said.

More news here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/us/19cnd-wiki.html

http://88.80.13.160

We currently have four children's computers in every branch library at MPOW. At this time they're all PCs but we just purchased four new iMacs and have been working to roll them out to one branch in the next month or so. This is a screenshot of the new interface we're developing for the iMac. Craig, one of my IT techs, crafted this carousel for the new "kiddieland" iMac computers.

...Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters....

...In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. “Although people are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more,” she said.

Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism’s antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution.

Ms. Jacoby doesn’t leave liberals out of her analysis, mentioning the New Left’s attacks on universities in the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American and women’s studies to an “academic ghetto” instead of integrating them into the core curriculum, ponderous musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat that trivialize college-level learning...

...For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard it is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. “I was stunned at how difficult it was for me,” she said.

The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and visual media made her realize just how pervasive the culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone is — even curmudgeons.

Link to full article.